Micah Walter has finished his first Aperture export plug-in and now has it available for beta testing. The plug-in uploads to Pictage, a photo site that specializes in wedding photography, and you'll need to sign up to Pictage to get the pug-in.

My own plug-in, Random Wok, underwent some updating awhile back, but has languished recently as I tried to localize it and then got sidetracked by my book. I still plan on getting version 1.1 out, but it may take me a little while.

Josh and Ellen Anon have a very interesting post and discussion going on at O'Reilly. The topic is this: suppose you have lots and lots of images that were shot as RAW+JPEG in your Aperture library and you no longer want the JPEGs? They can use up a ton of space. How do you get rid of the JPEGs?

The short answer is that you don't. At least not with the tools supplied in Aperture, since Aperture treats the RAW file and the JPEG as a single composite master and won't let you do anything with them individually except create a new master from the JPEG. That new master can be deleted, but it doesn't buy you anything since the original JPEG is still there with the RAW file.

I have as technique that I think is better then Ellen and Josh's. It uses only the Finder and doesn't require any Terminal typing or scripts. And I don't leave any files behind. So without further ado, I'll show you what I do.

[Update: Aperture.fr has an Automator action that achieves the opposite: gets rid of the RAW files and leaves the JPEGs. It does, however, lose any adjustment history. Site is in French]

Here is a project called Yard shoot inside a blue folder:

All three of the images are RAW+JPG. Here they are:

I'll look inside the project to see how it is organized. I open up my Aperture library with control-click and select Show Package Contents, then navigate to the Z folder and then control-click on the Yard shoot project file and select Show Package Contents again. Here are all the files:

I can see the RAW files (CR2) and their JPEG (JPG)sisters. I can also see the apfiles which contain Aperture's information about the image files and the apmaster file that documents the master. What I want to do is to get rid of the JPG files and their apfiles, but leave the CR2 files alone and not leave the apmaster file in a state that will confuse Aperture. Also notice the JPEG files in there that are in the Previews and Thumbnails folders. Those are the previews used for iLife and other applications, and I may want to keep those.

1. Export the project

First I export the project to a temporary location. It looks like this:

2. Open up the project package

It's a package just like the library, so I control-click and select Show Package Contents to view its insides:

3. Find all the JPEG files in the package

I type .JPG into the search box top right and press return:

The Finder window changes to show me the apfiles and the images that match. I can tell the image files apart by looking at the pixel sizes underneath.

4. Select all the files and delete them

If I want to delete all the JPEG files (including the previews) then this step is easy. Select all with command A and delete them with command Delete. Command delete does not appear to do anything at all, but actually it has moved the files to trash. Close the window.

4a. or Select some of the files and delete them

If I want to delete only some of the JPEGs or if I want to leave the previews alone then I have to be selective. By command clicking on all the images that I want to delete, I can make a selection. I'm deleting the JPEGs for images 2563 and 2565 in this case, so I select those.

While it is not critical that the apfiles get deleted too it can be good to be neat. Making this additional selection can be made much easier with the following trick. Press command J to bring up the Finder view options and make sure that This window only is selected. Now select Group By Date and within the group, By Name:

The window changes, but the selections are still there:

Now I can easily command click the apfiles that immediately follow the images already selected and add them to my selection. I do that, and then press command Delete and close the window.

Now if I look in the exported project I see that the JPEGs I wanted gone are gone and the JPEGs I wanted to keep are still there:

5. Reimport the project into Aperture

I create a new blue folder for my project to avoid confusion, and drag the fixed project in:

Now the images I removed the JPEGs from no longer have the option to create a new master from the JPEG:

6. Clean up

After checking the project, I delete the temporary copy and the original. I am done.

Why do all this with an external project? One reason is that it is much safer to operate on a copy of the data than the original, so exporting the project satisfies that urge. The other reason is that the result is much neater. When the project is imported, Aperture does some checking and fixes up the apmaster files.

The original apmaster files have the JPEG listed (originalJPEGFileUUID):

But the fixed and imported image no longer lists the JPEG:

Hopefully Apple will add this facility into a future version of Aperture and we can avoid jumping though all these hoops entirely.

Tags: Aperture, JPEG, RAW, RAW+JPEG, Library, Projects, Deleting

Maple leaf: 1/50s f/5.6 ISO400 195mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, adjusted

I rarely have reason to change the contrast of my images, but sometimes it is just what is needed. The image above started life as a much paler version:

It was taken in very diffuse light and the contrast was very low. Rather than increase the saturation as I usually do, I found that increasing the contrast dramatically had the desired effect. A small increase in the exposure was also needed:

The new version has much more depth than the original because there is enough detail to separate the leaf from the background.

