HeyMarkArana

justinrampage: Excellent Star Wars version of the Iwo Jima Flag...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:18:44 -0800

Excellent Star Wars version of the Iwo Jima Flag Raising. “Hail to the Empire, baby!” (Duke Nukem Voice)

Hail to the Empire by Ryan Jampole (Behance)

Real life Buzz Lightyear. Pretty cool via i.imgur.com (via xeno)

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:27:03 -0800

Real life Buzz Lightyear. Pretty cool via i.imgur.com (via xeno)

This is pretty awesome! Guy Sneaks Onto Champion Soccer Team is...

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:59:59 -0800

This is pretty awesome! Guy Sneaks Onto Champion Soccer Team is Today’s BIG Thing - FEB 01, 2010 (via @fdiaz)

Babies with Laser Eyes! —- really, does more need to be...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:38:52 -0800

Babies with Laser Eyes! —- really, does more need to be said?

Review of Aperture 3 in My Current Workflow

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:22:03 -0800

There hasn’t been much of an update with regard to my photo editing/publishing workflow because, frankly, there hasn’t been much satisfaction there. At least not until Apple introduced Aperture 3.

Aperture 3 finally brings some of the features iPhoto ‘09 has such as facial recognition, geotagging and built-in support for publishing but improves the functionality and adds features in more than a few places.

For the old hat items like Faces, Places and Social Integration (Flickr, .Mac Galleries and Facebook), Aperture 3 does a great job of integrating the basic features. It’s also nice that Aperture goes ahead and tries to ID all the faces in your library on import automagically (a lengthy task for lots of photos, but one that pays off in the end). They also have made improvements to importing, added video support (FINALLY), added a handful of useful, but important, features for image editing and now offers a convenient full screen browser.

To give you a baseline of my environment, I have over 41,000 photos I’ve taken in the last 9 years (20,000 last year alone thanks to the DSLR). The library size is around 380 GBs. We have a point and shoot for casual photographs, but the bulk of my photography is done through my DSLR. I currently average 200-300 RAW photos per event and I try and do basic deleting of unusable photos right on the DSLR as I shoot. My MacPro is a bit tired these days, but a faithful little beast with plenty of RAM. I’ve tried using Aperture 2 and Lightroom 2, but the back and forth integration with iPhoto was still a hassle (but more tolerable with Lightroom). The reasons I stuck with iPhoto were: Faces (for helping to organize), photo book creation, video handling and the ability to share the library on my machine with my wife’s iMac and her iPhoto installation there. We consider the photos on my Mac the “master” archive. She may import into her local copy, but through iPhoto’s ‘network sharing’ feature, I would just suck them in over the network.

New Workflow

All photos are now primarily managed through Aperture 3 and imported via the media browser to iPhoto (without moving the originals). I have Aperture handling the actual photo import and placing them in a specified target location that is independent from Aperture and iPhoto. I am having Aperture modify the folder names on import to reflect // for easy manual location. I am currently not modifying file names. Aperture does a great job of giving you control of the naming structure for both folders and files.

I started a fresh iPhoto Library and used the File -> Aperture Browser to pull up my Aperture Library. From there, I can select all my photos or filtered ones like 5-star, flagged, etc. and drag them over to iPhoto. **Make sure you have deselected in your preferences ‘Copy Items to iPhoto’.** I may think about creating either an Automator Action or Applescript app that can automate this type of import. Then it’s a simple cron job to update iPhoto. Of course, the ideal way is for Aperture to share over the network to other Aperture and iPhoto apps (or better yet, make the media library available over the network). I understand this can be done with a DPAP server, but that is for another weekend to setup :).

Pros

The Pro to this approach is that I can handle all my primary editing in Aperture- everything from color correction, organization and creation of books. Editing is non-destructive which is a big plus. iPhoto will be used primarily for sharing across the network. HOWEVER, as with all things… when iLife ‘10 comes out and it has the new whiz-bang feature X that Aperture does not have, I’m still OK. Because Aperture handles file import a little bit better than previous versions, I can still utilize the same workflow and switch to iPhoto for any editing/composition needs. But, it better be a pretty compelling set of features. At this point, Aperture now satisfies all my basic needs for managing a library EXCEPT for being able to share it over the local network, and even then, I have a decent workaround for it through iPhoto. Because Aperture is integrated into the Mac’s Media Browser, the Aperture library is available to any app automagically- Mail, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Final Cut Pro Studio and even Microsoft Office (ugh). This feature was added back in January ‘09 but was a little buggy back then. It’s a little bit more stable now.

Cons

There are some definite Cons, but I think they are mostly relegated to Aperture and not so much to the workflow- at least I like to think it’s not my workflow. Performance is definitely improved with Aperture but it doesn’t seem to take advantage of Grand Central (maybe a future update?). Initial importing was a bit of a drag- several random crashes and restarting the import has funky side effects. Importing 40,000 photos and doing facial recognition took about 24 hours. While it advertises that you can begin playing with the library while photos are imported, I found that it really upsets Aperture and it will crash on you. During import, the app has over 600 threads, utilizes 2.5 GBs of memory and the CPU will hover around 40% and peak around 400%. Import was the single most painful experience I have had with Aperture because the application, at times, would be unresponsive and I would get the spinning color wheel of death. But because Aperture only uses a couple of cores at most, the remaining processors where available for my system to work on other things. Still… it’s a pain to wait for your system to respond again. And if you do crash during import, restarting the import will create a bunch of empty folders because it scans your import, creates the folders and THEN skips duplicates on import. I haven’t figured out an elegant solution to this problem yet. Brute force deletion seems to work best.

