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When Will My New dSLR Have RAW Support in Aperture?

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 7, 2012 - 12:00am

This is a question we hear a lot on ApertureExpert (especially when really hot cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mk III are released—support added yesterday, by the way), so I put together a FAQ to answer the question as clearly as possible, and to offer some alternatives while you’re waiting.

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Viewer Not Updating After Going to an External Editor or Plug-in? Try This…

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 5, 2012 - 12:00am

There’s an outstanding issue with Aperture that seems to come and go, but I’ve seen multiple reports on it since the 3.2.3 update so it appears to be back with a vengeance. The problem is when you use an external editor (i.e. Photoshop) or even a plug-in (i.e. Nik’s plugins) and round-trip back to Aperture, the thumbnail itself updates to reflect the changes you’ve made, but the image in the Viewer does not (that’s the big version of the photo you’re looking at).

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Did You Know… You Can Move and Rename Your Photo Stream Projects

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 4, 2012 - 1:00am

Did you know that you can move and even rename your Photo Stream projects, and Aperture will still find them and continue to automatically import the photos?

Set the Preferences

If you have your Preferences set to automatically import your Photo Stream photos…

Aperture 3 Photo Stream Preferences set to automatically import photos

Then the photos are automatically imported into a project named “Month year Photo Stream”, like this:

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Lifting & Stamping White Balance

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 31, 2012 - 3:10am

If you want to lift and stamp the camera-determined white balance from one photo to another, you may have noticed that simply turning white balance ON on the good photo, lifting, then stamping to the target photo doesn’t work. Or even more confusing/frustrating, it may appear to work (the thumbnail and even the image in the viewer may update) but then you look at it later and it’s back the way it was, leaving you all sorts of confused.

In short, you need to “tickle” the White Balance on the source image. Just nudge it up then back again (click the temp arrow one way then back the other, for example), then lift and stamp it. For more understanding, keep reading…

The Problem

The problem is that since all you’ve done is enable White Balance, Aperture is considering this a “default” setting. So when you lift it, even though the correct values show up in the Lift & Stamp window, those actual values aren’t applied to the target image. All that gets applied is “default” white balance, which means essentially that the WB isn’t going to change.

Here’s a step-by-step of what’s happening.

In the first screenshot, you can see two photos side-by-side. The one on the left is an auto-white balance shot, and as you can see it’s very yellow. The one on the right was balanced off a white card on location and set as a custom white balance in-camera, and is the white balance I want to apply to the other image.

The custom white balance set in-camera is Temp: 2670˚K and Tint: 28

If you take a close look at the White Balance settings, you can see that the camera has set it to Temp: 2670˚K, Tint: 28. And if I enable the White Balance (just turn it on) then Lift the settings, those values are in fact showing up in the Lift & Stamp dialog.

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Displaying Your Photography On The New iPad

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 24, 2012 - 4:22am

UPDATE 2012-03-24 18:00 — I can hear my Apple friends shaking their heads in unison, “oh Joseph, why are you trying to figure this out… just let iTunes scale the images for you and it’ll all be fine!”. You know what… they’d be right. Read on; updates today are in red.

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the last week on how to best scale your photographs to sync to the new iPad to take advantage of the retina display.

(If you’re looking for the article on displaying images on a web page for viewing on the iPad, go here: How Do You Make Web Graphics & Photos Look Great On The New iPad?)

I’ve been doing a ton of research and testing, and here are my findings. If you just want the “what to do”, skip to the end. To understand why, start reading here.

Facts and figures

  1. The native resolution of the new iPad is 2,048 x 1,526, so you can export a photo to have a max dimension of 2,048 by making a preset “fit within: 2048 x 2048” and that will display at 1:1 and look amazing—but if you pinch in you’ll be past 100% view (obviously) so if you want to zoom in, you need more pixels. If you don’t care about that, then just make a preset to fit within 2,048 wide and be done with it.
  2. If you copy any photo to your iPad using iTunes that is over 3,072 pixels on the short side it will be scaled down to 3,072. For a normal aspect-ratio photo (2:3, 5:4, etc.) that equates to roughly 14 Megapixels (MP).
  3. Even though the photo will be 14 MP in size, the Photos app on the iPad will not display that image at full size; i.e. at 1:1. I have not been able to determine what it does show, but it’s not the full size. [UPDATE: Photos app appears to zoom in to 3x the photo size when you double-tap on it, regardless of the original size. It will not go farther, however iPhoto will. But I no longer am confident that even iPhoto is showing images at 1:1 pixels, because I can zoom in more than 3x (by measuring with a ruler on the screen) in iPhoto, yet if I zoomed into a 2048 image 3x that’d be 6,144 wide, which is beyond even a 21MP image. Maybe we are seeing 1 photo pixel per four retina pixels? I really don’t know…] This is easy to test; just copy over a 14 MP image and open it in Photos, then open it in iPhoto for iOS ($4.99), and zoom in as far as you can. You will see that you can zoom in farther in iPhoto.
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Apple Releases Digital Raw Compatibility Update 3.11 for Nikon D800

Thomas Boyd's picture
March 24, 2012 - 1:39am

I don’t remember a Digital Raw Compatibility Update dropping for only one camera, but I suppose if there’s one camera that justifies it, it would be the Nikon D800.

