RB

The Separate and Distinct Aperture Library Approach

Using the first approach is based on using the file->export->project and the converse file->import->project functions within Aperture 2. As an example let’s say that you capture most of your images while you are away traveling. At the end of each day you would import your images into Aperture either into an existing project or a new project, whatever is appropriate. Now you can sort them, keyword the images, do all of your metadata work, your rating, and even get to some adjustments while you are on the road. Great! When you get back to home base and your main computer/Aperture library all you do is use file->export->project on your laptop, get the projectname.app file over to your main machine in whatever way you choose, and then use file->import->project on your main computer. Viola – you now have all of your images, metadata, adjustments, albums, light tables, etc. that were on your laptop there in your main Aperture library. In fact you now have it on both your laptop computer and your main computer. Get rid of it on the laptop if you want, unless of course you want to continue to work on in while you are on the go. If that is the case just continue working on it on your laptop and do the export/import thing again. The rub is every time you import on your main computer you will get another copy of the project. No big deal just delete the old one lock, stock, and barrel. The only caveat here is that every time you work on a project and want to continue working on it on a different computer you have to export the latest greatest, import it on the other computer, and then delete the older version from that computer (if it exists there). As long as your projects are a reasonable size this is extremely fast on modern hardware and gigabit network connections.

That was easy enough, let’s throw in a couple of variations. Let’s say you used a managed library on your laptop and referenced masters on your main computer (this is actually the scenario that I use personally). Easy. When you import the project into your main computer/Aperture library you will end up with managed masters for that project (it won’t change your other projects, a common misconception with Aperture is that a library is either a “managed master” library or a “referenced master” library – Not true – you can mix an match all you like). All you need to do after you import the project with managed masters is to select all of the images in the imported project and use file->relocate masters to to put the master images where they belong on your main machine for whatever your file management scheme is. If you would like to take a project on the road with you that happens to be stored on your main Aperture library so that you can say…. do some long overdue keywording while you are on the plane but your main library uses referenced masters just use the “consolidate-masters.jpg” option in the file->export->project dialog. This will put all of the referenced masters into the exported project, it will not turn the referenced masters into managed masters in your main library. When you get home just do the same thing you usually do. Export the project from your laptop, import it into your main library, and use the relocate masters to put the masters where they belong. Just a note – when you do this you will end up with duplicate copies of your project and a second set of referenced masters. Although there are ways to get around this and use the same masters that were already sitting on your file system in the same place I highly recommend from a workflow simplicity sake that you just delete the old project and old set of referenced masters.

The Replicated Aperture Library Approach

Approach number two is for photographers that like to take their entire library with them on the road. Well that’s simple when using a “managed masters” Aperture library. Just copy the library from your main computer to your laptop. Move the old one out of the way and Bob’s your uncle you are done. When you are sure that it worked go ahead and blast the old one. When you get home with all your new images and projects just copy the library from your laptop to your main computer using the same approach.

Now for reality, if you have a whole lot of images and shoot raw the whole Aperture library probably won’t fit on your laptop. No problem just use referenced masters on your main computer. When you want to take your library with you just copy it to your laptop. If you are generating previews everything will still work fine except for adjustments and a few other things where you actually need to have the masters on-line to work with them. Let’s take a look at a fairly common scenario – a main library with referenced masters that you take with you by copying it (leaving the actual masters at home). While you are away you shoot a bunch of images and add some projects. If you are using managed masters for the new projects, when you get back to home base just copy the whole Aperture library from your laptop to your main computer and then select all of the images in the new projects and use file->relocate masters to put them where they belong in your file management scheme. (A real nice trick for keeping track of this while you are way is to put all of the new projects in a blue folder, when you get home just click on the blue folder itself. All of the images in all of the new projects will show up in the browser and you can relocate them in one fell swoop)

If you would like to work on an existing project (as in add new images, and do adjustments) while you are on the road just remember to select all of the images in that project and use file->consolidate masters on your main computer before you copy the main Aperture library to your laptop. When you get back and copy the library from your laptop to your main computer you can again just select all of the images in those projects and use file->relocate masters to make them referenced again. I cannot stress enough that although there are ways to use the old set of masters it is much simpler and safer to just duplicate them and get rid of the old set until you get used to dealing with the whole multiple machine workflow.

As I mentioned at the start of this article there are tons of variations on both of these themes. The main features to really get familiar with for coming up with a recipe to suit your particular Aperture 2 workflow needs are:

Relocate masters
Consolidate masters
Delete previews
Update previews
Manage referenced files and of course…
Import project and export project

Down the road maybe I’ll put a PDF together on managing huge libraries and some more complicated (but more efficient) ways of dealing with master images. For now if you have any specific questions about either of these approaches feel free to comment or email me at rwboyer@mac.com.

