In these two videos I compare Aperture 2.0 and iPhoto ‘09 and explain why you might want to consider upgrading to Apple’s more professional digital management and adjustment application. I might make additional videos about the differences between the two if I get any related questions that are not covered in these two videos.
FlickrExport 3 is available from connectedflow.com. There are several new features in this release, but the main ones include:
•Create a photoset with your uploaded images and set the photoset image order separately from the upload order.
•Add your photos to multiple groups after uploading, with presets to select groups-of-groups with one click.
In my view, this feature is what sets FlickrExport apart from the other Flickr exports, including the one native to the new iPhoto ‘09. If you like sending your Flickr photos to several different group pools, this feature is a time saver.
•GPS track log integration – download your GPS tracks and connect them with photos as you upload them (supports GPX and NMEA).
•Geolocation presets – store a location and recall it with one click.
Exclude Aperture keywords from being used for Flickr tags.
Rewritten upload engine for greater efficiency.
Upgrades
Upgrades are free if you purchased FlickrExport 2 for iPhoto or FlickrExport 1 for Aperture on or after January 1st, 2008. Visit the Store to check your eligibility.
If you are not eligible for a free upgrade, please use your previous serial number as a coupon code to receive a 50% discount on upgrades.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, iPhoto, photography, Flickr
If you’re a regular Flickr.com or Facebook.com user, you no doubt use some sort of uploading client to post your photos to your account. The latest upgrade of iPhoto ‘09 includes built-in Flickr and Facebook exporting features that are useful but very incomplete. The export buttons are found in iPhoto’s toolbar, and they work similarly to the MobileMe web gallery features of iPhoto.
When you click on the Flickr or Facebook button, you are invited to select how you want to share your selected photos and what size you want them to be. The first photos you upload will constitute an album on your Flickr or Facebook account. You can’t upload to your existing albums on your Flickr or Facebook account. But once you create a new album using iPhoto’s export feature, you can simply add new photos to it as you would any other iPhoto album or you can create new albums for new images.
Connected Flow’s FlickrExport
This new Flickr/Facebook export feature is slightly better than using Connected Flow’s popular FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto in that you can upload selected photos right within the application’s main interface. With FlickrExport, you have to open the plug-in using File>Export. But on the other hand, FlickExport has additional options that don’t exist in iPhoto ’09’s export feature. With FlickrExport, you can select an existing album and Flickr group on your account. You can also add Flickr tags to your photos from within the plug-in or select your existing one.
However, as a daily Flickr user, I find both export tools limiting. A full featured (e.g. professional) export application would include ways to upload photos to more than one existing album and Flickr group at a time. And because many dedicated Flickr users are members of several dozens of groups, there should be a way to select and create a panel list of favorite and most often accessed groups to add images to. There should also be a way to download photos from your Flickr account into your iPhoto or Aperture library.
Flickery
The closest full-featured application that I know of in this regard is Eternal Storms’s Flickery. You can access all your image files on your computer, including your iPhoto and/or Aperture library. After making image selections, you can indicate which Flickr sets you want your photos to go to, as well as apply your Flickr tags to each or all your selected image files. So basically, Flickery is a client-side application for your Flickr account. You can not only upload photos through the application, but you can download photos from your Flickr account into iPhoto, as well view your previously posted images and sets, plus the photos of other Flickr members including your contacts. In this regard, Flickery outshines both iPhoto and CoverFlows’s export tools. Except for not being able to add photos to your Flickr groups, Flickery enables you to complete your uploading process without having to visit the site itself. So this public beta application has a lot of promise for us dedicated Flickr users.
Additional Flickr Resources
If you’re looking for additional resources for Flickr, check out Flickrbits. It’s an awesome set of links to official Flickr applications; mobile, Mac, Linux, and Windows applications; developers’ tools, and plug-ins and extensions.
With digital photography, it’s every easy to take several hundreds of photos at a time, with no added expense. But just because you take 500 vacation photos doesn’t mean you have to process them all. You can choose some of your best photos from the shoot and take a little extra time to improve upon them using iPhoto’s post-production tools. Apple has made the exposure and color adjustment process in iPhoto fairly easy and in some cases less time consuming than working in Adobe Photoshop Elements or one of the larger CS programs. This article will describe how to use the Adjust tool on an average photo.
Our Original Photo
Let’s take a typical photo that you might capture at an amusement park. The photo below, except for the added annotation, has had no adjustment made to it. Here are a few problems with the picture:
1. The lighting in the photo is dull and lacking in strong color contrast.
2. The colors in the photo could be more saturated.
3. And lastly there is some digital noise in the photo. Digital noise is basically caused by using a high ISO setting on the camera. This photo was shot at ISO 400 (which is the default ISO setting that I use on both my Canon Powershot G9 and my Canon 50D.) ISO 400 works pretty well for average daylight outdoor and indoor lighting, and it’s not so high that it causes real digital noise problems. Noise is visible in this photo, but iPhoto can fix it pretty well.
