There are many photos in my Aperture library that have two masters, each one jpeg and one raw. I'd like to delete one of both, but I didn't even found a way of splitting them.
Why don't you use a smart folder? Set file type to RAW, and then you can delete the files. Its however not ideal.
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I have access to the below software and I use all of them at various times. I do not have a specific workflow and would like to start following one.
The general process that I follow is this:
How can I improve my workflow? I shoot JPEG.
The biggest step you could take is to commit to either Aperture or Lightroom. These applications are both trying to fill the same space in a photographer's workflow, and they each work best if they are the primary tool that you use. By committing to a single application for importing, organizing and processing your images, you will be able to put the full features of the application to use and get the value out of your investment.
Since you also use Photoshop, I'd actually be leaning towards Lightroom, as it has a clean integration between the two, but the choice is yours.
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My workflow consists of importing photos into Apple Aperture, where I do most of my editing. Sometimes, I edit the photo in Photoshop. Aperture can automatically create a .psd file based on my edited image, and include that in its own library. The final results gets printed on an Epson Stylus Photo R2880 printer.
In the Aperture settings, I can select which color space to use when generating the .psd file. As I have set it up right now I use 16bit and ProPhoto RGB color space.
However, when opening up the color utility, I can see that some of the glossy paper color profiles for the printer contains colors that are not inside the ProPhoto RGB color space. This is mainly blue and purple nuances in the black area that are outside the scope of the ProPhoto RGB color space.
What puzzles me is that the icc profiles for my printer, an Epson Stylus Photo R2880 are not CMYK, but RGB profiles, I am wondering if I should choose one of the color profiles for that printer when exporting to PhotoShop. The annoying part about that setup is that I would have to go into Aperture preferences and select the export color space based on the papertype I wish to print on before opening an image in Photoshop.
What also puzzles me is the fact that the icc profiles for the printer use the RGB, not the CMYK, color space. Although the printer does have 8 instead of 4 types of ink instead of 4, it is still based on subtractive color, as opposed to additive color that the RGB space is.
I'm quite new to the entire color management thing, and I want to set up my system to be able to generate predictable prints, and also fully utilizing the capabilities of my printer, e.g. I can see by comparing the color profile of my monitor with the color profile of the printer that the printer by far exceeds the monitors capabilities in producing very saturated green and blue colors.
My primary workstation is an iMac, on which I have calibrated the display using a x-rite Colormunki.
Working color spaces and print color spaces are distinct, separate things. Generally speaking, you never want to directly apply a print profile to an image. The purpose of ICM is to utilize ICC profiles to describe what needs to be done when moving content from one device to another. You NEED to keep your photos tagged with an RGB ICC profile that properly describes the image in the RGB space, and you NEED to select an additional ICC profile that properly describes the capabilities of the printer. The ICM engine will then (normally) figure out how to adjust colors...according to your selected rendering intent...from the RGB space to the printer space.
To demonstrate my workflow, I generally do the following:
I want to stress at least checking the white and black points when in soft-proofing mode. Using a Perceptual rendering intent when printing will usually do a pretty good job, but its easy to lose a lot of tonality in the shades and sometimes in the highlights if you don't adjust them for the specific printer and paper you intend to print on. Adjusting them in soft-proofing mode ahead of time helps maximize tonality for print. Generally speaking, you don't need to worry about out of gamut colors if you convert to an RGB space that closely matches the printer space. With modern Epson printers, that is probably closer to AdobeRGB than sRGB. If you prefer to use Colorimetric Rendering intent, then you might want to learn some techniques to fix out of gamut colors before printing, to maximize your control over color quality and minimize posterization.
Finally, once you have tuned the print copy for the specific paper and printer, save it with all your adjustments. You should be able to print from it as many times as you need with predictable results. If you ever need to print on a different printer, paper, and paper size, you should redo steps 1-4 above for each one, and save a separate copy off for each.
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I've been looking for a new Library / Photo Editing software, iPhoto isn't really cutting it any more. I've been using both Aperture and Lightroom a bit now (trial licenses) and I noticed a big difference in the noise reduction capabilities.
Lightroom does a really amazing job with noise reduction on some of my long exposure northern light photos. Apertures noise reduction on the other hand barely makes a difference. This might be due to how I use Aperture and Lightroom, but I've seen reviews that praise Lightrooms noise reduction while almost bashing Apertures (lack of).
I like how Aperture creates "Libraries" and organize the photos. The "do what you want at any time" aspect of Aperture is also something I prefer, but it's extremely slow on my computer which is quite fast (MacBook Pro 15" Early 2011, i7 4GB Ram).
I guess my question would be: Is there any other really good noise reduction plug-ins for Aperture? Can I get noise reduction that even get close to the quality of Lightrooms in Aperture?
Yes Lightroom 3.6 noise reduction is quite good but not great. You can get better results with dedicated software. I've read a number of reviews of various software packages and plugins but there is only one I personally use: NIK Dfine 2.2
I found it to be FAR better then Lightroom and NIK is also available for Aperture. How it works in Lightroom is that you have to select your image then right-click and choose edit in NIK Dfine. This opens your image in the plugin application where you work on the noise reduction. Once your work is completed, your image is added into the Lightroom library. You can choose to edit the original or a copy of the image with adjustments. The plugin is not seamlessly integrated within the application framework as the word "plug-in" would suggest, but it is not very cumbersome to use. Personally, I use Lightroom tools for most of my work and only use specialized plugins such as this one for selected photos.
