I went running during the Mavericks this year, but I heard it was awesome. I went running down Ocean Beach that day and was blown away by the size of the waves.
My friend, Jim Goldstein, made it and he was kind of enough to share some 1×1 crops of the expressions of the surfers. (Read about his day here.)
Check it out! đ
âDans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prĂ©parĂ©s.â
âLouis Pasteur (quoted before)
Flackette sent me this article today.
The film effects section of my last article on Aperture presets reminded me that I really like the film effects in nik Color Efex Pro and nik Silver Efex Pro.
I thought Iâd try to emulate them in Aperture with a set a presets, starting with black and white film.
Download the presets here. Current version at time of this writing is 0.4.
(Note that my friends of Aperture Users @ Flickr are thinking of creating a website to house presets so I donât know how long Iâll keep updating this. In the meantime, I added Pavel Sigarteuâs SinCity, El TiDYâs presets, and Ian Woodâs Aperture 2 Image Presets Project to the download.)
In order to show the B&W film effects, I hacked in an extension to my IMG Mouseover plugin. Above the image thereâs a control panel where you can click to see the effect of the preset (and compare it to Silver Efex Pro):
Leica M8, Cosina-VoigtlÀnder NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/30sec, ISO160, 35mm (47mm)
Click on the controls above to test the different film presets. Mouse rollover contain images processed in Nik Silver Efex Pro.
(Note that Aperture has decided to have a brain fart and replace all my photos even if they havenât been changed at all. This breaks the images in Flickr. I tried my best to fix this. If any are broken or incorrect, please tell me in the comments below and Iâll fix them.)
Continue reading about How to use Aperture presets and about black and white film after the jump
More Aperture presets
Aperture Presets are not new to Aperture 3. Before this however, you had to apply them by using the lift-and-stamp tool and share them by generating an Aperture project. It was never a very good solution. But my recent post on presets, made me look into our archives for some Aperture 2 settings to add to my Preset Library.
Download the presets here. Current version at time of this writing is 0.3b.
Without further ado, here they are: (Remember to mouseover the images to see the pre-preset versionsâŠ)
Sony DSC-WX1
1/320sec @ Æ7.1, ISO160, 4mm (24mm), panoramic video
This photo was a sweep panorama of the Embarcadero to the Bay Bridge was done by the amazing Sony WX1 on my walk home from the San Francisco Farmerâs Market.
Graeme Smith came up with this setting darken and saturate the sky. When coupled with a brush and other enhancements, this should be a pretty good start for landscape photography.
Sony DSC-WX1
1/250sec @ Æ7.1, ISO250, 4mm (24mm)
On a street corner in Chinatown thereâs a guy yelling, âHappy! Happy! Happy! Everybodyâs happy!â
Bakari finds this levels tweak adds some much-needed contrast to outdoor photos.
Sony DSC-WX1
1/125sec @ Æ4.5, ISO80, 18mm (100mm)
These band was playing at the Farmerâs Market. I think theyâre from the Haight normally.
Aperture now has two cross-process presets, but I thought Iâd bring in the one created by heber vega also. Cross-processing probably started with a mistake from dipping films in the wrong chemical bath during development⊠now it creates an interesting recognizable effect.
Nikon D3, AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D
1/60sec @ Æ1.8, ISO800, 50mm
Scott Beale, a fixture of the art, culture, and technology underground scene of San Francisco back when it really was underground decided to celebrate adding cloud hosting services at Varnish when I took this photo of him. Varnish Fine Art was recent victim of eminent domain.
This is an old trick from the video camera world. One way to get video, in Final Cut, to get a look resembling a movie was to adjust the output curve of the finished video to resemble filmâs characteristic curves. You do this by creating an slanted S bend in the curve. Since Aperture 3 finally has curves, it was time to create a âfilm lookâ preset, which I did.
Hope you enjoy the presets, and contact me if you have other suggestions for more.
Keep shooting.
I was just reading Joe McNallyâs post about Aperture 3 and I thought, Yes, three is the lucky number for Nikon and Apple, huh?
Someone today asked me to give a short answer as to which they should buy. Here it is:
Probably neither. But if you must⊠if you use a Mac, get Aperture; if you use Windows, get Lightroom.
Continue reading about Nikon/Canon SLRs after the jump and why Aperture 3 rocks
After a year of bouncing rumors and requests among friends and watching Adobe erode Appleâs marketshare, Aperture 3 is finally out. As far as Iâm concerned, the people who are disappointed in the update probably shouldnât have bought Aperture in the first place.
One of the things in the new Adobe Lightroom that is implemented (and improved on) in Aperture 3 is the concept of presets. This is one step closer to having me abandon my insanely slow Photoshop workflow for something that is fast, can be undone, and doesnât chew up disk space. But the thing that was bothering me was, will it blend? Can I really get away with not leaving Aperture unless I really, really have to.
Letâs see what I can create in a few minutes of fiddling around.
The Fallout75âs Vintage Film effect tries to mimic the fading that occurs when a photo starts to fade over the years: the process is outlined here. Here is what I get in Aperture when I try to follow the same rules:
Leica M8, NOKTON Classic 40mm f1.4 S.C.
1/750sec, ISO160, 40mm (53mm)
This is my Vintage Film preset. Mouseover the image to see the original.
