Mac Photography Tips

Bring Back the Sky July 17, 2009

Filed under: Aperture 2.0, Automator workflow, Photoshop — bakari @ 9:49 pm

photoshop-tipsNote: click on the title of this article to see the photos better.

Sometimes when you’re shooting with subjects in the foreground and the blue cloudy sky in background, it’s hard to take a photo whereby both the foreground and the background are sufficiently exposed.

That’s the case with this photo below. Shooting in RAW mode, I exposed for the sky so that I could maintain its detail. As you can see, though, the bride and groom are under exposed. But the power RAW mode enables you to work with under exposed photos a lot better than in shooting in JPEG mode.

Picture 6.png

When I correct the exposure for the foreground subjects, I loose detail in the sky. As you can see in this photo. So what to do?

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1. Well, in Aperture or Lightroom, make a duplicate copy of darker exposed sky photo. While selected, you darken the sky even more if need be. Next, select the other copy of the photo and properly expose it for the foreground. You will lose detail in the sky, but that’s the point. You’re wanting bring detail in the foreground in this copy of the photo. Use adjustment tools (e.g. contrast, Definition, Vibrancy) that you normally use to make the foreground subjects look the way you want.

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2. Next, open both photos in Photoshop. Holding down the shift key, select the background layer, in the layers palette, of the lighter/over exposed sky photo, and drag it onto the darker exposed sky photo. After doing so, you should see the lighter sky photo on top, with the well exposed foreground.

3. Now click the Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layer’s palette. This will put a layer mask over the photo you just dragged in. Select the Brush tool, and make sure your foreground color is black. Using the brush tool, at about medium size, start brushing back in the darker sky, leaving the rest of the photo as is.

layerspallette.png

Presto, you now have brought back the darker sky to match the better foreground. You can flatten both layers and save the photo back to Aperture or Lightroom. The other opened photo of course doesn’t have to be saved. And here’s the result:

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I hope these instructions make sense. If not, I’d be happy to make a video of the process.

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Custom Album Layout Tips for Aperture 2.0 November 1, 2008

Filed under: Aperture 2.0, Automator workflow, Intermediate Tips — bakari @ 9:00 pm
Aperture Tips.png

If you’re an Aperture 2.0 users, you no doubt know that you can create custom books within the application. You’re not stuck with the pre-designed albums that Apple offers, though those templates are great.

This article won’t go into how to set up a custom book in Aperture. There are other articles and resources already published about that. Aperture User Network has good introduction that you can read here.

In this article I’m just going to provide a few useful tips for doing layouts.

1. First off, if you create a custom album but you want to later delete it from your list of templates, go to Home>Library>Application Support>Aperture>Book Themes. All the book themes you’ve created will be there. You can delete or add custom themes to that folder.

Layout Panel Tips

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2. Sometimes it’s not cool to include the page numbers on your album pages. So you can make them disappear by clicking on the Book Actions button of the Layout Panel and select Page Numbers> Off.

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4. I completed a couple of books before I realized that I could save a template and reuse it. Simply right-click on the page layout in the Layout Panel and select Save Page>To Document Master.

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After you save it, you can reuse it by right-clicking on a new page layout and selecting your custom layout. This is a great time saver.
The only draw back is that these custom layouts won’t show up in new book projects, so you have to duplicate the book in which you created the custom layout so that you can reuse it in a new project.

new document master.png

5. Thin border: You can create a border around the photos put into a layout. Click on the Book Actions button and select Show Layout Options. Select the image in which you want to add a border. In the area where it says Photo Border, click on the arrows to create the thickness of the border. If you want thiner size than is offered, type in 0.05 in the little window and click the Enter key on your keyboard.

Also, you can re-click on the selected photo in which you created a border, and select Duplicate. That way you don’t have to type in the number again for a new photo. Unfortunately, you can’t copy a photo from one page and paste it on a new page.

thin border.png

6. Edit photos without leaving your book project. I didn’t realize this at first, but you can simply select an image in your album, click on the Inspector Hud, and then do additional editing and enhancements to your photo. Another great time saver.

 

Using Automator to Import Photos into Aperture October 11, 2008

Filed under: Aperture 2.0, Automator workflow, Intermediate Tips — bakari @ 7:08 pm

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.

This workflow simply imports selected photos into Aperture and applies an assigned keyword to them. For my particular purposes, I’m doing two daily photo projects in which I have to import photos into Aperture everyday so that the processed photos can be posted on my Flickr account after processing.

For one daily project, here’s the workflow set up I created. It’s very simple and straight forward.

apertureimportworkflow.png

Both workflow actions can be found in the Photos actions library. I saved this workflow as an application and put that application into the Eye-Fi folder where my daily photos are imported to. Photos that I want imported into Aperture are simply selected and dragged on top of the Automator application. When it runs, it labels the selected photos with a keyword and imports them into the selected project. It’s a great little time saver. Anything that can reduce a few clicks on in the process is cool with me.

Automating Aperture Website
By the way, Automator is a great program, but if you want to get a little more power in your automation, Applescript is the way to go. I just discovered this useful site devoted automating Aperture using Applescript. It includes a AppleScript for importing photos into Aperture.