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.

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?

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

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

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!

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:

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.

This post is another in what feels like an endless series of love letters to Aperture. I’ve been using Aperture exclusively for a year now. At first, I was in way over my head. A complete amateur, lost in a professional tool. Now, I’m a complete amateur, able to salvage photographs pretty effectively in a professional tool. I’ve dabbled with iPhoto recently (using it to manage the photos from my son’s Fisher Price camera, because sending a 5 year old into Aperture felt like overkill) and I’m positive I could never go back. I’ve imbibed deeply of the Aperture Kool-Aid. It’s entirely possible that other apps (Lightroom?) could do what Aperture does, but Aperture works so amazingly well that I won’t bother to check out the other apps for awhile.

To illustrate just how amazing Aperture is, here are 2 photos I took this week. When posted to Flickr, they looked decent, even passable as non-crap. But that was only after some photo rescue applied from within Aperture.

Photo #1 (12 Mile Coulee Road on Christmas Day) was taken on Christmas Day, as I went for a bike ride around my community. I was booking it down a country road (the first country road you get to in my neck of the woods, and the one that marks the NW corner of the city of Calgary). I saw a pretty breathtaking view of the foothills, including a farmer’s field with scattered hay bales, and the Rocky Mountains off in the distance. I pulled over, and took a few shots. After getting home, I opened them up, and noticed that the photos all looked flat and lifeless. Drab. Dreary. It was a pretty much overcast and flatly lit day. But 15 seconds twiddling bits in Aperture brought the photo back to what I remembered seeing.

The left half of the image was “in camera” without touchups. The right half is after (literally) 15 seconds of tweaking in Aperture. I set the white balance (eye dropper on the snow) and tweaked levels and exposure. Bumped up contrast and saturation. Done. 15 seconds from boring, flat shot to a half decent photo of the foothills.

For the second shot (Santa Ball), I’ve been dabbling with a DIY lightbox. I’m just using whatever lights I have laying around (in this case, halogen and CF lamps collecting dust in the basement), so the white balance is pretty much crap, and not bright enough to make the images pop. I took this photo today to try a new combination (having been thwarted by Boxing Day closed stores and unable to pick up a set of more consistent lights).

While the final image isn’t bad, the “in camera” version is absolute crap. The warm light makes it look orange, almost brown. And it’s not bright enough. This one took a bit longer to clean up properly. I think I spent a whopping 2 minutes. I set the white balance (eye dropper just below the bottom of the ball), bumped up exposure, saturation, contrast, and tweaked levels a bit. Hopefully after picking up some decent lights, the amount of lightbox post-processing tweakage will drop dramatically.

Although there’s no replacement for getting a photo right in camera, there’s also nothing like having the tools available to consistently rescue a photograph with pretty minimal effort.

I’ve been exclusively using Aperture for about 6 months now, and absolutely love it. The non-destructive edits are liberating. The RAW support is fantastic. The workflow stuff is great. Vaults? Great. Loupe on RAW images? Perfection.

But, of course, I’ve got some gripes.

1. It’s hard to copy individual photos between computers. If I have Aperture on a desktop and a laptop, and I want to copy just a handful of photos and their metadata (stars, keywords, etc…) from the desktop to the laptop, I have 2 choices:
   1. create a new Project to contain these selected images, then export/import it. This would make me organize my photos according to which sets I want to move between computers, with no semantics retained.
   2. export the Masters for the selected photos from the desktop, copy them to the laptop (USB thumbdrive, sftp, whatever…) and import them as new photos. All non-EXIF metadata is lost, and has to be manually re-entered.

   But Aperture already has an “export metadata” option… Why not let me export just a selected set of photos (masters and versions) as well as their associated metadata, in a format that can be ingested into another Aperture without manual intervention or redundant/meaningless Projects used as interchange vectors?

2. No keyword tag cloud. I’ve got a BUNCH of keywords, but the keyword viewer (i.e., searching) is kinda sucky for that. I want a nice tag cloud.
3. Performance on my quad-G5 (with stock video card) is rather craptastic. If I disable the second display view, it’s marginally better, but it’s generally a dog on this box. It’s much faster on my MacBook Pro. I’d love it to run a bit better on the quad…
4. Albums sometimes forget their designated sort order. I use a “general” project, and it’s got a couple thousand images in it by now. Half the time, it decides to ignore my “newest first” sort order and show photos in “oldest first”. It’s kind of nice, to be occasionally reminded of the first photos I shot using Aperture, but it’s not how I told the album to be sorted. One additional click of the sort triangle, followed by a 2 second wait as the 2000 photos are reordered…

Actually, this is just one of the many reasons why I love Aperture. Non-destructive, interactive image adjustments. I don’t use adjustments very often, but when I do, they’re absolutely amazing. I had to hunt through my library to find images that had many adjustments made to them – most of my images are used as they were taken in-camera, with only minor RAW tweaks. But, occasionally, an image needs some extra love. Two recent examples are a lightning strike I was lucky enough to catch last night, and my son’s team photo for his T-ball team.

The lightning strike was taken on the spur of the moment, without any prep or composition. I just fired off a bunch of shots, hoping to get lucky enough to catch some lightning. Exposure was off. Contrast was off. Tweaking a handful of sliders in the Aperture adjustments HUD turned the image at top left into the image at top right. Much more dramatic, but not unfaithful to what I saw. All I did was drop the exposure a bit, and bump up contrast. Easy enough, and because it is an interactive adjustment, it took maybe 20 seconds to do.

