Speaking of Aperture, there are several video tutorials at Nathan Smith's site. I particularly like the one titled Better Black & White. I used the Color brick in the same way for my Aperture 3 Black & White presets.
That’s when I thought “I wish that when you dragged an image over the Inspector in Aperture it would switch to the Library pane. Oh, it does.”
I love finding out little tips like this one.
I'm a bit of a geek and a bit of an Apple fan, so I was exited about the announcement earlier today. And if you've been following my site you'll know that I really like taking photographs with my iPhone. So, I'm really happy about all that Apple has coming, but what's really cool (and relevant to this site) is the new improvements to the iPhone camera app.
The grid lines and other composition things are nice, but what's really great is the "quick access" features they added.
With iOS 5 we'll be able to get to the camera straight from the Lock screen. This is a huge time saver, which is important when you want to catch a moment happening right in front of you. Currently, we have to swipe to unlock, find the Camera app, and tap it. Three steps. If I understand this new feature correctly, now all we'll need to do is tap the camera icon. One step.
The other very cool feature is using the volume-up button as the shutter. This feel way more natural and will make the iPhone feel more like a true compact camera than a phone with a camera.
I just checked the analytics for this site and realised my black & white presets for Apple Aperture have been downloaded just over 1,000 times.
I find that amazing.
If you're one of them please send me a note or tweet me and let me know what you think. And if you've used them on your own photographs send me a link. I'd love to see what people have done with them.
Thanks to everyone who's downloaded them!
This weekend I merged a few different Aperture libraries into a single big one (more on that in another post). It took a long time as some libraries had close to 10,000 photographs, but I now finally have all my photos in one library, which is what I wanted.
The only issue I had was that a bunch of my photographs suddenly had a green tint over them. It was like a green layer on top of the image, which made it impossible to work with. Some looked like they'd been crossed-processed or something to that effect. Really annoying.
I tried rebuilding the library, deleting the Aperture preferences file, and other things, but nothing seemed to work. So I went to Google to see if others had experienced the green tint problem and if someone had a solution.
The green tint problem seems to be fairly common and it's been discussed quite a bit. There's a long thread in the Apple forums here. But sadly, none of the suggested fixes actually fix the problem for me.
In my investigation, some images that had the green tint in the thumbnails looked ok in full screen, and some the other way around. The fact that they looked ok sometimes suggested it could be the preview (the jpeg Aperture creates to display the image), so I gave rebuilding all previews a go. And that solved the problem! All my photographs are back to normal.
Here's what I did step by step:
1. Select Photos in the Library section.
That shows you all the photos in your library irrespective of which projects they're on. It's just every singe photo you have.
2. Click on a photo in the viewer and Select All.
This will of course select all your photographs. Now, anything you do from the menu will affect them all.
3. Go to Photos and select Generate Previews.
To see it you need to hold the Option key and the menu item will turn from Update Previews to Generate Previews.
4. Wait.
And wait some more. And keep waiting. Aperture is generating new previews for all your photographs. To see the progress click on "Processing…" at the bottom or go to Window > Show Activity to open up the Activity window. Depending on the size of your library this step could take a long time, so be warned!
That's it.
I guess you could just select the ones that have the green tint and generate previews for those only, but I found it more time consuming to go through my entire library trying to select the problem ones. I just let it do it while I watched Dexter so no problem. Hope that helps those with the same issue.
A few days ago I submitted my black & white Aperture presets to the Apple site for inclusion in their downloads page. It's my first time sending anything to Apple and I honestly expected it to take a while, but a friend found them today! I'm excited to see them there and really impressed that they were approved and published so quickly.
Link to them in the Apple website here.
The presets have been downloaded a few hundred times from my site already and I'm sure the Apple site will give them more exposure. It's great to see other photographers finding them useful. I even found a website in a language I don't know linking to them. I still find this whole Internet thing amazing.
Anyway, I've been considering sharing other Aperture presets I've made and this has certainly given me new energy to do so. I'll put another pack together in the next few weeks and post it here for download... and of course, submit to Apple.