Tags: Aperture, Canon, 30D, Contrast, Adjustments, Leaves

Pro members of the Aperture Users Professional Network get 50% off my ebook Get Your Head Around Aperture. Visit the AUPN pro info page for more information.

Tags: Aperture, AUPN, Get Your Head Around Aperture, Books

A frustration with buying the latest and greatest DSLR is that Aperture won't support the RAW format straight away. We're forced to wait for an update to add that capability. This is one reason that I went for the Canon 30D rather than the 40D: it's supported and has been for a long time.

Derrick Story at O'Reilly Digital Media has a partial answer: shoot RAW+JPEG and view the JPEGs in Aperture.

Tags: Canon, 40D, G9, RAW, JPEG, Aperture

Hello, I'd like to combine the contents of a few folders; however, some file names are the same, therefore, I can't add them all together. Is there a way to "automatically" rename the files so that they can all share the same folder space? I don't want to go inside each folder and change the name of files one by one!

There is a way to do this automatically, and surprisingly the tool that can do it is Aperture. The files do have to be image files that Aperture can read.

Here is a folder structure with two folders that contain different images with the same name, Mud.jpg:

I'll move these two images into a single folder in such a way that the names don't clash.

The first step is to import my two folders, Monday and Tuesday, one at a time, into the same Aperture project.

First I create a new project called Temp, then select it and press command I to bring up the Import pane. At the top of the import window I select the first image folder:

And make sure that the import is going to the right place:

Then I select a referenced import that leaves the files in their current location. This is an important step -- I don't want to move the files yet:

After performing the import, my Temp project has the images from the Monday folder, just one in this case, but it could be thousands. Here is the image in the project with the badge that tells me it is referenced:

Next I do another import into Temp using the Tuesday folder, making sure that I import referenced again. I could repeat this with many more folders of images if I wanted, all with clashing image names.

To combine the folders, I relocate the images in the Temp project to another part of the disk, in this case a folder called All Mud. I control-click on the Temp project and select Relocate masters for Project...:

And provide the destination folder in the dialog. I don't need any subfolders and I don't want to rename the files in any special way, so I select None and Master Filename from the pop-ups:

The relocation of the files is fast because they don't have to be copied if they are being moved into a folder on the same disk, as is the case here.

Once the relocation is complete, I see that the original Mud folder is now empty:

And the All Mud folder has the images:

Aperture renames with numbers in brackets; there is no choice about that. Not only are the masters in the same folder, but they are already imported into Aperture. I am done. If at any time I want to store then as managed masters in the Aperture library I can use the consolidate function of Aperture to do this.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Relocate, Consolidate, Folders, Name Collisions

Ken Huth has a podcast called ApertureCast that broadcast its 12th edition today. He talks to Ron Cronk, a photographer who has switched from a PC with Lightroom to a Mac with Aperture. He's using two 20" monitors and likes it very much. I have an iMac 24" and no second screen, so I've not had a chance to try this. He also shamelessly plugs my book.

Tags: Aperture, Dual Monitors, Podcast, Lightroom

Now I have a DSLR, I have sensor dust. I've one big annoying spot and several lesser spots that make their presence felt whenever I use smaller apertures . So, lacking a blower or other equipment to fix it, I use Aperture's Spot and Patch tool to deal with them. The spots are only visible against a plain background, so I don't have to fix all of them, just the really bad ones in certain images.

In the photo on the left, the original, the bad spot is visible above the horizon. After adjustment, the spot is worse because of the better contrast.
     
Once I go into full screen mode with F, the spot looks like this:

To fix it I bring up the adjustment HUD with H and then select Spot and Patch from the HUD:

This brings up a radius control dialog which allows me to drag the control to get the approximate size I want for the spot:

Over the image, the cursor turns into a target:

And once over the spot, I click and a yellow circle appears to mark my adjustment:

Inside the circle the spot is fainter, but it's not entirely gone. And it's hard to see what is going on with that yellow ring around the spot. To toggle the yellow ring off and then on again I press A, then X.

The problem is that my spot adjustment is a little too small. All it takes is a small change to the radius using the Spot and Patch controls:

I can make it vanish completely:

I press again A to restore the regular cursor and I'm done with that one. Gone!

Now I have a puzzle. I want to fix another spot, but how do I get the target cursor back? Selecting from the + menu on the HUD doesn't work -- it's grayed out -- because the control is already in use. There is no button on the control to add another spot, just a button to delete one.

The answer is to use the hidden menu at the top of the screen in full screen mode. Taking the cursor up to the top of the screen reveals the controls and shows the keyboard shortcut for Spot and Patch, X:

By pressing X, the Spot and Patch control is activated and a new target cursor appears that I can use to banish the other spots. In fact, I could have pressed X at the beginning to create the first spot adjustment had I wanted to.

