Someone asked me how I got the sunbleached faded photo treatment from this photo (mouseover to see original):
Olympus E-P2, Lumix G HD 14-14 f/4-5.8 OIS
1/400sec @ ƒ8, iso 200, 103mm (206mm)
A lot of people are complaining that the flickr sharing feature in Aperture 3 is missing geolocation data (Places).
This is not true, all you have to do is go to Aperture > Preferences… > Web and check the box to “Include location information for published photos.”
Then click on the “radar” buttons to the right of the Flickr sets in Aperture to force a resync. Your image geocodes will be re-uploaded (I noticed in my case, it re-uploaded the images instead of just resyncing the metadata, but that bug may have been fixed in Aperture 3.0.1).
Here is a photo I uploaded via Aperture 3’s flickr sharing:
Sony DSC-WX1
1/30sec @ ƒ2.4, ISO160, 4mm (24mm)
I was so tired after the run, I could shop no longer…or rather, watch my friends shop. I decided to hang outside and take photos of the curvy escalators in Westfield San Francisco. And I actually needed to buy a suitcase from the Tumi store, too.
You can see it has been placed on the map automatically.
One thing a lot of people don’t realize is the flickr sharing is a synchronization, not an upload. This means that edits you make on flickr appear as metadata modifications in the original file. (I think it does not sync down changes to the image, but new images in a set do get brought down.) It also means you can’t do an upload without creating a set. It also means you are limited in the tags by what tags you explicity upload (instead of tag hierarchy). It also means you are limited to the amount of resizing you can do on export. It also means you can’t do things like add a watermark on your export. It also means you can’t batch add to a group, or another set, or anything without using flickr’s online organizr.
If you don’t like that, then that’s why Frasier Spears is still selling FlickrExport and has recently updated it for 64-bit. I own it, and use it.
Nikon D3, 24-70mm f/2.8G, SB-800
1/30 sec @ ƒ/2.8, iso 1000, 24 mm
Fraser Speirs with some of my friends. I got really shit-faced that night (it was my birthday so I was making everyone buy me drinks).
I believe I uploaded this image with his software. 🙂
Oh yeah, the “check mark” you see next to the image in Aperture’s Flickr albums is the image actually uploaded/synced with flickr. I have no idea how to change it other than deleting it and dragging a new one. This is a major bummer for me.
Faces are synced back in Aperture. You can tell because Facebook added faces are now searchable. Right now, getting the Facebook Faces back into your Aperture faces is a little buggy. The only way to do that is to go to the set, click the “Name” icon, and manually go through each image confirming the facebook entries by clicking the “f” icons and hitting return. Still it does guess faces well.
Basically click on the “f” and then hit return and those names will be synced back. Notice that even though Alicia Kenworthy has only been tagged in a different Facebook photo, it guessed the face here.
I hope they fix that.
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 I’d 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 don’t know how long I’ll keep updating this. In the meantime, I added Pavel Sigarteu’s SinCity, El TiDY’s presets, and Ian Wood’s 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 there’s a control panel where you can click to see the effect of the preset (and compare it to Silver Efex Pro):
Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer 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 haven’t 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 I’ll 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 versions…)
Sony DSC-WX1
1/320sec @ ƒ7.1, 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 Farmer’s 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 @ ƒ7.1, ISO250, 4mm (24mm)
On a street corner in Chinatown there’s a guy yelling, “Happy! Happy! Happy! Everybody’s happy!”
Bakari finds this levels tweak adds some much-needed contrast to outdoor photos.
Sony DSC-WX1
1/125sec @ ƒ4.5, ISO80, 18mm (100mm)
These band was playing at the Farmer’s Market. I think they’re from the Haight normally.
Aperture now has two cross-process presets, but I thought I’d 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 @ ƒ1.8, 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 film’s 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 “film look” preset, which I did.
Hope you enjoy the presets, and contact me if you have other suggestions for more.
Keep shooting.
After a year of bouncing rumors and requests among friends and watching Adobe erode Apple’s marketshare, Aperture 3 is finally out. As far as I’m concerned, the people who are disappointed in the update probably shouldn’t 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 doesn’t 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.
Let‘s see what I can create in a few minutes of fiddling around.
The Fallout75’s 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 Fallout75’s 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 didn’t know what I created the current version of the action. I suppose that’ll be for later.
Continue reading about One more preset and downloads after the jump