Using the Adjust Tool
The Adjust tool has four areas that you can work through to improve the exposure and color of a photo. Some adjustments you make will be corrections to problems in the photo, while other adjustments will be enhancements and sometimes radical changes to an image.
1. The top Levels part of the Adjust panel is where you want to start. If you move the sliders in the second section of the Adjust panel, you’ll see that it makes similar adjustments to the Levels slider. The right side of the Levels slider is what you use to make a photo brighter by moving the slider toward the left. The left side of the slider is used make the photo darker, by moving it toward the right. And of course the middle of the slider affects the mid-tones of the photo. The difference between Levels and Exposure is that the latter impacts the entire image, whereas Level adjustments affect just either the highlight, shadows, and mid-tones of the image.
The beauty of the Adjust tool is that you can make as many adjustments as you like, and your original image will not be touched. You can always use the Undo shortcut keystroke (Command+Z) or the Revert button at the bottom of the panel to get rid of your adjustments. So there’s nothing keeping you from experimenting. Also note, however, that changing the exposure level of a photo in the iPhoto library also changes the appearance of that same photo if it is used in a slideshow, book, or calendar of iPhoto. If you want two separate versions of an image, you need to duplicate the image (Photos>Duplicate or Command + D) and then make the adjustments.
2. Next, move to the Exposure, Contrast, and Saturation sliders of the Adjust tool. If the overall photo is too dark, move the Exposure slider to the right. If it’s too dark, move it the left. Rarely should you need to move the slider to extreme left or right if you made a fairly good and correct exposure when initially taking the photo.
The Contrast slider is is one of the most useful adjustments you can make to improve your photos. You will typically increase the contrast in most of your photos by moving the slider to the right. Move back and forth between the Exposure slider and the Contrast slider to get the enhancement you want. Earlier versions of the Adjust panel included a Brightness slider next to the Contrast slider, but Apple was smart to get rid of it. The Exposure slider does the same thing as the Brightness slider.
If the colors in your image seem rather dull or cloudy, the Saturation slider can help. You move the slider to the right to increase the saturation, and if you want to desaturate the image to see how it might look in black-and-white, then move the slider all the way to the left. (Desaturating the photo, however, is not the best way to create a quality black-and-white or monochrome image.)
3. The 3rd part of the Adjust tool is mainly for fine tuning. The Definition slider adds more detail and a boost in contrast in parts of the image. It almost seems as if it sharpens the image. The Highlights and Shadows sliders work similar to the Exposure and Levels sliders. Move the Highlights slider to the right if you want to bring detail the brightest part of the image. This slider won’t be very effective if you have over exposed areas in your image, such as you see with the white bright parts of the photo used in this article. The Shadows slider helps you bring back detail in the darker area of your photo. The Shadows tool can’t correct too effectively the over exposed parts of the photo. Neither slider should be taken to the extreme right, at least not with your average photo.
The next slider is the Sharpness tool, but it should typically be the last adjustment you make. The Sharpness tool cannot fix a poorly focused photo, but it can help bring sharpness or detail to fairly focused images. So be sure to hold your camera as steady as possible when taking photos in order to get the best use of the Sharpness tool.
The De-noise slider in my view is pretty good for a consumer-based adjustment program. The noise problem is not always noticeable, but for photos you plan to print, you might want use the De-noise slider to help smooth out some of the digital noise. In the examples below, I zoomed into a part of the sample photo to provide a closer look of digital noise (top image), and what difference it makes when the De-noise is applied (botton image). I use Nik Sotfware’s Dfine 2.0 plug-in for Aperture to take care of all my noise issues. But De-noise does a pretty good job in my view for a consumer application like iPhoto, so it doesn’t hurt to apply it.
4. The temperature slider is one of the last tools that you will want to use in your adjustment process. In prior versions of iPhoto, the Temperature slider was near the top sections of the panel, as it is in Aperture 2.0. I think it should have remained near the top because it’s one of the first adjustments you might want to make to improve an image. You of course move the slider to right to warm up the photo (like adding warm sunlight to the scene) or take it to the left cool the image down. This temperature slider cannot correct White Balance problems in your image. If for example your original photo is too blue, yellow or purple, the temperature slider really can’t correct the problem. If your image is a RAW file, you can open it up in an application like Aperture 2.0 and make the correction. iPhoto will accept RAW files, but you can’t get the full editing capabilities of RAW files in iPhoto, in the way you can with Aperture or Adobe’s Camera Raw application.
