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A Neat Trick for Uploading Photos from Aperture

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 10, 2012 - 12:00am

[There’s an important update to this at the end… be sure to read all the way through, and to read the comments as well — particularly those by Butch Miller.]

Aperture has built-in support for flickr and Facebook, but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it for you. Or you may simply need to upload a photo to a service that isn’t built in; it doesn’t matter which, there are dozens (hundreds?) of places and reasons to push your photos.

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A Comparative Review of Snapseed and CameraBag 2

Thomas Boyd's picture
April 9, 2012 - 12:00am

With the recent addition of inexpensive photo enhancement apps Nik Software’s Snapseed [$19.99 on Mac App Store] and Nevercenter’s CameraBag 2 [$23.99 on Mac App Store] for Mac OS, we’ve been given quite a powerful set of creative tools. There’s been a good bit of excitement about both apps and Snapseed’s new feature allowing to be selected as an external editor for Aperture makes it even more attractive.

Before I continue, I have to explain my philosophy on post processing. I believe in a light touch. I’m a photojournalist and I could literally get fired for manipulating an image beyond the tolerance of my editors, which is closely aligned with the NPPA Digital Manipulation Code of Ethics

Not only do I proceed with a light touch to due to ethics, it’s also an aesthetic decision. My default preference is to see an image, and appreciate it for the content, light, color and composition. Too many times, I look at a photo with heavy manipulation and and only see the manipulation. The post-processing gets in the way of the photo. Too many times, heavy handed post-processing is intended to make a mediocre image better…and it never does.

Having said that, I do have fun experimenting with different presets, filters and apps that take a photo in a completely different directions. I mostly experiment with portraits and other non-newspaper work. Embarrassingly, I’ve spent hours messing about, sometimes only to abandon the whole idea and stay with the straight image. I don’t mind using my time experimenting because, when I finally decide to go with something, I feel good about it.

This is how I exported the image out of Aperture

Click through to see the comparisons and the rest of the article!

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Using iPhoto for iOS “Journal” Feature for Aperture Photos

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 8, 2012 - 12:00am

For those of you with iPhoto on the iPad, you may have played with the Journal feature. It’s quite a neat way to display photos, although it’s very isolated. Once published there’s no discovery infrastructure like on Flickr, and other than emailing the URL to people or manually tweeting/facebooking it, there really isn’t a great way to get it seen.

All that said, that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool ;-)

In this entry I’ll cover how to get your Aperture-treated photos into iPhoto for iOS, then what to do once you’ve created the Journal. I’m not going to get into how to actually make the journal itself. I may do that another time.

Here’s the end result… click the screenshot to be taken to the real gallery (just be sure to come back here!).

Click to view the iPhoto for iOS generated Journal gallery

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Yeah I thought so too! The images are really large, so if you tap on one to open it, and then click the arrows to go full screen, since these are 2048 wide images, not only do they look perfect on the new iPad, they even look great full screen on a 27” iMac (2560 wide). 

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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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Places

Live Training Session 017

In this video we covered everything there is to know about Places in Aperture 3.

Duration: 00:58 hr
Included with membership
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