If I have other images with spots that I want to fix, then as long as the camera has the same orientation, they will appear in the same place in each image. So I can use Lift and Stamp to get a head start on fixing the spots in those other images. Pressing O to select the Lift tool and clicking on the image gets me the Lifted parameters:

By unchecking the items I don't want and deleting all the adjustments except for the Spot and Patch (why no checkboxes for those?), I end up with what I want:

Now I can stamp that spot adjustment onto other images that need the same set of spots eradicated.

Unfortunately I can't rotate the coordinates as I Stamp to mimic rotating the camera. So for each of the three other camera orientations, I have to create a despotted image to have spot removal ready for Lifting. And the tool does not have a numeric coordinate input like the Crop tool does, so I can't just move numbers around to move the spot between orientations.

I also find that images with spot adjustments are very slow to process, at least on my machine, so I do them last. After the other things that are slow in fact: Straightening and Shadows and Highlights.

When I get a Rocket Blower, we'll see how well it works. The final image can be viewed here on Smugmug.

Tags: Aperture, Sensor Dust, Spot Tool, Adjustments, DSLR

"Steve Weller's insights go far beyond that of a typical photographer. Get Your Head Around Aperture is filled with tips and tricks, a must read for first time users and Aperture masters alike" -- Micah Walter, photojournalist and contributor to Inside Aperture

It's done! I've taken more than a year's worth of Aperture articles and compiled them into a living PDF e-book. Many people suggested that I do this, so thanks are owed to them and to everyone who reviewed the book and made comments and corrections.

A PDF version of the Aperture articles on the site is convenient and useful. It's portable since you don't need to be on-line. You can put it on your laptop to read in the field. It's searchable by Spotlight and Preview. And it's printable. You get three editions: one 490-page edition optimized for screen viewing at 100%, so you can stash it to one side and have Aperture next to it, and two 160-page editions optimized for printing -- one for A4 paper and one for US Letter paper.

It's available only from this site. More information on the Get Your Head Around Aperture product page.

Tags: Aperture, Books, Anticipation, Get Your Head Around Aperture

Bird Over The Bay:1/800s f/9.0 ISO100 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, adjusted

One of the things I'm loving about my DSLR is that I no longer have to deal with the fog of an electronic viewfinder. They should really be called electronic fuzz makers: it's very difficult to know what you are taking a picture of. I've had many a surprise when I've looked at the result in Aperture and seen objects and detail that I had no idea existed at the time.

Now I can track things, see accurate color, be aware of detail, and, most importantly, know when things are in focus. And it makes manual focussing possible. Manual focussing with up and down buttons and an electronic viewfinder is just wretched. In the picture above I could wait until the bird banked in front of the lighter water so that it was recognizable and get the picture I wanted with ease.

Of course with the 30D I don't get a live preview, nor a flip-out screen (like the S3), so that makes it harder to get certain shots. Live preview is one advantage the 40D has over the 30D that would be useful to me.

Tags: DSLR, Viewfinder, Canon, 30D, 40D, S3

Having been playing with getting back-lit photos of ducks, I accidently left the exposure compensation set to -1ev and proceeded to underexpose everything else. However the photos were quite easily adjustable.

Here is the original image of a type of duck I have not seen before (what is it?). I caught it just as it had shaken the drips off its bill, but before they had hit the water. If you view the full-size final image you can see the sprinkle of drops frozen in the air.

After cropping and adjusting the under-exposed original in Aperture I was able to get this much more pleasing result:

1/2000s f/3.5 ISO100 195mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, adjusted

It still looks a little dim, but I prefer it that way, and the sun was fairly low anyway. I was quite surprised that I could under-expose so much and still get a good result. It helps that I was using ISO100. The adjustments looked like this:

I could boost the exposure and the brightness on this image because the highlights were very small. As long as I didn't diminish the color in the drops or lose the feather detail it was OK. I used a little shadow boost as well. In other pictures from the same series I have found that the colors adjustment is very useful: I can desaturate the color of the water to focus the eye on the colors of the ducks.

I am also finding that the 70-200 zoom is not enough for bird pictures: a 1.4x TC is probably on the horizon. One of my reasons for going for the f/2.8 over the f/4.0 version of the lens was so that I still had a decent aperture with a teleconverter.

Tags: Aperture, Underexposure, Adjustments, Canon, 30D

Photographer's Journey has an old posting that lists some Firefox extensions that are useful to photographers. Yet another way to read EXIF data.

Tags: Firefox, Extensions

Apple has a 32 minute seminar on extending Aperture posted on their site. It looks at Applescript, Automator, export plug-ins, and iLife integration.