After your noise reduction is complete I would also suggest to use more advanced sharpening utility. Again, I use a NIK plugin Sharpener Pro 3.0 for the occasional photo i deem worthy.
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I guess this comes down to an Aperture question and a more general post-processing question.
I've been shooting RAW+JPEG and importing both to Aperture with the RAW image set as the master. But I've noticed that in low-light or high-contrast photos, if I switch the JPEG to master the photo "looks better".
Why does the version I set as master affect the appearance of the photo in my library in Aperture (where does the other one go exactly)?
And why does the RAW image seem to look worse in these situations? How can I figure out approximately what the camera did for the JPEG so that I can best process the RAW image?
The Aperture software display the one that you selected as master with the applied changes. If you compare an imported RAW with a JPG, Aperture treats them a little bit different. That is until you make any changes that is. When showing a JPG imported image, the camera has already performed all the post processing, like white balance adjustment and in some cases noise reduction. The RAW image is only corrected with "RAW fine tuning". It does not have any noise reduction or sharpening and stuff. Therefore you have to work more with the RAW image than the JPG image. The reason for cameras to have a JPG + RAW mode is for you to get a quick way of getting a usable image without doing any post processing.
I think it is impossible for you to figure out how the camera did to convert from RAW to JPG. However you could test the preset "Auto Enhance" which could give you similar result. It perform things like sharpening and adjusting the colors of the pictures. Note that the noise reduction is not adjusted when applying "Auto Enhance".
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I have tried to create a smart album in Aperture 3 that is based on this:
1) It is flagged 2) It has a label
I have followed the instructions in provided help documentation in Aperture 3. Searching the Internet does not give any answer. I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong.
The resulting smart album contains all the images from the original album.
The problem is that at the top of the settings box, you have it set to choose " 'Any' of the following..." which results in either or both conditions to be part of the selection. Change it to 'All', which will mean both conditions must be true before images are added to the album.
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I want to know if there are any good lens correction software (i.e. plugin) for Aperture 3? I am primarily looking for general purpose lens correction software.
I have looked at the plugin page for Aperture 3, but this does not give a clue which is the best. I have also searched the Internet, but there are not many reviews when it comes to this kind of software.
However what is best might be subjective, but I hope that you could give me the pros and cons of the one that you suggest. I am also interested in your experience with the software.
Some interesting things to know (handy but not necessary):
The answer partly depends on what you are trying to correct; for correcting fisheye-style wide angle lens distortion I really like a program called Fisheye-Hemi:
http://www.imagetrendsinc.com/products/prodpage_hemi.asp
That has just a few settings, but does a nice job making fisheye images look more natural.
Between the three general-purpose lens correction plugins listed (FixLens, LensFix, and PTLens) I'm not sure which is best - PTLens is more classic but traditionally had a rather complex interface, FixLens and LensFix may be simpler to use.
Edit:
Looking at the release dates, FixLens from Human Software was last updated in 2010 - the other two, in 2008! Also the screenshots make FixLens look more advanced... I would go for FixLens for a general purpose tool.
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I am about to get my pictures published in a magazine. I am going send the pictures to the publisher, thus not printing them myself. Therefore I am curious about how to export the pictures appropriately from Aperture 3. I know how to export from Aperture. Also I have tried to edit the export settings and trying to figure out how these should be set. I noticed that it is possible to set the DPI when exporting.
What are the appropriate export settings for Aperture 3 when using the pictures for print?
I had to do this once, and I sent the people .TIFF files.
DPI is largely irrelevant for you as you are not printing it. You're dealing with Pixels, not dots at your stage. (ie. not printing). You just want to send the file at 100% original size. However many X and Y pixels that is.
Color space is subjective - I use sRGB, which is better for screen viewing as I understand it. I think Adobe color space is more for printing, but I could be wrong. I won't advise you on that personally but you could always ask your magazine contact which they prefer?
By the way -- congratulations on getting your photos printed!! It's a good feeling isn't it :-)
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Aperture seems to be displaying my images brighter than they actually are -- this makes colors seem washed out and makes it very difficult to accurately adjust the black point and other exposure parameters.
Here's a screenshot:
Notice that the loupe (set to the same magnification as the zoomed-in image) is more saturated, and blacks are blacker than the surrounding image.
Also compare the bottom edge of the image to the black strip just below it.
This happens even for totally black images, and is independent of any image adjustments:
Why is Aperture messing with my colors like this? How can I fix it?
You've accidentally turned on Onscreen Proofing, which is used to simulate the colors of a final output medium like CMYK ink on paper. Turn it off by going to the View menu and clicking Onscreen Proofing, or hitting Option-Shift-P
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I'm trying to export the EXIF metadata from my photo archives so that I can do some analysis of which focal lengths I use the most. Aperture has a "File --> Export --> Metadata..." option, but that seems to only include IPTC metadata and not EXIF info.