I mentioned that I use blue folders to group projects by genre in my Aperture library. Things like Family, Fashion, Portraits, Glamour, Experimental Projects, Events, etc. For commercial work I usually create a blue folder for each client under the main genre. Guess what projects go in there. The other thing that I use blue folders for is to follow some of my own advise regarding keeping project size relatively small. If I am working on an ongoing project that can span months or even a year or more, I usually will create a blue folder to represent the whole project. Inside that are housed the Aperture “projects” that comprise the whole. Pretty nifty.

The bottom line is that in addition to reducing the visual noise of tons of projects in the project inspector pane it also provides extremely useful context restrictions as well. If you are not using blue folders or are using them only for boring pedantic things like year, month, etc. try getting creative with them.

RB

First off I group my similar shots together in a stack using the auto-stack feature. You can do this in the import pane of after the fact when you are looking at images in the browser. Don’t be afraid that using the image date and time may make a couple of errors when stacking your images together. The process is highly interactive, you can see what it is doing as you drag the slider control. It almost doesn’t matter what you shoot, auto-stack is useful. Try it. After you get either close or perfect stacking just go through all of the images once in the image browser with all of the stacks open and do some manual tweaking using some of the stack commands that you may not be super familiar with. Things like split stack, extract item, etc. My preferred method are the short cut keys. Once you get a feel for these commands you will probably love auto-stack because you will make completely different decisions that you may at first, like going over board rather than under-doing it because it is so easy to split one stack into to or to extract an image from the middle, etc.

Once I have my stacks I can get to my stack picks, the ones that represent the best and show up when stacks are closed extremely quickly using stack mode. It’s easy to turn stack mode on just go over to the button on the right above the filmstrip that looks like a TV set and use the drop down to choose “stack” or better yet hit option-T. You can do this when viewing the filmstrip and the viewer but I prefer fullscreen mode so I hit “F”. Now for the good part…

In stack mode you will see two images at a time. On the left will be the current stack pick. On the right will be the “compare” image. If you like the “compare” image better just hit the command-\ and the compare will become the stack pick and will now be on the left. The image on the right will now be the next one down the stack. If you want to leave the current stack pick alone just hit the right arrow key to move on down the stack. When you get to the end of that stack the right key won’t do anything any more. Hit the down arrow to go to the next stack. The key to using this effectively is to get your stack picks before creating new versions.

Another tidbit. When you are comparing images like this try hitting the Z key. This zooms into 100% view on both images you can scroll them around at the same time by using shift-command-space and drag. This is usually much faster for me to evaluate sharpness between two images or compare details rather than moving the loupe around between the two.

Comments and critique always welcome. MobileMe comments have been really flakey lately so you can email me.

What I do once I have the best image that I shot of a similar group and the base level optimization of that image as the stack pick is I then create new albums for things mentioned like aspect ratio changes, black and white conversions, output specific color or sharpening adjustments, etc. In those albums that “album pick” is the version representing what the album is for. The other thing I find very helpful is to create an album specifically for versions that were round-tripped to an external editor or plug-in for post processing. Obviously the album picks in this album are the resultant TIFF’s or PSD’s produced by the external editor.

Why do I do this? I do it because the few additional key strokes it takes to create a new album with new versions as the album picks pays dividends 1000 times that in the future. Here is an example. Say I need to produce and upload flattened 16 bit TIFFs of the Photoshop’ed finals in a specific order to a new publisher for a project that I was done with 6 months ago. What would you rather do, go to the project and hunt through each of the stacks that are in some humble jumble order hunting for the particular PSDs that are somewhere in the stack along with every other version that you made and select them blah blah blah for god knows how long or…

Would you like to just go to the project click on the PSD album, close the stacks, hit command-A, command-L, type “New export for dipshit publisher”, and then drag the images to the required sequence and export using a custom naming convetion. If you take the advice of creating albums as I suggest your life in Aperture will be much better.

Now let’s connect a couple of dots. I mentioned that I always have the best version with Aperture adjustments applied as the overall stack pick. If you took a look at the  Aperture 2 Metadata PDF you can see that one of the items that is prominent in my metadata overlays is the project field. That field displays the blue folder hierarchy and project name that the image resides in. Some of you maybe thinking that is useless because you already know where you are. Think about this. When you do a search over the whole library or in a smart album at the library level it’s great to have the location of the image instantly available so that you can go right to the source. I don’t know about you but knowing that the images showing up are the best of the best with out a lot of duplicates and noise is great. If you have versions inconstantly ordered in the stack and having 17 versions of the same image show up in my searches is not efficient. Doing it my way you can confidently check the “include stack picks only” box and eliminate a ton of noise in your smart albums and library searches. Having the project that an image exists in at your finger tips saves me a ton of time.

As always I hope this gives some of you ideas of how you can use Aperture to improve your workflow efficiency. Comments, questions, and feedback always welcome or email me.