Another issue is related to the Media Browser. The files referenced in the Media Browser are the JPEG preview images. Just be careful what your Aperture preview settings are as this is easy to screw up in your prefs. In order to save myself some space, I originally had the setting at JPEG compression 3 which was too low for printing in iPhoto (or any other application). A setting of 8 and preview size of 2560x2560 should be sufficient for casual printing and iPhoto book printing.

Conclusions

Well, I’m not sure if I have any solid conclusions… just first impressions. This new workflow centered around Aperture seems to be working. I’ve imported new images just fine and have handled the iPhoto integration just fine as well. Aperture seems to have also done a good job with their upgrade- features and some performance. There’s always room for improvement in my workflow and Aperture, but this is certainly a better upgrade than Adobe’s Lightroom 3. While I enjoy Lightroom’s interface, Aperture is now a better application to get things done and loop it back to iPhoto and the rest of the Mac applications. Photoshop is seeing less and less of my business as an amateur photographer because Aperture has added the necessary image editing features I need. I’ll still use Photoshop for the more critical operations and photocompositions. As always, I’ll continue to post my observations here.

If there’s interest, I may consider doing a much deeper review on Aperture itself as there are many things that have improved since version 2 and that Lightroom 3 is not meeting my full needs.

A note about video

While iPhoto and Aperture are about handling photos, there is a convenience factor in being able to handle short videoclips captured through a point and shoot camera or DSLR. This was a huge weakness for both Aperture and still is for Lightroom. When looking at an event such as a birthday party or hiking trip, it may consist of photos and videos all captured on the same camera. It is logical then to store those items in a single application for viewing. However, it’s understandable those applications not have robust video editing tools. Most people just want to be able to keep those things together. If any editing takes place, it makes sense it is done with an external application. As cameras gain capabilities (RAW, GPS, meta, etc.), these apps should offer the basic support for them

Really cool Star Wars inspired photo illustrations. Amusement.fr...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:35:00 -0800

Really cool Star Wars inspired photo illustrations. Amusement.fr (via shadowstorm)

For my photography friends: Apparently I’m late to the...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:54:17 -0800

For my photography friends: Apparently I’m late to the game on this. Ever since I bought my camera, my chief complaint has been the strap. Yes, I know I’m supposed to ditch the one I got and get a new one, but I just haven’t found the right size/material/style. Enter the Luma Loop from Luma Labs. Seems novel in concept and the price point is decent. I’ll be giving this a try and will let you know how it goes. Luma Labs

Some very creative mug designs. The 25 most awesome mugs ever...

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:22:10 -0800

Some very creative mug designs. The 25 most awesome mugs ever created - FrancescoMugnai.com - Graphic Design Inspiration and Web Design Trends (via @brit)

Good little robot. One day we’ll get you out. A story...

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:40:21 -0800

Good little robot. One day we’ll get you out. A story about Spirit.

When I first saw this photo, I thought to myself: How awesome...

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:43:50 -0800

When I first saw this photo, I thought to myself: How awesome would it be to have a Red Dawn movie, except instead of the Russians invading, it was the Imperial army. Here, a few AT-ATs are walking across a high school football field and parking lot in a Hoth-like fog.

fyeahstarwars:

kevin:

My mom has been sending me pictures of wintry fog in Overland Park, Kansas — and to me it always looks like the ice planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. So, I took it a step further and added some AT-ATs. That’s my high school football stadium in the background.

Disney gave private demonstrations of KeyChest at CES. It was...

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:14:24 -0800

Disney gave private demonstrations of KeyChest at CES. It was well received and people were very enthusiastic about the initiative. I’m glad the tech community is finally realizing it’s not another DRM system. Disney’s KeyChest is not DRM — Engadget

It sure was. Avatar = Pocahontas In Space (PICTURE) — via...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:54:14 -0800

It sure was. Avatar = Pocahontas In Space (PICTURE) — via @kloh

The last 36 hours have been crazy. The cat’s officially...

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:43:33 -0800

The last 36 hours have been crazy. The cat’s officially out of the bag. We’ve been doing press briefings all day and night. Heading to Vegas to do even more. Click the link for more information on the project we’ve been working on — Keychest. Monetizing Media Content - CNBC.com

Only through this analogy can I relate to how women feel about...

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:35:06 -0800

Only through this analogy can I relate to how women feel about something. And then, somebody else had to tell me we were talking about shoes.

(via SimonPegg)

davemorin: The road to powder skiing in Montana.

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:26:58 -0800

davemorin:

The road to powder skiing in Montana.

For all my fontoholic friends out there. An iPhone game to help...

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:28:20 -0800

For all my fontoholic friends out there. An iPhone game to help feed the addiction. The Font Game for the iPhone and the iPod touch

Can somebody in the NE area send me some Imperial STOUT Trooper...

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:00:54 -0800

Can somebody in the NE area send me some Imperial STOUT Trooper beer? For research purposes of course.

Damn… Where did I put that Santa outfit. I think Bowser still...

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:29:40 -0800

Damn… Where did I put that Santa outfit. I think Bowser still has it.

It’s the friggin’ Falcon! Hmmm…Which room should...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:46:14 -0800

It’s the friggin’ Falcon! Hmmm…Which room should this go in? TechEBlog » Amazing Star Wars Millennium Falcon Bed

nickholmes: This is our moment gentlemen.

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:12:11 -0800

nickholmes:

This is our moment gentlemen.