Category: Apple Aperture

Stuff about the Apple Aperture: the Final Cut Pro for photography, or iPhoto for professionals.

Aperture supports Panasonic/Leica

I noticed in the release notes of the Mac OS X 10.4.10 update today:

  • Adds RAW image decoding support for the following cameras: Panasonic DMC-LX1, Panasonic DMC-LX2, Leica M8, Leica D-LUX 2, Leica D-LUX 3, Fuji S5 Pro, Nikon D40x, and Canon EOS 1D Mk III.

Since Apple Aperture uses the same RAW decoding. That means that I no longer have to do that crazy hack to get my LX-1 RAW files into Aperture. I blogged about this earlier, so I’d like to say, “Thanks, Apple!”

Coincidentally, I almost purchased a Fuji S5 Pro. I bought lenses instead. You really have to have more lenses before you can justify a purchase of a second body, right? 🙂

I think the Leica M8 is a sweet camera for the photo buff who has gobs of money to spend. I mean besides the body, the lenses are astronomical. Or is it just me? I don’t know. I’m just thinking the days when I shied away from Nikon because I thought, “their stuff is too expensive.”

Aperture Users @ Flickr discussion

Posted on by tychay 1

Leica and Aperture. Don’t you think it’s about time?

Some of you remember my my strange hack for getting the LX1 working in Aperture.

A year later, and I still have to do that. This model has since been replaced with the Panasonic DMC-LX2 (a.k.a. Leica D-LUX 3) which on paper sounds like this same trick should work for the RAW files. I don’t know, so I haven’t tried but this Flickr thread made me think.

This is total B.S. Why do I have to resort to using an Adobe product to get this to work at all?

[Why Apple should support this after the jump]

Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 0

Argh!

I lost all my photos today.

The net result is I lost about one and a half months of photos permanently (around 1000 images), about six months of originals that haven’t been burned yet to disk, lost days of work, and shot up my entire backup regiment.

I’m also one crash/corruption from losing everything.Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Customizing Aperture Books

Canon enthusiast, Ben Long, posted a nice little article on how to customize Aperture’s book printing features.

That’s pretty cool because I haven’t really had a chance to mess with the book layout capabilities yet (except to note that it puts iPhoto to shame).

Custom Book Layouts in Aperture

The article is a shorter version of Ben’s new book on Aperture.

I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but it is nice to know that there are books about this product coming out. There are many neat little things about Aperture that people need to know or might find useful.

I hope I can blog more about them in the future.

Posted on by tychay 0

LX1 and Aperture

In order to get the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 (or Leica DIGILUX-2) to work in Aperture you first have to convert it to DNG using Adobe DNG Converter. Then you follow these directions which a commenter provides the trick.

  1. Open “/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/
    Versions/A/Frameworks/ImageIO.framework/Versions/
    A/Resources/Raw.plist” as an administrator.
  2. Search “DMC-LC1” and copy the chunk of XML in there
  3. Replace the “DMC-LX1” with “DMC-LC1” and the “C-LUX 1” with “DIGILUX 2”
  4. Save file

Now you can import the DNGs into Aperture or iPhoto and the previews will now work.
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Taking your Aperture keywords with you

Here is a small Aperture tip I forgot to mention.

I work on Aperture on two machines, my Powerbook G4 and my girlfriend’s PowerMac G5 when I can sneak in some time. One problem I ran into was finding that the keywords (and also various export settings) I have set up in Aperture are not carried with the Aperture Library.

The trick is realizing that they are stored in your home directory in: “~/Library/Application Support/Aperture”
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Aperture 1.0.1 update

Drew mentioned that Apple released an update to Aperture. This is probably the first of many though don’t expect anything major:

  • White balance adjustment accuracy and performance
  • Image export quality
  • Book and print ordering reliability
  • Auto-stacking performance
  • Custom paper size handling

Aperture depends on the ImageIO Framework to do the file handling and Core Image to do the majority of the heavy lifting in the UI. So the largest changes should be expected when Apple updates the operating system, not Aperture.

Posted on by tychay 0