The other is my son’s T-ball team photo, which was unfortunately shot with the sun as a backdrop. Way overexposed, with too little contrast. Again, some minor tweaks of the Highlights and Shadows tool, and I got an almost usable image.

The best part is, all adjustments are nondestructive. I can easily modify any of the adjustments without having to futz about with file management or layers. I can toggle exposure adjustment to see how it affects contrast or white balance. I can easily toggle between unmodified Master and tweaked Version views to see the difference easily. Very cool. This one took me quite a bit longer – maybe 2 minutes – before I was happy enough (or realized that was as good as it would get).

I don’t use it a lot, but when I do, I sure appreciate the nondestructive adjustments. Although I shoot RAW almost exclusively, these nondestructive adjustments work just fine for any file format Aperture can read, including JPEG. You get less data to work with in JPEG, but you can still take advantage of the adjustments.

I’ve been using Aperture for a couple of weeks, in somewhat light usage (some days not at all, others, like today, with it open for most of the day). I’ve got a few gigs of images in my Aperture library, without importing my iPhoto images (I decided it’s not worth having an out-of-sync snapshot of my iPhoto library in Aperture). Here’s some quick thoughts based on my time in Aperture 1.5:

• I love the various views (list/browse, browser/viewer/fullscreen, metadata hud, adjustments hud, secondary screen modes…) – makes it soooo easy to find what I’m looking for, and get the job done.
• Smart albums – great way to organize images. I can add stuff to projects/albums, and have a Smart Album populate itself based on combinations of keywords, star ratings, and other metadata fields (show me all images with 3 or more stars, having the keyword “Issue #1″, shot with an aperture greater than f4 in the last 2 weeks).
• It runs like a pig on my PowerMac G5 Quad. The chips and RAM are up to the task, but the stock Nvidia GeForce 6600 video apparently doesn’t have the horsepower needed by Aperture (although it kicks Q3A and UT2003 pretty nicely – Dashboard hangs a bit, too, so perhaps it’s a Quartz Extreme thing). Images can take a few seconds to display. The loupe might take up to 5 seconds to show up, and is sluggish to drag. HUDs fade in very slowly, often over a couple of seconds. I resorted to minimizing the previews, selecting the smallest size and lowest quality, and that seems to have really sped things up. But it sure doesn’t feel like it’s running on what was Apple’s flagship machine until the recent release of the Mac Pro.
• Keyboard shortcuts aren’t properly localized. They’re hardcoded to the QWERTY keys. Or, rather, some are hard-coded, some are localized. I use the Dvorak layout, so have to use the menus and toolbar buttons for many things (like changing the Window Layout), but keyboard shortcuts work fine for other things (like fullscreen, and loupe). Frustrating.
• No straightforward way to crop/export really wide aspect ratio images. I spent most of today cropping a whole bunch of images into 790×287 and 790×134 sizes, and had to leave Aperture to do that. The crop HUD won’t let me enter values over 40, and seems to be acting up on large-ish numbers in general. So I resorted to exporting versions of the image, and taking those into Photoshop for cropping (where the crop tool lets me enter whatever dimensions I want) and export as jpeg for use on the web. Frustrating. I’d love to be able to apply non-destructive crops in Aperture, then export at the appropriate dimensions. It would make tweaking the crop much easier, rather than eyeballing it in Photoshop.
• No “Burn Project to DVD” button. I wanted to send a copy of an organized Aperture library to a client for backup, because their photographer sent them some really scratched and unorganized CDs full of great photos, and a nice DVD with the Aperture library would be better for their archives. I had to export the project to my desktop, then copy that do a DVD and burn it. A handy “Backup Project to DVD” feature would be great. Maybe I missed it.

Even with a few gripes, I’m pretty impressed by Aperture 1.5. It’s not perfect, but is a really sweet app that (mostly) lets me plough through a whole bunch of images quickly to get things done right and fast.

Things I’d like to see added:

• Live reference to iPhoto library. So I don’t have to stop using iPhoto in order to use Aperture. Instead of importing a snapshot of iPhoto’s library, how about a dynamic reference, something like a symlink from a Project in my Aperture library to my iPhoto library. There are a few reasons to keep using iPhoto, so it’d be cool to play better with it rather than just trying to push it out of the playground.
• Make it run faster on the Nvidia GeForce 6600. No idea if that’s possible, or how to do it, but the card’s not supposed to be a total stinker, and a whole lot of people have Quad G5s with it as the stock card. It’s a shame that Aperture doesn’t run fast enough on it.
• Wide aspect ratio cropping/exporting workflow. For things like blog/website banners, newsletter headers, etc… The crop tool’s acting up at really wide aspect ratios.

I got a copy of Aperture this week, just in time to get to play with the new 1.5 update. I'm really impressed with the application. It blows iPhoto out of the water.

I was trying out some of the new features, and thought I'd see if I could tweak one of my favourite photos of Evan to make it "pop" a bit more.  On the left, the original, "in camera" image. On the right, a version with white balance correction, and an application of the new "Spot & Patch" tool to remove some blemishes.

Evan – tweaked (before and after)

The tweaked image definitely "pops" more. Might be a bit too warm, but I was just messing around with Aperture. I'm realizing a couple of things:

1. shooting in RAW is awesome (I went for a walk around campus today, shooting RAW for 90% of it. what a difference…)
2. I have huge gaps in knowledge/understanding of photography. I'm having fun slowly learning, but man, do I have a long way to go.

King jokingly suggested I should quit my job to be a photographer. If that would pay the mortgage, I'd do it in a heartbeat.