RB

There are a couple of good ones in my humble opinion, some of the good ones are even contrary to my taste in subject matter and photographic approach. The thing that I find amazing is how popular a lot of the ones that I consider truly bad are. It boggles my mind how some of these remain so popular. I won’t mention any specific names for fear of generating controversy and to protect the innocent, the innocent being fans of the podcast, not the perpetrators. During endless hours in the airport, on a plane, in a rail station, etc. here is what I found in general followed by some specific examples of the shear lunacy that I heard last Thursday alone:

An amazing degree of podcast incest, if there is such a thing. A couple of podcasts that cover the same photographic ground, let’s call them photo podcast cousins, get together and have deformed retarded baby podcasts. What the hell, how can 27 different podcast cover the same material, the same way within a ridiculously short time frame. I am not talking about news here, I am talking about stuff as old as the hills. Here is a shutter speed, this is a photoshop layer, here is how to do a local saturation adjustment in Lightroom2. The amazing thing is other specifics like studying the photographs or composition of the same dead photographer. How does this work – is it like the on-line porn industry, the same people own 678 different websites and recycle the same images through all of them or what?
Repetition of the same subject, the exact same subject. Not among podcasts, I am talking about episodes that are 5 or 6 months apart covering the same exact thing over again. In some cases even taking pieces of an older episode and piecing them together as a new episode. The strange thing is the subject is something inane like “you need a high shutter speed to hand hold a long lens” type crap, and they prattle on about this for an hour. Are the listeners this moronic that they need to hear it again? WTF?
Out and out inaccuracies that are proclaimed as fact. I mean stuff that is verifiable by just about anyone. Amazing, and it’s all over the place. I wish I could mention specifics here but it would be a dead give away what podcasts I am talking about.
Lies both blatant and subtle. If some of them are not lies then they are at best points of view that are points of view so far from center it’s craziness. Stuff like – “Here is a photo that I used one light so that….” You look at the image and you can SEE that at least five lights where used. This is a good one – “I never do any photoshop….” Let’s go take a look see, hmmmm, these things look like freaking illustrations and here is a composite. What the hell is this guy talking about?

Okay, enough of that you get the idea. Here are a couple of things that I heard Friday. Not quotes more like paraphrases with a little tiny bit of hyperbole to disguise the source slightly but accurate and representative of the ridiculousness. The first specific example is typical, an interview. Near the beginning of the conversation there is a long segment casting dispersion on all of the photographic hacks out there taking way too many images and how real photographic artists only take one or two or something, you’ve heard it before. Later in the discussion we come to find that the guest has been photographing for two years and he has 25,000 of his final product on freaking flickr.com. What the hell? Do the math. By the way – the numbers are not an exaggeration.

The second example is a self-proclaimed expert in Lightroom2 and digital workflow sharing his instructions on how photographers should put each and every project that they shoot in a separate and distinct catalog. Now this guy’s projects last exactly one day (take a wild guess what he does), a separate Lightroom catalog for each shoot, hmmm, great idea. He goes on to explain why not to use Lightroom collections at all and how to organize your folders so that you can work on images and all sorts of things outside of Lightroom for all the important stuff. Brilliant, why not just stick with Photoshop and bridge? Oh one more thing, this guy sells Lightroom presets and you get to hear about it in every single podcast a couple of times. You heard me correctly – Lightroom presets, I might have missed something here but if anyone uses the product for more than 10 minutes it’s pretty trivial to reproduce your own presets to replicate the exact same thing.

RANT OFFICIALLY OVER.

Question. If I help a group of thoughtful photographers to produce a podcast that is not trying to sell anything and covers some material that is not as inane as “what a shutter speed is” and maybe slightly more high value, will anyone want to listen to it?

RB

Next time you are coming up with reasons that you can’t make the image you want use it as an opportunity to learn some new tricks. You will be surprised what you can come up with. As a note the corner as a background trick is almost always available and works wonders to give images some dimension, so good that you can use it when you have lighting gear at your disposal as well. Tired of the same old gray background? just light the side of the background opposite that of your main light and adjust the fall-off to achieve a similar if not more refined effect – it works great if you only have two lights.

RB

Aperture 2 pros:
Way better organizational capabilities that are not at all tied to the underlying file/directory structure.
Completely do anything anywhere flexibility, you are not forced into a workflow in any way. If you want to bring up the adjustments HUD and monkey around with the colors while laying out a book, have at it.
In general a less cluttered and more flexible user interface but this may be a matter of taste.
Books – Aperture books are really, really, flexible, nice, cool, and, did I say wonderful. Not just the once printed by Apple or just the templates supplied out of the box but the concept in general. If you take the time to figure Aperture books out you can make some really nice stuff really quick and have just about any service print it up. Too bad that there is virtually no documentation on how to really do advanced book things in Aperture. Almost anything is possible but also almost completely undocumented.
Stacks, stack mode, compare mode, full screen mode, stack picks, and album picks…..Uhhh if you don’t really know Aperture than this means nothing to you so let’s just say once you figure out how stacking, stack picks, etc work you can improve your productivity by about 1000% if you shoot a lot of images and you need to narrow it down to a few. If you shoot tons of images Aperture shines at streamlining your ability to get through them and end up with the best of the best extremely quickly compared to anything else including LR2
Customization. You can customize the user interface in ways that suit how you work, what metadata is displayed where, what keys do what, etc, etc, etc.
Keyword hierarchies once you understand them.