Is there any way to export the EXIF metadata to a text file?
It turns out that Automator has an Aperture "Extract Metadata" action that has access to all of the EXIF fields.
I was able to solve my problem using a simple Automator workflow that performs the following steps:
I have uploaded the Automator workflow as Extract Focal Length.workflow for reference. This workflow took about 30-minutes to run on 10,000 images, but at least I got the data I needed out.
One note, be sure to collapse the steps so that the results aren't displayed in Automator if you are running this on many items as this will slow it down dramatically.
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I've done a lot of searching but haven't been able to find the answer to a problem I'm having. I have several projects in Aperture 3. I just noticed that three of those projects now have duplicates. If I rename a project, its duplicate also gets renamed. So, they're linked. If I go to delete one of the projects, I get a scary warning saying the images are referenced elsewhere. How do I get rid of these duplicates? Was it something I did?
1) Back up your aperture library.
2) Hold down "Command" and "Option" at the same time, while you click on the Aperture application to run it.
3) You are given a dialog box with the option to "Repair Permissions", "Repair Database", or "Rebuild Database". Start with "Repair Database", and see how your library looks when that is done.
4) If that didn't fix the issue, try "Rebuild Database" - that's pretty slow (many hours usually) but should resolve the issue if nothing else does.
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For some strange reason, Aperture 3 seems to shift the colors of the raw images, after importing them.
For example, the reds become washed out and something not red. In the following example, the red of the sweater was pure red!
When viewed on Adobe Camera Raw, I get the correct color (the same one when viewed in the camera):
but when is imported into Aperture and the initial processing completes, the colors are not correct.
The only setting that has being applied by default to the image, is the "RAW Fine Tuning" from which I've removed the "Hue Boost" and the "De-Noise" from the default setting, because I think its messing up the photos.
The settings are the following:
but I don't thing that these would make any change!
Does anyone knows how can I preserve the colors of the image?
It's really fairly simple: there's a direct trade-off between color accuracy and apparent noise.
To sense color, the sensor has a filter in front of each sensel. As it happens, the filter for the red channel cuts out the most light. This means when you're doing the conversion, you have to multiply the red channel by the largest factor1 to achieve a particular color balance. When you multiply the data, however, you're increasing the apparent noise right along with the intended data.
As such, to minimize apparent noise, the raw converter software wants to use the weakest multiplier on the red channel that it can get away with.
It looks to me like Aperture is simply using a somewhat smaller multiplier on the red channel to reduce the appearance of noise. ACR apparently uses a slightly larger multiplier to give more accurate reds. Though it appears unlikely to matter much in this particular picture, it's probably fair to guess that when you have pictures taken in relatively low light that Aperture will do a slightly better job of suppressing noise without losing detail.
1 In case you care about the details, the green channel is normally the "baseline" so we'll treat its factor as 1.0. The blue channel is multiplied by a factor of around 1.3 to 1.4, and the red by a factor of about 2 to 2.3. This varies with the camera though -- Sony, for one example, uses much stronger red filters than Canon, so their cameras reproduce saturated reds more easily, but also do relatively poorly in noise tests.
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I'm embarking on a trip across Europe in a few weeks. I have a QStarz GPS logger that I intend to use to log the trip and I will use the tools built into Aperture to geotag my photos when I return.
My only concern is crossing multiple timezones. What should I do to ensure I can tag my photos when I return without a lot of extra work adjusting metadata?
Another solution is setting you camera and GPS to the GMT timezone and never change it.
Then you can geotag your photos and time-adjust the GPS time-staps. Geosetter is an alternative geotagger that can do this:
You can also add or subtract hours/minutes/seconds if the GPS and the Camera aren't perfectly synchronized.
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If I upload some pictures in a new facebook album and after that I need to adjust them, I select the picture from facebook's album in aperture but when the pic is reuploaded on facebook? It does in automatically or there is a commando for force the process?
And other question, there is a way to know if an image is already on a facebook album? Now I need to add some other photos from the same project and maybe I don't remember if it's already in it!
** Update I made myself a way to recognize the pics that are already uploaded on facebook's album....I tagged them with a blue (fb style :)) label!
Once you create a Facebook album in Aperture it will show up on the left hand pane or project inspector area. To re-upload or sync any changes that you have made, simply click the "publish" icon to the right of the album title.
I found a handy tutorial on Youtube that might help you with this process: here.
There is not a built in feature that specifically notes if an image is on Facebook that I am aware of. You will have to just look at the albums in the project inspector area and see if the images are in the Facebook albums there.
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I'm slowly working on cleaning up the metadata in all my old images that I imported into Aperture from iPhoto. I'd like to get a list of the images that I haven't added a certain metadata field to but I can't figure out how to search for a missing value.
For example I'd like to get a list of all images that don't have a GPS location, or all images that don't have copyright info, etc.
Open up any metadata search criteria, add in either EXIF or IPTC fields you want to search by (using the "Add Rule" dropdown), and indicate you want images where the EXIF/IPTC "is empty".
An example for copyright:
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