Tag: aperture

Aperture’s Browser view fails with tiny thumbnails

Aperture’s pretty handy at managing a bunch of photos into projects etc… I just merged a few projects into a new überproject with sub-albums, and thought I’d broken something. For a minute, I was afraid all of the photo metadata was gone:

aperture-browse-thumbnails.png

GAH! **Version N…** *Oh NOES!*

Turns out, I’d just cranked the thumbnail size way down, and the labelling code kind of barfs on that, displaying the first few characters of the redundant “Version Name:” label before each actual version name. Here’s the same view with embiggened thumbnails:

aperture-browse-embiggened-thumbs.png

Better. The metadata’s safe. But it would make more sense for the thumbnail sizing code to better handle shortening the labels beneath each image thumbnail – seeing the first few characters of the label prefix isn’t useful, and caused a bit of confusion and worry.

uploading…

I spent the day doing the usual day-after-vacation stuff. 47 loads of laundry. and processing 1100 photos into 117 keepers, then uploading to Flickr and Mindfulseeing – and accidentally spamming the 3 people that follow me on twitter with automated updates for each of the 15 posts. oops.

Aperture 3 Faces is magic

I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can’t put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it’s spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I’ve been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I’d forgotten of people I care about. Great stuff.

What amazes me is how few pixels it seems to need to be able to recognize a face. It’s finding faces in group shots (of course), in crowds at hockey and football games (even if the shot is a wide angle photo with hundreds of people in it). It even finds faces in photographs pinned to the wall in the background of photos. Fun with recursion. It could also be a bit scary as a latent crowd identification system – but The Man has this stuff already…

The image of Cole above was found in this photograph of my laptop. Cole is only visible in a small iChat window. On an angle. Amazing.

lazyweb: macbook or macbook pro for aperture use?

I mean, of course, if money is no object, get the most pimp-daddiest MacBook Pro with gills of RAM and stuff. But… Will the new solid aluminum case MacBooks do the trick? (and, yeah, if money truly was no object, I KNOW I’d rather get a fully maxed out Mac Pro with dual 30″ displays and terabytes of storage…)

I need to replace my antique home system, and need something that can run Aperture well (not necessarily pro speed, but well enough that I don’t want to throw the fracking thing across the room while waiting for it to catch up…). I’d initially planned on getting a 20″ iMac, but think it’ll be better to maintain mobility.

So… Will the new MacBook do the job for running Aperture (and other stuff). Just day-to-day use, and daily workouts in Aperture. Is the MacBook Pro really worth the roughly extra $1000$600 for a little more screen real estate and a real video card?

macbook_vs_pro

half way

half done filtering and processing 1100 photos taken on our vacation. between unpacking and doing laundry, this was my friday. didn’t feel like taking a photo of the dozen loads of laundry though…

geotagging in Aperture with Maperture

I’ve been geotagging many of my photos on Flickr, but it’s always bugged me that the geolocation metadata was not available in my Aperture library – geotagging only happened after posting photographs to Flickr, and that metadata was essentially lost from my library.

That just changed. Now I’m using the awesome new Aperture geotagging plugin Maperture, adding latitude and longitude data directly within Aperture before uploading to Flickr etc… That means I get to keep my metadata.

Here’s what the Maperture metadata entering screen looks like:

geotagging in Aperture with Maperture
geotagging in Aperture with Maperture

and once posted to Flickr, the geotagging data is still available:

displaying the geotagged data from Flickr after posting
displaying the geotagged data from Flickr after posting

And, thankfully, the coordinates seem to match up pretty closely. I’d tried using Google Earth via the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to add the geotag data before, and there was a mismatch when viewed on Flickr. Maperture seems to work great so far!

Yet Another Aperture Fanboy Post

Just a quick post to say, once again, how much I fracking LOVE Aperture. I shot some sunlight poking through the clouds, in what was an amazing and inspiring scene. But when looking at the RAW files, they looked a bit flat. Dull colours, no “pop” and not at all what I remembered. Less than one minute later, and Aperture 2 let me tweak it very easily to match almost exactly what I remember seeing. Below is the before and after versions of the photo:

Solar Battle Before and After

My tweaking involved clicking some checkboxes, and dragging a couple of sliders. Easy peasy:

  • Auto Exposure adjustment (camera exposure was a bit high because of the directish sunlight, so Auto Exp. dropped it down a bit by -0.27)
  • Auto levels (B&W)
  • Black point adjusted higher (to 7.56) (crushed the blacks a bit, dropping some of the details in the trees and houses to make them more silhouette)
  • Contrast nudged up +0.04 (to give a bit more punch to the sunlight coming through)
  • Definition nudged up +0.09 (again, more punch to the sunlight, and helped with the edge definition of the trees, and defined the shapes of the clouds a bit more)
  • Saturation set to 1.18 (brought out the colour in the clouds, and some of the orange above the treetops)
  • Vibrancy +0.51 (refined the clouds and orange light)
  • Highlights +18.9 (dropped contrast in the brightest parts, bringing back some details in the brightly lit cloud portions)

That’s it. 2 checkboxes and 6 sliders, all done as fully interactive realtime adjustments. It took me 15 times longer to write this blog post (and make before/after image) than it did to tweak the photo in the first place.