2008 October

Archive for October, 2008

RAM it up!

Sometimes it’s embarrassing to admit the obvious, but I’m going to share this anyway for other Mac photographers like myself who are slow to get a clue.

I finally got around to adding four gigabytes of RAM (making a total of six) to my Mac Pro this morning. And damn it sure has made an epic difference in performance. I knew I needed more RAM/memory, but I kept thinking 2gigs should be sufficient, not realizing that the more I opened up and used memory hungry applications like Photoshop and Aperture –while running several other smaller applications in the background–the slower my computer navigation would be. Read more…

My Experience with FotoMagico

This past week I started using the pro version of the slide show application, FotoMagico.
I downloaded the application over a year ago, and have read some pretty good reviews about it, so I thought give the latest update of the application a try. Read more…

Poladroid Brings Back Old School Photos

One of the first things I do in the morning is check my RSS feeds. The news and articles are plentiful, but sometimes I get a treat that just makes my day. Dave Caolo on the Unofficial Apple Weblog wrote up a short piece about a new application out of the UK France, called Poladroid. Read more…

Backup Media Card Tip

I feel compelled to write about this camera tip – the first one for this site. Sadly, on two recent occasions I left my house without a media card in my camera. Now as a wedding photographer, it’s typically unlikely to ever leave 4-8 media cards at home. Those cards usually remain in your camera bag ready to go. Read more…

Aperture 2.1.2 Update

According to Apple: “The Aperture 2.1.2 update improves the printing quality of books, cards and calendars ordered through the Aperture printing service. The update is recommended for all customers using Aperture 2.”

I’m working on a Aperture book now, so maybe we’ll see just how much this update improves the print quality. From my experience with iPhoto and Aperture books the printing is okay but not outstanding. I think a little color saturation is lost in the printing, and the quality of paper for the books is not very high.

But overall, the ability to do book layouts in Aperture is still very convenient and pretty easy to do.

Using Automator to Import Photos into Aperture

I’ve written several articles about Automator, and so here’s one more that Aperture users might find useful.

Here’s how I use it: I recently wrote a blog entry about using Eye-Fi for uploading Wirelessly. Though I could use this device to upload directly to Aperture, I typically discard most photos and choose only a few from a particular shoot to import into Aperture. The process of dragging selected photos into a selected Aperture project is not that difficult. But an Automator workflow makes it even easier. Read more…

Aperture for Approval v1.5

Last night I went over to the Apple site to check to see if there were any new plug-ins and application for Aperture 2.0 and I was pleased to see an updated version of Publish for Approval. I downloaded the application a while back, but I think it required a costly third-party application to run it. Read more…

Black-and-white Presets in Aperture 2.0

When I started using Aperture, I struggled to find a good greyscale or monochrome mix for my images. While there are tons of Photoshop approaches to black-and-white (greyscale) conversion, I rather use Aperture to make the conversion. Read more…