I have another set of black & white presets that I use often for photographs taken at night with flash. Not sure how useful they'll be for others as they do a very specific job for me. I also have a couple of colour ones that I think are interesting.
If anyone has any ideas or suggestions please leave them in the comments.
If you follow my blog you probably know that I love black and white photography.
I previously posted a video on how to convert colour photographs into black and white using Aperture 2. While it worked fine, you had to use the Dodge & Burn plugin in Aperture 2, which made it a destructive process and a bit of a pain in terms of workflow.
Now, Aperture 3 offers many ways to do it non-destructively with a lot more control over the final result. And a great feature is that you can save the edits as an adjustment preset so you don't have to do it all again alter. Even better, you can share these presets with others. I've been playing with this quite a bit since Aperture 3 was released and I have to say the possibilities are amazing.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the ability to save some of my settings as an adjustment preset that I can then apply to other photographs in one pass. I'm currently working on a series that emulates the effect of the black and white settings that my Panasonic GF1 bakes into the JPEG's. I'll share those when I'm happy with them, but for now I want to share 3 that I think are pretty cool.
The following photographs illustrate the effect:
Original photograph (no adjustments)
This is the photograph straight out of the camera with no editing. It's an iPhone 3gs photograph.
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Light Shadows
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Preserve ShadowsAdjustment Preset 3: B&W High Contrast
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White High Contrast
I hope you enjoy these black and white Aperture presets. They're completely free and I use them a lot myself. If you download them I'd appreciate your comments on them, good or bad! Do you find them useful? Any suggestions for improvements? Send me a message and let me know.
Other Apple Aperture related content you might enjoy:
This is just a quick post to test posting directly from my Flickr account. I've neglected Flickr lately and I want to get all my online stuff (Website, Blog, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Model Mayhem, Posterous, etc.) to start working together. Probably the main reason why I haven't done it is because I haven't found a good way to manage everything without spending a ton of time. I have a bunch of images everywhere and I don't really know where I've posted what, so I'm trying posting everything I intend to be in Flickr into Flickr first and then blog and embed from there.
I'm also playing with the new Labels in Aperture 3 to help me organise this mess. Right now I'm thinking I'll assign labels depending on what I've done with the photograph. For example, if posted to Flickr I'll give it a grey label. Not too sure if that's going to work, but we'll see.
Speaking of Aperture 3 and Flickr, I just posted a bunch of photos directly from Aperture and I have to say I'm not too impressed with the in-built Aperture to Flickr export. It's the first time I've used it, so I may be wrong, but it seems it doesn't read what's already there on Flickr so you can't post photographs into an existing Flickr set. The old plugin seems much better, but I'll reserve my final judgement until I've played with it thoroughly.
Often I need to resize a bunch of images to upload to a website or to send via email to family and friends. Sometimes opening up an application like Photoshop or Aperture feels like using a Plasma Rifle to kill a cockroach (apologies for the super geeky reference, I've been playing a lot of Fallout lately).
Anyway, there are a ton of paid and free applications out there that let you do this. I've tried pretty much all of them and they also seem like overkill for such a simple task. Even opening up Preview is slow and requires a bunch of steps. This morning I was thinking about it and I thought I'd play with Automator and see if I could create a little app that did exactly that. Within 20 minutes and a couple of tests I had it. Automator rules.
I thought I'd share it with everyone in case you're looking for something like this. If you download it, please keep in mind that I'm sharing this out of goodwill and I cannot guarantee it will work in your system. It works fine in my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. A quick rundown of what it does:
Double-click on the app and a window will open asking which photos you want to resize:
Choose as many as you need and click OK. Then the next dialogue box will ask you where you want to copy the items to so you have a duplicate instead of replacing the originals.
Finally, it'll ask you what size you want the final ones to be.
And that's it. Depending on how many photographs you selected it may take a little while, but you'll get all your images in the size you wanted, and for free!
You can download the app as a .zip file from here.
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