If you are one of the lucky new owners of a D800, run your Software Update app and enjoy using Aperture to manage those files.

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ApertureExpert Live Training Session 017: Places Available Now

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 22, 2012 - 8:59am

It’s alive…

Live Training Session 017 on Aperture’s Places is ready for your viewing pleasure!

This session was a little… nuts. LOTS to do in a short amount of time, and as well prepared as I was, a few things still went topsy-turvy. BUT that seemed to add to the fun (hey, it did for me!) and no one threw things at me, so it must have gone well ;-)

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Turning Off Text Replacement in Aperture

Thomas Boyd's picture
March 20, 2012 - 12:26am

I was shooting the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships at the Rose Garden Sat., and a fellow photographer had a very unusual Aperture question. 

He shoots for a wire service and each wire service has very strict and unique style for their captions. For instance, instead of writing, “John Doe, center, looks at his feet,” he needs to write, “John Doe, (c), looks at his feet.” 

This is all fine and good, except that when he typed, “(c)” a copyright symbol like this, “©” would appear. Needless to say, we needed to figure out how to turn that off. 

I first thought it was his text expansion app causing the problems. We turned off Typinator and it still happened. My second plan of attack was to Control-Click the caption and see if I would find something in there that might be causing the problem.

Sure enough, Text Replacement had a check mark next to it. This had to be the culprit. We turned it off and that worked.

However, between games he had to restart his computer and the problem was back again. Turning off Text Replacement isn’t sticky. It comes back on after re-booting the app.

Control-Clicking the caption field will show you where to turn off Text Replacement.

This is a feature he never wants on. So, we drilled down a little deeper, and found “Show Substitutions”. This window allows the user to either turn off all the substitutions, selectively turn them off, or edit and add substitutions. It’s quite powerful if you think about it, but for us, since we both use Typinator for this anyway, we need it disabled. 

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Sorting Images by Import Session

Thomas Boyd's picture
March 18, 2012 - 2:07am

Most of the time, we do one import of the all the photos to a particular project. However, there are times when we go back and shoot the same subject more than once and import several times to the same project. 

I was recently asked by a photographer friend if it was possible to sort images based on the import session. My first instinct was that it wasn’t possible. I was thinking of the sort properties in the sort pop-up menu and I knew that wasn’t one of the choices.

But, like all organizational needs in Aperture, the answer is most often solved with the powerful Smart Folder.

I use Smart Folders all the time for all kinds of problem-solving, but I had never needed the “Import Session” rule. Well, it’s there and with a couple clicks, it will populate any one of your import sessions.

Here’s how to sort by import session

1. Create a Smart Folder and select “Add Rule”.

2. Select “Import Session”.

Add the rule “Import Session” to the search box.

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ApertureExpert Live Training Session 017: Places Scheduled

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 18, 2012 - 1:18am

It’s time for another Live Training!

This Tuesday, March 20th at 4:00pm Pacific time we’ll be looking at Places. We’ll check out a variety of ways to add your photos to the map from simple drag-and-drop to external GPS or even iPhone integration.

As always attending live is free, or you’ll be able to download the full session afterwards for just $2.00

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New ApertureExpert Adjustment Presets

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 16, 2012 - 11:55am

I just put the finishing touches on two new preset packs! I’ll add them to the store later, but for now, those of you who just happen to stroll by here can get ‘em right away!

Looks #2

The first is the long-awaited “Looks #2” pack. The original Looks pack is still the most popular one, and this expands on that. Some presets from the first pack have been tweaked and improved, and there are some completely new ones as well. There’s a small sample set below.

Add to Cart $4.99

Split Tones

The second pack is a series of split tones. What are split tones, you ask? It’s when you take a B&W image and make the shadows one color and the highlights another. It’s a really cool effect, and this pack includes nine starting points. As you might imagine, the final results are very image dependent, so you’ll want to play with these presets after applying to get the optimum look.

Add to Cart $4.99

Samples

Here’s the first half of the Looks collection… (click to view larger)

(Looks #2) A variety of looks… subtly different, but look at ‘em closely (click to view larger)

There are more samples; click below…

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Welcome MacCreate Readers!

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 16, 2012 - 2:00am

It is with great pleasure that I announce the joining of forces of MacCreate, one of the largest and most popular resources for Aperture users on the web, with ApertureExpert.

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