Finally Tint tool is something I rarely use for normal photos. It is there if you add some funky coloring to your photos for various types of color effects.
Effects and Enhance Tools
If all this adjustment stuff is too much for you, then you might just pop open the Effects feature in iPhoto and use that. Click on the Boost Color box and see how it impacts the image. You can click it more than once to increase its application. Sometimes it does a really good job, for a down-and-dirty color enhancement. You can also click and add one or more effects to the same photo to see what happens. If you mess up the image, just click the center Original box to start over.
In the toolbar of iPhoto, there’s also an Enhance feature that is a quick color and contrast boosting tool that you might try applying first to see if it improves your photo.
Copy and Paste Adjustments
With iPhoto ‘08, Apple added a way to copy adjustments you make one photo and apply them to another one. You can only paste adjustments to one photo at a time, which is really a bummer. I figure Apple thinks batch processing exposure and color adjustments might be too overwhelming for the average iPhoto user, or that it might make iPhoto seem more and more like its pro version application, Aperture. Nevertheless, if you use iPhoto a lot, learn to use the copy and paste feature of the Adjust panel. It will save you some time and hassle in the adjustment part of your process.
Well, as you can see, this is the result of making adjustments to our sample photo. The colors are richer, the over-all contrast is deeper, and, believe it or not, there’s less digital noise in the image. iPhoto is not Photoshop or Aperture 2.0, but it’s a great application for those who don’t to spend a lot of time managing and processing pictures.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, digital photography, iPhoto, photography
After purchasing Apple’s new iLife ‘09 suite of software, the first feature I wanted to explore is iPhoto’s Faces. It has been one of the most talked about and anticipated features of iPhoto ‘09. Similar to the face recognition technology found in newer digital compact cameras, faces attempts to scan all your images in your iPhoto library and identify individual faces in them. Macworld attendees oohed and awed the feature when Phil Shciller presented it in early January.
Well after spending a couple of hours exploring and using the tool yesterday, I personally found using iPhoto’s Faces not that much different from simply selecting and applying keywords to photos in your iPhoto library. In my experience so far, Faces is not a very efficient visual recognition program. If all your photos in your library were shot and looked like well-developed stocked images, then Faces would probably be much more successful. But then again, maybe not.
I mainly use iPhoto to store and manage all my family photos. (I use Aperture for professional work.) So I have digital photos dating back from 2003 primarily of my children. Well, Faces unfortunately does not easily recognize their growth from year to year or even from photo to photo. First off you have to train Faces to know what to look for. You have to select and name a person’s face several times before Faces kicks in and starts identifying that same face in other photos. (View the how-to tutorial here.) When it goes through this process, it will deliver up a handful of images in which it thinks a selected face appears. You have to then go through those suggestions and confirm or reject the correct recognitions. I couldn’t figure out exactly how the recognition works. But obviously it looks at skin tone, eyes, chin, and other facial features as part of the recognition process. But what I don’t understand is why when I select select and name say my daughter’s face in one photo that Faces doesn’t always recognize her face in other photos taken within a few seconds or minutes of one another. It simply is not consistent in its facial recognition. I can understand why it may have difficulty recognizing similarities in her face in photos taken when she was 3 years-old with ones taken recently at 11. I think that it accurately recognized her face in less than 50% of all the images I have of her in my library. The same goes for the faces of myself and other members of my family.
I try to keep my iPhoto library fairly well managed using keywords, albums and events. Unfortunately, Faces probably won’t be the primary management tool that I and others thought it would be. After spending a few hours selecting, naming, and confirming existing photos in my library, I imported a few photos of myself that were not already in the library. Faces failed to make the recognition, even though the photos are very clear and well composed portraits of myself. There are about dozen other photos of myself in my library that Faces still hasn’t yet recognized on its own. I have to select those photos and go through the naming process just as I do using keywords.
The sample photo below clearly shows the faces of my sister-in-law and my daughter. Well, even after helping Faces recognize and name at least 90% of their photos in the library, the tool fails to recognize their faces in a simple shot like this.
And of course, forget about shots in which faces are too small to see. For example, I have photos taken of my children playing in the snow in Reno where the pictures include them and the surroundings. Well, there’s no way for Faces to work effectively in these type of pictures. Photos in which faces are obscured by sunglasses or turned sideways are typically not going to be recognized by Faces. So you still need to keyword those photos if you care about managing and identifying the content of all your saved images.
Basically, Faces is a hit and miss tool. It doesn’t appear that it can be counted on to replace the other management tools in iPhoto. For my workflow, I will stick with manually applying keywords to my images to effectively manage my iPhoto library.
I look forward to hearing about how the tool works for you.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, digital photography, iPhoto
