The next Live Training is scheduled, for Monday Feb 13th at 11am PST. I know that’s not a great time for a large portion of my readers, but I did promise to mix up the timing in fairness to those around the world, and I haven’t been doing that much lately. So, here we go!

If you can’t make it live, of course the session will be available for download shortly after.

Read more about it here, or just click the button to sign up. You’ll be able to verify your time zone from the sign-up page.

One of the first things I read this morning was a tweet from @ScottBourne that read “About Aperture 4.0”, which woke me up far faster than coffee ever could! However it wasn’t an announcement, but simply a prediction. Ah, I can relax now.

I read his article on photofocus.com with interest, and he has some encouraging thoughts on the future of the app (all of which I’ve been saying as well, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one!). His historical timeline, however, is off. I guess Scott posted before his morning coffee, didn’tcha buddy ;-) It got me curious of the actual timeline though, and so I broke out Numbers to start plotting it, and before I knew it I was completely geeking out on charts and tables in Numbers. Hey, we can’t look at images all day long!

I share this here only because I wasted spent so much time on this this morning, and figured someone should see it other than me!

Aperture Release Schedule timeline — click to view largerAll data is from the Wikipedia entry on Aperture, so if there are any mistakes, I blame whoever edited it last :) The way I did this is I assigned a “value” to each release; 1.0 for a major release like v1.0, 0.1 for a dot release like v1.1, and 0.01 for a maintenance release like v1.1.1. I however gave v.1.5 a score of 0.8 because frankly, 1.5 could have been 2.0. With actual dates and calculated days-since-release, I was able to make the fancy little chart you see above.

The short summary is:

• Aperture 1.0 to 1.5: 10 months
• Aperture 1.5 to 2.0: 16.5 months
• (Aperture 1.0 to 2.0: 26.5 months)
• Aperture 2.0 to 3.0: 24 months
• Aperture 3.0 to present: 20 24 months

But the chart is much more fun to look at.

So when do we “predict” Aperture 4.0 or X or whatever it may be called? My Numbers skills aren’t that good to draw the prediction for me, but if you call the 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 the only major releases and then the average is simply 25.25 24.8 months, so that’d put it right around five months from now, or this June within a month or less! If you want to call 1.5 a major release, then the average drops to 16.8 months in which case we’re several months overdue.

Scott predicted between February and October of this year (2012); I’ll go more aggressive and predict before June 2012. Revised data now points to Feb or March of 2012, actually. Also it’s been pointed out that most releases are on a Tuesday. The guy who runs TheApertureBlog predicted on twitter that it’d be this tuesday. We shall see!

So there you have it… the results of a totally wasted morning. If you spot any errors, please do let me know.

The problem with many of these apps for Aperture users however is that they don’t simply “save”, but only “save as…”. The ability to simply “save” means from Aperture you can Open in Editor, (for example Photoshop), do your work then simply save and close the image, and it’s automatically updated in Aperture. It’s one of those fantastically simple features in Aperture that opens it up to just about any app you like.

But as soon as you can’t simply “save” — as you can’t in Snapseed — that process breaks. You now have to “save as…” to some other location, import that into Aperture manually, merge it back to your project, etc. etc. and the process, while not particularly hard, is just annoying.

Automator to the rescue

Reader Jon Parsons of Jon Parsons Photography sent over his workflow which makes this process a lot easier. I’ve modified his steps a little as he had an extra step in there, plus I’ve modified for Referenced master users, and added a tip on how to easily switch between External Editors, but other than that he gets credit for this technique.

By the way, this has the potential to get even easier through AppleScript. If it can, I’ll certainly let you know here.

What it’ll do

In brief, you’ll create a dedicated folder for all those “Save as” images, and attach a script to it that will automatically import photos added to that folder into Aperture. Unfortunately it has to add them to a dedicated project, so you’ll need to manually move them to your current project (assuming you want to keep versions together), but otherwise this is quite clean.

Setting up Aperture

First let’s make it easy to switch External editors. I gave this tip once before, but it’s worth repeating. You probably know that to switch editors, you just go to the menu Aperture > Preferences… > Export > External Photo Editor: and choose the one you want. But digging through your entire Application folder can get tedious, so I’ve set up a folder of aliases to the apps I’m using from Aperture. I also keep that folder in the sidebar, making it quick to get to at any time.

As you can see above, just click on the Choose button next to External Photo Editor: and then using the handy-dandy External Editors folder set up in the sidebar, quickly navigate to the app you want to use, and click Select.

Unless you’re sending to Photoshop, you may as well set the filetype to TIFF (8-bit). Many apps won’t read PSD files, so you could just get an error, and you’re not saving back to this format anyway when working with alternative apps, so just keep it simple.