Here is the output in Adobe Photoshop CS4 when the action is run:
Leica M8, NOKTON Classic 40mm f1.4 S.C.
1/750sec, ISO160, 40mm (53mm)
This is Fallout75âs action. Mouseover the image to see the original.
You can see that Fallout75 has two undocumented effects: a brightening of the center region and a vignetting on the edges. I can emulate this, but I didnât know what I created the current version of the action. I suppose thatâll be for later.
Continue reading about One more preset and downloads after the jump
Now that Aperture 3 is out, I need to update one area of my previous article.
No, Aperture 3 doesnât support the Olympus E-P1/E-P2/E-PL1 or Panasonic GF-1 RAWs (yet).
There is a workaround, however, for doing sorting, selecting, and metadata in Aperture 3.
Trying to return to âSet RAW as Masterâ and then Catapulting yields and âEditing Errorâ as the backdoor used by Catapult is now closed. đ
Therefore, you must export masters manually to the drop folder, generate RAWs, and then Catapult. If you do so, you canât reimport the sidecar xmps, currently.
Here is some proof:
Olympus E-P2, Cosina-VoigtlÀnder NOKTON 50mm f1.1
1/8sec5, ISO200, 50mm (100mm)
Image processed from ACR in Aperture. Try as you might, you canât recover clipped highlights.
(BTW, the images were uploaded with the new built in Flickr support, so weâll see how good sync isâit appears to be uni-directional. For instance, I just found out movies arenât supported in Flickr sync, so videos are synced back as stills.)
Olympus E-P1, Cosina-VoigtlÀnder NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
00:15, 1280×1070, 30fps
IMing during the announcement today:
10:22:49 AM
Aâ: Google Buzz
Me: ?
Aâ: http://www.youtube.com/feb0910googleevent
Aâ: I am not impressed
Me: Over half the shit Google makes doesn’t go anywhere
Me: I’ll wait until it catches on.
Me: Give me a summary of buzz, or blog it and give me the link đ
Aâ: I wish I had a moment to blog it. It’s pretty sweet actually
Aâ: Here is a summary
Me: Oh it’s just a FriendFeed/Facebook knock off.
Me: That won’t fly. While Iâm sure their filter will be way better than the others,
Google has gone down in a ball of flames for anything social network.
âŠ
âŠ
Talking about something completely unrelated after lunch with Pâ:
ââŠthatâs why thereâs a term âsocial media douchebagâ in the first place.â
âI feel uncomfortable about talking about âsocial media,ââ Pâ confesses.
âWhy would you? Itâs social media. Talking about it would be like waxing eloquent about your pencil.â
Pâ laughs, âThatâs funny.â
âItâs just a thing you use, itâs not an end in itself.â
âYou know thereâs going to be a lot of social media people at South-by right?â
âThatâs different, there will be a lot of people there in general. With that dilution the douchery is within acceptable limits.â
âTrue. True.â
From a previous article, I finally found a way to work in Aperture again. But since Iâm also trying to pick up photography again, I thought itâd be fun to write a little bit showing a few experimental images taken from that day.
This will be a way to test out a new WordPress plugin I just wrote to do mouseovers. As long as youâre on this blog article, you can run your mouse over the image to see the pre-processed original image.
Olympus E-P2, M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6
1/5sec @ Æ3.9, iso 1600, 17mm (35mm)
I arrived a little late as usual, but just in time to order dinner with everyone else.
This was actually the first image I used to test out whether the workflow works. Because of that, the DNG output was 8-bit, not 16-bit. That may have accounted for the overaggressive smoothing, or it could be the lack of dynamic range in an ISO 1600 ”4:3 CMOS sensor (roughly 1/4 the size of a 35mm frame). Then again, maybe itâs the setting on Topaz Adjust plugin. In any case, it does have the painterly look that you get when you start remapping dynamic range of an image. Not too sure if I can still call this a photograph.
If you mouseover the image, you may be wondering how I pulled color from the black-and-white original. The original is the JPEG, but the image was generated from the RAW. For documentary photography, on cameras which resemble rangefinders like the Leica M8 and the Olympus E-P2, I prefer black-and-whites previews, which force me to concentrate on tone and not colorâbut itâs always nice to be able to grab the color channels from the RAW if I change my mind.
This exposure tests the outer-limits of the kit lens: 1/5 of a second at a borderline too-high-for-this-camera ISO at the largest aperture for this 35mm EFL. Had I my old 17mm pancake, Iâd have gotten a full stop faster. Still, it got focus-lock and the in-body image stabilization allowed me to shoot handheld braced against elbows on the table. Yeah!
More photos in later pagesâŠ
One of the most annoying aspects of Apple Aperture is that there is no API for RAW plugins. This means that youâre stuck with Apertureâs RAW renderingâand Apple has been slow to update support for the latest cameras. For instance, the Olympus E-P1/E-P2/E-PL1 series has been out since August, selling like hotcakes, but there is still no RAW support for these models, even though the E-30, which is supported, uses the same basic RAW file format.
Well finally my workaround seems to work for my satisfaction. Whee!
Olympus E-P2, M.ZUIKO Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6
1/3sec, iso 160, 14mm (28mm)
For those too lazy to read forward here is the step-by-step: