This Blog is Moving

I've been thinking about switching this blog to be more about photography and post-processing in general. Now that I'm trying to get my name and a brand out there, I've decided to do just that. Yes, I could very easily switch this in blogspot, but I wanted to migrate to something new. I've exported and imported all the posts on here to the new blog. Nothing will be lost. Just a minor switch in venue that hopefully few people will notice.

From here on out, please visit woodsonphotography.blogspot.com.
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BW Comparison between Aperture and Photoshop

The whole point of Aperture is to reduce the dependency on larger, more complicated applications like Photoshop. I find working in Aperture to be far faster when working with a large number of photos. But ultimately, there are still more than a few tweaks that I can only do in Photoshop that I can't achieve in Aperture. A lot of my issues stem around the performance of the brushes (see my previous posts). Nonetheless, for certain effects it's totally possible to achieve basically the same results as in Photoshop. I used to do my cross processing in Photoshop, but now I've saved it as a preset in Aperture. A similar preset is also preinstalled with Aperture 3. Over at ChaseJarvis.com, he's posted up an article comparing what can be achieved in a black and white photo between Aperture and Photoshop.
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Badges Overlay

Aperture places a small badge overlay in the lower right hand corner whenever an image has adjustments, keywords, or other changes applied. I really only remember what a couple of them are. I'll convert this into pdf, but for now here's the link to all of their meanings in the manual.
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30 Questions and Answers about Aperture 3.0

Over at PhotoFocus Scott Bourne answers some questions about Aperture 3.0. All the questions are pretty basic. The people asking the questions seem like either beginners or have never used Aperture 3.0 before. Either way, it's worth a quick skim.

On an unrelated topic, I'm currently working on exporting old or delivered projects out into Libraries and then burning them to disc. I'll write up my experiences about that later once I've gotten it to the point where I want it to be.

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Free Aperture 3 Training

Guess I should have mentioned this earlier... CreativeLive started a FREE 3 week online course on Aperture 3. There are three sessions:

1. What's New with Aperture 3
2. Working with Aperture 3
3. Scott Bourne's Aperture Work Flow

Unfortunately these classes are only free if you watch them live -- which is on Mondays at 3PM Pacific time. It's not exactly convenient for me to spend two hours during my work day so I haven't been able to give a review of the class. But hey, free education is free education. So I figured I should spread the word.

If watching live isn't your thing, you can buy the full six hours of videos for $39 until next Monday. After that, the price goes up to $79.

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Rate Your Photos

Step 1 right after I import in my images after a shoot is I rate my photos. I try and keep a consistent rating scale when I go through my photos (see below). I'll go into Full Screen Mode (F) and keep my fingers on the number keys. They correspond to the ratings (1-5).

★★★★★ : This photo is perfect out of the camera. It absolutely needs to be delivered.

★★★★ : This photo is pretty good. It might need some post-processing, but it most likely will be delivered.

★★★ : This photo is ok. It's on the line. I'll need to look at it a few times before I decide whether or not to deliver it. It will most likely need some post-processing before being delivered.

★★ : This photo is not that good, but it might be good to somebody else. I'm keeping it in the library in case I need filler.

★ : This photo is not good. I will most likely delete this photo after I've delivered the shoot.

As I go through the pictures, I'm also not shy about hitting the 9 key to reject a photo. These are the blurry, out of focus, random photos that I wouldn't show anybody. I'll use reject instead of delete at this point because delete takes longer. It's faster to just reject and then batch delete all the files at a later date.

I wouldn't recommend only selectively rating your photos. When you do that, you are basically saying that all the photos that you are NOT rating are not worthy to be rated. In that case, you might as well reject them since you don't plan on using them. By rating all of your photos, you are also making sure that you've gone through and at least looked at all of your photos.

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Aperture 3 is a Big Fat Bloated Pig

I didn't want to make my blog just full of complaints about Aperture 3, but lately it's just so cumbersome that I can't help but complain about it. I had tried to stay away from this particular topic thinking that maybe it's was just because I was running a large library, but no. I've come to the conclusion that Aperture 3 is a big fat bloated pig. (Extra points if you know where the "big fat bloated pig" comment comes from, btw.)

I am running a MacBook Pro with 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB 1057 MHz DDR3. For some reason, it really doesn't seem like that's enough for Aperture 3. Granted my machine isn't the latest and greatest, but it's no slouch either. I spend the majority of my time in Aperture 3 waiting for it to process or generate thumbnails. The skin smoothing brush is near useless if I can't see what it's doing. I am literally writing this blog post in between brush strokes. Do you remember Doogie Howser? At the end of every episode, Doogie types a journal entry? But he types pretty darn slow. Well, it's basically like that for me when I use Aperture and blog at the same time. I'll make a brush adjustment. Flip back to Safari and start typing in the text box. Aperture 3 so totally consumes my CPU that it's even causing a text box to be slow in rendering. Seriously big fat bloated pig time.

There is some hope in the land of Aperture 3 with its promises of advanced editing tools. I have it on good knowledge that one of the engineers that I absolutely respect is now joining the iPhoto/Aperture team to focus on performance improvements. The team really needs help because right now it's near impossible to use. There are many days when I wish I can just go back to Aperture 2. (This cycle feels similar to Adobe Illustrator. They used to release a version with a bunch of new features. The subsequent version would be an incremental improvement but drastic speed improvements. Next version: features. Version after: speed.)

Here's a slight update to my workflow. I've separated all of my stuff out into two Libraries. One is my archive; the other is my working library. I import into my working library under a new project. Once I've delivered the photos, I'll export the project and then import it into my archive. My archive gets backed up to multiple hard drives and locations. Now when I'm working on files, I'm working on a pretty lean library.

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