Lightroom 2 pros:
Local adjustments. No need to bounce your image out to an external editor to do really flexible non-destructive adjustments. Just make sure you have a really powerful machine to keep things speedy. Aperture’s out of the box dodge and burn plug-in is a joke.
Way better standards support for metadata but still not perfect.
Better print module, especially the output specific sharpening and the like.
Adjustment presets.
Windows (yuck) and Mac OS X.
Fabulous DNG support (of course) and especially the camera model presets that emulate the manufacturer’s RAW conversion or roll your own with free tools. See my preview here.
Out of the box more flexible web delivery but only out of the box (if you have tons of time you can make aperture do some amazing stuff but not for most of us)
Better but not perfect integration with Photoshop CS 3
Keyword synonyms.
There are strong and weak points to the adjustment capabilities of both applications but overall I have to say LR2 nudges out Aperture’s adjustments by a hair.

Bottom line – Both applications are fabulous considering that neither of them existed just a few years ago. You can’t really go way wrong with either choice. I have highlighted what I consider to be the strength of each application. Trying to quantify which application in superior overall for every photographer is pointless. If you are curious about a head to head detailed comparison on any particular feature that is really important to you and your photography shoot me an email or leave a comment and I will be happy to let you know what my experience has been.

RB

I found the metadata display options fairly intuitive myself but based on conversations with other Aperture users and a bunch of questions over on the Apple support forums I figured a quick guide to using some of the metadata customization and display features could be useful to people. I actually think it’s pretty amazing how underutilized a lot of the user interface customization features are within Aperture. In my opinion this is one of Apertures greatest strengths compared to other products such as Adobe Lightroom.

I will try to cover some of the other user interface customization features in future articles but this is a pretty good place to start. Without further adieu here is the Customizing Metadata Display in Aperture 2 PDF. If anyone would would like to post corrections, ideas, or ways that you use any of these features feel free to comment or e-mail me.

RB

I will speak only from a Nikon shooter’s perspective but if you change the names the same kind of thing is true no matter what you happen to shoot. Once upon a time if you wanted your RAW processing to look like the JPGs produced by your camera with various in camera settings you really needed to use Nikon Capture, not a pretty piece of software but getting much better over the years. Still it is backwards and cumbersome compared to Aperture or Lightroom. With Adobe’s release of Lightroom2 in combination with ACR 4.5 and the beta of DNG camera profiles plus profiling software this is not true anymore.

I just got done downloading and doing a quick compare of Lightroom2 RAW conversions using the new DNG camera profiles versus Nikon Capture NX2 RAW conversions with “picture control” settings with the same names and could not believe my eyes with respect to how close the conversions are. This is friggin’ great if you happen to like the RAW conversions and in camera produced JPGs that your camera happens to make and want to use them as a starting point. Huge time saver compared to starting with the same old flat RAW conversion that Aperture makes and then tweaking it from there. This tweaking usually takes multiple adjustment “blocks” and is not quite the same for every single image (probably due to white balance). What’s more is that Adobe has a free DNG camera profile editor and instructions on how to make your own camera profiles. This is totally great if you like to do that sort of thing or happen to shoot RAW with a camera that happens not to be a Nikon or Canon, you are now not out in the cold anymore. I can imagine that some dedicated non Canon/Nikon shooters out there will produce a bunch of profiles for their companions, if not do it yourself.

You can find the new tools here <——. I did a really quick comparison on the Nikon profiles for a D200 verses NX2. Check it out here <—–. The captions under the images represent the software and profile or Nikon “picture control” name for the conversion. For beta software I really think that it’s amazing. If you are a RAW shooter and are still using the clunky camera manufacturer’s software because of the RAW tone curve and color characteristics you may want to rethink that or at least try it out for yourself. I know what you are thinking – “DNG conversions and all are a pain” but guess what, you don’t have to do anything, the camera profiles work without converting your native NEF’s or CR2’s or whatever, they just work.

There are plenty of things I really love about Aperture compared to other products but the brilliant implementation of local adjustments, keyword synonyms, truly useful output sharpening, and now camera RAW profiles are starting to make the grass look greener and much more saturated over there on the Lightroom2 side of the fence.

RB

Now here is what photomatix does with just screwing around with a couple clicks. Amazing the only thing I don’t care for is the banding in the image areas with no detail. Maybe I will mess with it and see if I can get it to stop doing that. I could probably do a better job in photoshop with the same set of exposures and twisting them together using a bunch of different techniques and time but I think this photomatix thing is worth spending some time with and maybe even setting up a tripod to do it correctly. The days of a graduated neutral density filter or putting images together by hand in Photoshop may not be over but I think it might be getting close. On a more creative note, I did notice some interesting motion artifacting (if that is a word) using a few of the various options that photomatix has available to try and counteract moving things (it was me that was moving the camera in this case). I say interesting because I may just find a use for this software by creating those effects intentionally with a moving subject and see how it goes from an aesthetic standpoint.