Tags: Apple, Aperture, Plug-ins, Automation, Applescript

Smoky sunrise: 1/800s f/5.6 ISO400 185mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, unadjusted

This photo is the opposite to the smoky sunset: a smoky sunrise. It was taken just seconds after the sun appeared, through a window and with a UV filter attached, so there are some reflections that shouldn't be there. It's cropped to remove some distracting foreground, but unadjusted. I have no idea why there is a yellow arc and a red arc further out. The red arc was more pronounced before the sun rose over the hill. There was less smoke when this was taken than a few days before.

It's an uninteresting photo though. Apart from the fence posts on the right, there is no detail, and without enhancement, nothing to scale it by either.

Tags: Smoke, Sunrise

EXIF Viewer is a simple application that does what it says: shows EXIF data. The information is shown in a table and can be copied and pasted as text into other applications:

It can't interpret the ISO data from my Canon S3, but then nothing outside of Canon's own software does that, so this is no big surprise. To use it I just drop a selection of images onto the application icon and it creates a window for each image.

Tags: EXIF

There has been a lot of smoke in the San Francisco Bay Area these past few days from a couple of large forest fires. As a result the sun has been sunset orange hours before it sets, turning to a deep red color as it nears the horizon. The color of the sun in the photo below is straight from the camera:

Smoky sun: 1/800s f/5.6 ISO200 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, unadjusted

I took that out of the bathroom window of my house: the only place I could get an unobstructed view through the trees. You can see the haze across the face of the sun. I took it with the camera in manual mode after finding the sun too bright at the metered shutter speed (I think 1/200). I took some more at 1/400 and 1/800 and it was the latter that was the best setting.

Another handy setting I am using at times is Custom Function 4 set to 1. This sets the * (asterisk) button to autofocus and lock and leaves the shutter to set exposure and take the shot. This lets me set focus once -- on the sun in this case -- and then keep taking shots without the focus changing. Since I was in Manual mode, the exposure wasn't changing either.

Tags: Fire, Sunset, Canon, 30D, Custom Functions

Pixel Peeper looks like a very useful site for researching lenses. It hosts links to images shot with specific lenses and cameras with the EXIF data organized in a database. This allows you to see what kind of shots are possible with a lens and camera combination you are considering. With my 30D I have the EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 and the EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS.

Tags: DSLR, Lenses, Canon

Deck roof: 1/40s f/11.0 ISO100 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped

The Aperture Users Professional Network has published the first of a seven part series on image adjustment. I recommend that everyone read this series. There are a large number of controls in the adjustment panel and I'm sure that nobody understands all of them.

Now I'm shooting RAW most of the time, I'm doing more adjustment than I was (but still trying to minimize it) and I find myself poking around in this panel trying to understand how everything affects the image. What I have to adjust is a good way to learn what I got wrong.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, AUPN

Teapot: 1/100s f/11.0 ISO100 48mm, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55 IS, unadjusted

Now I have shot about 1800 photos with my 30D, I'm starting to learn what settings make sense for the kind of things I do.

I have a custom picture style set up that has Sharpness +2, Contrast 0, Saturation +2, Color tone 0. This leaves me less work to do in Aperture: just a little sharpening is needed and sometimes more saturation. That's one of three. I have another with less Sharpness and another with more Sharpness and more Saturation.

White balance is best either left on auto, or quite often on Shade. Out of the shade that setting gives a nice orangey effect that is good for indoors.

Fill-in flash makes a big difference when it comes to getting rid of harsh dark areas or when extra sharpness is needed and the light is low. The camera is clever enough that if the shutter speed is faster than 1/250 (the fastest sync speed), it will cap the shutter at 1/250 and increase the f number to compensate. That way you get a picture with a deeper DOF than intended rather than no picture at all. Flash recharge takes about 1/4 second, so I can take the next shot almost right away.

Evaluative metering is very good and gets it right almost all of the time, so I leave it on that.

For autofocus I either use One shot mode or AI Servo, the latter for moving objects that I want in a particular part of the frame. I have changed the function of the 8-way control so that I can use that to select the focus point quickly.

Drive stays on 3 per second normally, and ISO at 400, going up or down by a factor of 2 or 4 when needed. I'd prefer just ISO 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 settings, but no: I have to click past all the intermediate ones.

Typically the ON/OFF button stays at ON. I set it to / when I need to be able to change the exposure compensation quickly. Otherwise I avoid that setting because it is easy to change the exposure setting unintentionally.

I normally limit the aperture to f11 or larger to avoid diffraction effects. Slowly I'm getting to learn the depth of field that is available at different focal lengths and f-stops. It didn't matter anywhere near as much with my S3 because the images were not as sharp. Now I have to be very careful of depth of field.

I'm also learning that the EF-S 17-55 IS lens I use a lot of the time has its limits. Close focus at 55mm is not so sharp, while at 17mm it is. So I back off the distance or the zoom when I find myself going there. It is very versatile and stays on the camera most of the time.

Tags: Canon, 30D, S3