Gabriel Ponzanelli Photography & Motion - Gabriel Ponzanelli Photography & Motion

Entries in software (6)

Friday

Jul012011

iOS App: Test Yourself for Aperture 3

Pearson Education just released an iOS app that helps you study for the official Aperture 3 certification test. The app is designed for both iPhone and iPad and is called Test Yourself for Aperture 3.

The iTunes App Store description says:

Whether you are preparing for the Aperture 3 Level One Exam or brushing up on your knowledge of Apple’s groundbreaking photo editing and management software, the new Test Yourself for Aperture 3 iPhone/iPad app from Peachpit can help you prepare with confidence.

The app is based on the official Apple Training and Certification program. If you're interested in learning Aperture 3 it might be worth a look, even if you're not going after the certification.

It's only $1.99 and has good reviews, so worth a try I think.

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Monday

Dec062010

Fix for Apple Aperture 3 green tint error

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.

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Sunday

Feb072010

Automator app to resize images

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!