Are these ready to go finished images? No. So I guess here is my point. I could always do this in about a million different ways. Use a grad ND filter, mess around with cutting physical masks in the darkroom, combining images in photoshop using hand build methods, etc. Have I done this? Yea but I haven’t done it on spur of the moment stuff that I was not sure would work out. With software like photomatix and what will probably be built in to about everything down the road I will probably experiment a whole lot more with images that I would never have spent the time on in the past.

RB

To do a white background it’s pretty simple. Get a roll of white seamless paper, white foamcore, whatever and make sure that you light it so it turns out actually white. The easiest way to do this is setup two lights with umbrellas painted at 45º at equal distance from the paper. Get them as even as you can and you are gold. Just a couple of notes. If you are really really picky about your exposure and know your camera’s sensor/film very very well you can get away with a background exposure at whatever your taking aperture is, i.e. incident meter at your seamless = your camera f-stop. If you are like the rest of us about 1-stop over exposed at the seamless will be great. A lot of people just starting to monkey around with this stuff go way overboard in dumping light on the white seamless because that’s what they think they want. Namely they want it to blow it out. Now here’s the issue, if you do that you will be fighting major flare unless your background is about a mile and a half away from your subject. Exaggeration to make a point, the point being use as little light as required to make the background go white, since the paper is actually white it doesn’t take much.

So in the course of this demonstration I was not doing any of that stuff I just rambled on about, I was just giving a quick tip of how to get a headshot with a white background without going through all the fuss of setting up a couple of lights and getting out the background stand etc. I just took a white umbrella with attached to a strobe head that I was using as a rim light and stuck it behind the model. This works great for a quick white background headshot, problem is I didn’t do anything but move the light. Maybe I should have cranked the power down a bit, like all the way. The light is only about a foot from the umbrella so it takes about no power to turn it white. Instead of getting white I got nasty flare that reduced the contrast of the shot to absolute garbage. I think I took about three images. See how the contrast is screwed here, that’s lens flare. See the pixelated nonsense going on in the hair on the right, that’s what happens when you go way overboard on the backlight. So take a couple of things away. One, do not use more light than required to make your white background go white. Two make yourself a mental checklist and go through it every time on every set. You will be glad you did. By the way this image has the blacks crushed like crazy to get some actual black in the image. I couldn’t bear to put it up in the state it came out of the camera, even with the blacks crushed it still looks flare-y and contrast challenged. Anyway keep those couple of things in mind and the umbrella trick is still a great way to get a white background for a headshot when you don’t have or don’t feel like setting up a couple of extra lights and white seamless.

RB

The reason you want to use a giant pain in the rear dish potentially with a giant pain in the but expensive grid is again more contrast, specularity in the highlights, falloff pattern, center hot spot. If you move the light too far away with a beauty dish you lose the fall off pattern (at least the part you care about), you lose that hotspot because it gets big enough to cover your entire subject and you end up with something that looks not too different than a small regular old reflector. That’s why you have probably read about beauty dishes having a “sweet spot”. That “sweet spot” is pretty much pretty darn close to your subject that is placed in such a way that it uses the hot spot and fall off characteristics in a way that is pleasing to the image.

In this image I used a beauty dish, the effects are subtle as always compared to a box of the same size but they are there. The dish was about 3 feet away from the model and there was a white reflector under the model’s face just out of the frame. If you look close you will see that the face is a bit brighter than the rest of the skin. This is the hot spot. If you take a look at the highlights on the nose, and lips you will see that they are a bit more sparkly than they would be using a box of the same size, this is again due to the hotter, brighter center that the dish has versus a double diffused soft box. Other than that there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between a beauty dish and a soft box of about the same size. Maybe the dish puts out a bit more light as well if you are starved for power. One last little point, if you put diffusion in front of a beauty dish or it’s too far away from your subject the more and more it will look like a soft box. Just way more expensive and way harder to carry around.

If you shoot RAW you can do anything you want to WB in post, most of what I am going to talk about regarding white balance assumes that you want to be efficient when it comes to corrections and enhancements when it comes to post with a couple of exceptions towards the end. If you shoot JPG most of the things discussed will be pretty darn important because the color is baked into your files and major corrections or enhancements will not give you wonderful results. So here we go.

The two white balance methods that I use the least are auto and custom white balance modes. Of course I use them both but I really not much, maybe 10% of the time. By all means use auto if the light sources you are shooting in are all over the place in terms of color temperature and you are shooting JPG and you need to get your images out quickly. The newer cameras, even the point a shoots not only do a credible job, in a lot of cases they actually produce pleasing results (ie warmer). My issue with auto is that the results are difficult to predict and even worse they vary shot to shot. The shot to shot variations are a real headache for me in post. Even if the results are good I almost always have to screw around with every image so that the color balance matches from image to image. If I use a direct Kelvin setting or one of the presets, you know either the cute little icons of the sun, various light bulbs and such, even if they are incorrect or I just want a different look I only need to correct one image and apply the same exact change to every other image. Most modern software allows you to do this in about 1/2 of a second.

The reason I don’t use a custom white balance using some kind of target much is I rarely want a dead on neutral image. If you want to shoot a reference or your client wants a dead neutral set of images or whatever go ahead use a target and a custom white balance it will probably save you time. What saves me time is using either a preset (daylight, florescent, tungsten, whatever) or just dial in a Kelvin setting. The reason this saves me time is I get the results that I want or really really close without much messing about in post.

Here are a few examples. I love to shoot outdoors very early or very late in the day. Big surprise right. I usually just set my white balance to daylight and get those wonderful warm tones that you are after, perfect, just like when we used daylight balanced film. If I want to pump things up I use cloudy or shade, just like putting a 81 or 85 series warming filter on back in the old days, only now it’s free. Here is a tricky one, set your camera to florescent and shoot a city scape right after the sunset. You will get amazing colors in the clouds and sky and the interior lights in the buildings will be neutral, I used to use this all the time with a FL filter when shooting film – again it’s free using digital.

I use gelatin filters like crazy (actually too much and usually have to back off a lot) not on the lens but on my lights. I find the most useful are the CTB and CTO series. Color Temperature Blue and Orange respectively, intended for correcting color temperature of light sources to the film stock in use in the old days now they are great for effect. Try this, set your camera to tungsten slap a full CTO gel on your strobe and shoot outside. You get a neutral subject lit by your strobe(s) and the background goes crazy blue. This works great especially if you underexpose your background by a stop or so. I am sure that you have seen this if you look at any commercial images. Want to fine tune the color balance of the effect – just dial in the temperature using the Kelvin settings, if you shoot RAW do it with reckless abandon in post with the white balance in your RAW processor. Try the same thing I mentioned in the city scape but this time slap and FL correction gel on your strobe and chuck a model in the scene. As for the CTB gels let your imagination run wild. Combine different gels on different strobe heads and balance what light shows as neutral (and how close or far) with the Kelvin white balance settings on your camera. Hollywood does this all the time, next time you watch a relatively recent TV show or movie pay attention to color temperature and you will learn a lot and probably steal a couple dozen ideas for your images.

RB

Please leave comments with any feedback or email me here rwboyer@mac.com

The following is a snip of the original post describing the screen shot above.

Here is a description of a few things going on with this structure that may help clarify how one can use some of the grouping features of Aperture.

Note the blue folders – these can contain projects, other blue folders, and a few items that are usually found inside projects (smart albums etc.) I use these to group related projects and some items that are useful that are associated with the grouped projects.

Looking at the blue folder named “Glamour” you can see that there are a bunch of yellow project boxes in there, they are all individual studio sessions that I shot as promo material for lighting workshops that I do. There is also another blue folder inside of “Glamour” named “Albums”. Note that they do not “live” in a project at all. I am using those to group images of the same model that are in more that one project. There is also a purple smart album named “Rated” that lives at the top level of the “Glamour” folder. I am using this smart album to collect all of the images that have a rating of one star or above in all of the different projects under the “Glamour” folder. Since I created the smart album inside of the “Glamour” folder it is only going to collect images in projects under that folder, not everything in the library. This is a great way to limit the context of smart albums etc. with out making ridiculously complex search criteria or going back and redoing a bunch of keywording etc. One other note, There is a project in the “Glamour” folder named “Workshop” this project contains a couple of objects, namely Layout, Prints, and Workshop Book. This Workshop project contains NO image masters or versions but does contain pointers to masters/versions in other projects under “Glamour”. I use this project to contain a book and printed promo material that is derived from images that are in the rated smart album. Why is it in a project? So that I can export it as an Aperture project and import it to other Aperture libraries. Why do I have the static albums for each model? So I can keep a static order to the images and run a slideshow preset on them.

Onto another blue folder “Experimental Projects”, I am using this to group two projects that I was actually shooting today. If you look at the project “Ghost Ships” you can see yellow folders named “Albums” and “Light Tables”. Yellow folders are really simple, they exist only inside projects and are used to group and organize stuff inside projects. Here I am using them in an extremely simple way. One for my albums, one for some layout ideas on how different images play together. After I export the project and import it to my main library on my desktop workstation the population of yellow folders under that project will probably change quite a bit to group a bunch of different but related things together.

This is a very basic example of folders and projects. If anyone is interested at all I would be glad to put an illustrated PDF guide together that explains exactly how all of this stuff works in different contexts and workflows along with some ideas on how each feature from basic to advanced context tricks can be used effectively. Just leave a message here or hit me up on my email.

Finally had a chance to do some editing and corrected some typos and minor phasing.

RB

Sharpness, crispness, vividness, whatever you want to call it, If the images from your DSLR seem to be fuzzier, not as sharp, or something along those lines there are a ton of factors that may be contributing to either the reality or your perception of the images versus those shot on your point and shoot. The first thing to talk about is the fact that most point and shoot digicams are much more aggressive than DSLRs in the in-camera sharpening applied. Even with JPGs, DSLRs in general do not apply as much in-camera sharpening to images. There is a good chance that your DSLR has 700 times the detail but the sharpness of the big outlines is not as eye popping. The fix, learn how to do sharpening in post or buy one of the million sharpening plugins. Another thing to look at  is your technique. Point and shoots typically have tiny itty-bitty sensors compared to even APS-C sized sensors of DSLRs. Smaller sensor = shorter focal length for any given angle of view = less depth of field = more focusing screw ups. Camera shake / too slow of a shutter speed is something else that may be showing up way more now. If you bought one of those nifty 18-200 do it all lenses with your new camera realize that you are probably going to need at least 1/300 of a second when zoomed to 200mm to hand hold and that is if you are good at it. If your not count on 1/500, not possible in a lot of circumstances at ISO 100 and f5.6. Other factors may be contrast related but more on that later.

Color. If you don’t like the color your getting with your new camera compared to your old point and shoot there are a couple of things that you may want to look at. The first thing is white balance. Point and shoot cameras can be configured to get accurate white balance but are usually used in the default mode. Camera manufacturers figured out a long time ago that consumers like warmed up images hence most consumer point and shoot cameras produce JPG files that have a white balance that is warm. Most DSLRs are more accurate which is sometimes better and sometimes not. Bottom line if you want warm images you have to do something like set the color temp yourself to get them. Another thing that you may be seeing is that most DSLRs out of the box are set to render “accurate” colors, point and shoots by default pump up the saturation and produce less “accurate” but punchier color out of the box. Easy fix for this, if you shoot JPGs just find the setting on your DSLR to pump up the saturation. If you shoot RAW there are some other things that need to be considered, we’ll get there in a minute.

Noise.  This is very subjective and all over the place depending on brand, model, newness of the DSLR etc. Generally if you are getting noise in your images that you were not seeing in your point and shoot here are a couple things to investigate. First point and shoots apply super aggressive in-camera noise reduction compared to DSLRs, so much so that some point and shoot cameras put out images that look more like a cartoon than a photograph when shot at higher ISOs. Solution – post processing noise reduction. The other thing to look at is to ensure that your main subject is not underexposed, if it is and you are cranking up the “exposure” in post you are almost guaranteeing a noisy image. Solution – understand and adapt to your new DSLRs metering and exposure system. In most cases it is way “better” than your point and shoot, “better” depends on what you are trying to do.

Moving on to exposure. Typically the multi-segment evaluative metering systems employed in DSLRs are optimized to do something way different than they were on your point and shoot. Both of them try to “figure out” what the heck you are trying to take a picture of and then set the exposure properly. They part ways with the contrast in the subject goes off the charts. Point and shoots typically optimize for whatever they thing the subject is and let the highlights go to pure white. DSLRs typically do everything they possibly can to keep the highlights from going pure white while letting significant areas of the image fall into pretty deep shadow. Why do they do this? Because manufacturers assume that point and shoot customers are going to want a cheery bright image of grandma’s face on the shaded front porch and it’s ok if the background detail is gone. With DSLRs the assumption is that the photographer wants a file that detail can be rescued in the highlights and shadow in post. The photo at the top of this post is a reasonable example of what I am talking about. I shot this while torture testing the metering system, something that is a good idea whenever you get a new camera. Here is another similar torture test. See those clouds and the light around them? That is the sun, and hence the light source for the rest of the image, it’s in the frame. See the boats? they are being lit by the sun that is reflecting off of the sky behind me and a little from the ground. As we all know if you include the light source, namely the sun, in the frame you have the choice of either getting completely black subjects in the foreground or getting blown out sky, etc. in the background. Here we have detail in both. The image did not look this way without me tweaking it in post but it’s pretty incredible compared to what I could do with slide film a few years ago. It’s also pretty incredible that the metering system “knows” so much about the limits of what the sensor can capture. Of course I shot a RAW file so I could use all of the captured information later. Here is what the JPG looked like with standard processing. I could have gone even further with the detail in the shadows but wanted to keep somewhat of a feeling of reality to it. If you are shooting JPGs of grandma on the porch with a really bright background there is a good chance that they will be underexposed with your new DSLR. Solution understand the metering system and how it reacts to different lighting conditions or use one of the other metering and exposure modes to get what you want. The other big thing that changed here is the color.  This is just a white balance adjustment done in post. With RAW images the white balance is processed after the fact so that it can be infinitely adjusted in post with no loss in image quality. With JPG files the white balance is baked in so minor adjustments are OK but major shifts are not a great idea.

Last but not least is shooting with RAW. RAW shooting, processing, ins, outs, ups, and downs are a subject for another article but here is some really basic info that will help you to get started without going nuts. If you are using the software that came with your camera to view and process RAW files there is a very good chance that by default your RAW images are going to look exactly like JPGs that you shoot with the same camera using the same settings. If you are using other software to view and process RAW files like Apple’s Aperture, Adobe’s Lightroom, etc., there is a good chance that the initial view of those files will look nothing like JPGs. Even with JPGs captured at the exact same time with RAW+JPG mode. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, as a general rule the manufacturer’s software will read in-camera settings that were applied to the JPG file and do the exact same things to the RAW file. These settings affect tone-curve, contrast, color, etc. Third party software universally ignores most or all of the in-camera image control settings. Two, the default tone curve and contrast will almost always be different with third party RAW software, the same is true for color. Last, in a lot of cases even the white balance information embedded in the RAW file will be processed a little differently in third party RAW processors.

Hopefully a tidbit or two will help you get going in the right direction to get the most out of your new DSLR.

First off the lighting setup: Large box (3’x4’) at 45° to camera right and high enough to cast shadow under the eyebrows. Exposure metered at the face is f11. The light that is actually included in the shot is as you can verify behind and at about head level pointed strait ahead. It has a very narrow grid on it and a full CTO gel. Exposure value is again at f11. The last light is a 1×3 strip box located to camera left and about 45° behind the model and slightly above. Exposure value is about 2/3 to 1 full stop below f11, Yep below, like f8 to f8 1/3.

A couple of quick questions, no cheating with your cursor or eyedropper tools yet. What is the brightest area in the photo? The darkest area? Ok that’s easy enough, the light source in the back and the black background will values of 255 and 0-3 respectively. So I we don’t get confused all of the left right references are from the camera’s perspective not the model’s. Now here are a couple of harder questions. What’s brighter the highlights on the right side of the hair or the left side? Most people would have the first impression that the left side is brighter. How about the highlights on the right side of the model’s cheek or the left side? Again most people would guess they are about the same. The answers – the highlights on the left side of the model’s hair are the same values as on the right at best and in most cases are darker. As for the highlights on the right side of the cheek versus the left side, the values are miles apart, like a couple of stops. Don’t believe me check out the luminance values yourself. The cheek highlights are in the 180’s on the right and in the 90’s on the right.

How is this possible? Why do the values look similar or in some cases even reverse of what the initial perception of brightness is? The simple answer is context. say an exposure value of f11 in a sea of tones that are f8 to f16 is not going to stand out very much in terms of contrast. An exposure value of f8 stands out like crazy in the context of black or very low exposure values. Here is another image that may surprise you if you measure the luminance values.
When put in terms of exposure values it seems like a simple concept, pretty much obvious. What is not obvious when first learning how to use lighting gear is why your images look flat. The answer is usually dumping way too much light on the scene or subject and eliminating shadows and local contrast. A little bit of light goes a long way in the shadow areas of an image. If you don’t have a bunch of lighting gear, let’s say two lights and two umbrellas. If you are using one for a main and one for a fill there is a good chance they are too far away from your subject and too close to the walls, ceiling, etc. What you get with this is pretty much very similar light values everywhere because umbrellas through light all over the place. Instead of using the second light for fill try using it as a rim light instead on the shadow side and slightly behind your subject. Try it with the umbrella, if you still have too much light coming from all over the place try a plain old dish on it and ditch the umbrella. Check out the image to the left. She seems pretty bright in the image and well separated from the background. Lighting set up is a large 3×4 box slightly to camera right, 1×3 strip light about 45° behind and to camera left. If you look you can see the rim lighting starts where the main light would be falling off into almost complete shadow. It’s a little bit brighter than the subjects skin that is lit by the main light but not much. If you measure the skin values on most of the model they are pretty much in the mid-tones. She looks bright in the image for a couple of reasons. One the rim light and the separation that goes along with it. Two the specular highlights on her skin. Last but not least and maybe a surprise. She is way brighter than the background. Check out the luminance values yourself, the brightest background values are between 40 and 50. By comparison her skin is in the 120 to 140ish range. Hey the background doesn’t look that dark does it? Why? Again due to context. The low values and I am talking about the red not the black, are in the teens, of course the blacks are actually black. To get the background to pop like this but still leave the model looking bright I used a red gel and a grid on a light and brought the background up while leaving it fall off to black towards the top.

Hopefully this will give you some helpful ideas on using your lighting gear a little more effectively. As is the case with most photographic things. A little bit goes a long way. Feel free to hit me back with questions or comments.

Here is the exact same softbox, the exact same reflector the same shadows values, the same model. This time with the main light set to more of of a Paramount/loop position but almost at the “Rembrandt” position and “short lit” – shooting from the shadow side.
One of the things I do in the workshops is to use somewhat extreme lighting ratios to emphasize some concepts but the same concepts apply to more moderate lighting ratios as well. In fact one of my all time favorites is Rembrandt lighting at very low lighting ratios for beauty shots. It adds some nice pizzaz to otherwise the same gigantic flat light source beauty shots we are so used to seeing. If you want to try extremely low lighting ratios you may want to work backwards – setup your fill first and your main last. Just a hint, I’ll show you why in another post.

RB