Next up, you’ll need a Project in Aperture that’s dedicated to importing these externally edited photos. I called mine simply Externally Edited (clever, no?) and that sits at the top of my Library list.

Guess what… now they have a version on the Mac.

It’s just awesome. I think it’s one of the easier 20 bucks you’ll spend on the App Store this week, because you’ll just have SO MUCH FUN with it. Check it out!

Click to view snapseed on the Mac App Store

In the post, I said that I’d been advised that quality-12 JPG wasn’t really any better than quality-10, but as you’re about to see… that’s not true at all.

Here is the original photograph I worked with for this test; the little blue box is the crop that you see in the rest of the photos.

Original photo used for the JPG difference test; the blue box is the crop you see in the tests belowHere we go… here’s the crop we’re working with:

Here is my response. As you’ll see, there are gaps in my knowledge when it comes to scanners, and if you, dear reader, have any additional information, feedback or corrections, please join the conversation in the forum. I’ve closed comments here; I’d like any discussion to happen on the original forum post. Thanks.

TIF vs JPG for scanned negatives

The essential advantage of TIF is twofold; one, it’s uncompressed, and two, it can be higher bit-depth than a JPG. JPEGs can only be 8-bit, whereas a TIF can be saved up to 16-bit (the spec actually allows for 24-bit RGB or 32-bit CMYK).

I wrote about this app once years ago on my photo blog, before I even launched this site, but a user question just made me think of it again and I realized a lot of you may not be aware of it.

The app is called iMedia Browser, and is free on the Mac App Store. You do need to enable “Share previews with iLife and iWork” for each Library if you haven’t already. But once that’s done, you should see all of your Aperture and iPhoto Libraries at once in this little app. You can even search through the collections! Just keep in mind you will ONLY see images that you have previews generated for, so if you’re rendering selected previews selectively, you won’t see all of your photos here.

Download iMedia Browser from the Mac App Store for free

Here’s something new… I’ve just created a gallery on flickr to display photos created using ApertureExpert presets or techniques learned here. I realize that’s a bit loose, but hey, let’s see what happens!

There’s a new link in the toolbar called “Gallery” so you can access it at any time.

With any luck, when Squarespace is updated to v6 we’ll be able to post photos direclty in forum posts, and (again with any luck) we’ll be able to just grab code from flickr and pop photos in the posts. Time will tell!

In the meantime, if you already have photos on flickr you want to share, just add them to this group, or upload some new ones! I added a small selection in there, with more to come.

-Joseph

Check out the new ApertureExpert group on flickr!

Dan asked:

On the training videos you use the hot/cold feature to show blown highlights and blocked shadows. To set the white point and black point in my photos, I press the command key when adjusting Exposure, Recovery and Black Point sliders. Is there a difference between the two methods or are they just different ways to reach the same goal?

The short answer is “yes, they are different ways to reach the same goal”. But of course, there’s more to it than that!

Background

Just in case you’re not familiar with what he’s asking, here’s the skinny. If you enable View > Highlight Hot & Cold Areas (which by the way, I’ve re-mapped on my system to simply the letter ‘q’ as a keyboard shortcut, because I use it all the time), you will see red marks on parts of your photo that are “hot”, or blown out, meaning they are too bright to see/print/show any detail, and blue marks on areas that are “cold”, or too dark to see/print/show any detail. (You can actually adjust the threshold in the Preferences, under Advanced). This is critical if you’re adjusting for print, since anything too dark will just block up and go solid black in printing, but even if just adjusting for viewing on screen, it’s a really easy way to see where your highlights or shadows may have gotten too extreme, and you are losing detail.

This update primarily addresses that issue, and also adds in a few more polishing touches, including enhanced gestures support, and fixes bugs where a possible color profile mismatch on externally edited images could appear, and a possible crash when using brushes could rear it’s ugly head.

I am very curius for those who have encountered this 1,000 image issues — does installing this update make your older, “lost” photos reappear? Please let us know in the comments!

Here’s the official word…

“This update resolves an issue that could prevent auto-imported Photo Stream images from being displayed in the library after your Photo Stream hits 1,000 images.”

For more information about this update see http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4144

Included in Aperture 3.2.2

• Addresses compatibility with iCloud and iOS 5
• Resolves an issue that could cause the “Loading” indicator to reappear in the Viewer when cropping a photo
• Aperture now automatically relaunches into Full Screen mode if the application was in Full Screen mode when last quit
• Pinch-to-zoom gesture now automatically activates Zoom mode in the Viewer
• Left and right swipe gestures can now be used to navigate between photos in the Viewer
• Microsoft Outlook can now be chosen in Preferences as the application used by Aperture for emailing photos
• Fixes a problem that could cause Aperture, running on OS X Lion, to quit unexpectedly when using brushes to apply adjustments
• Loupe now correctly displays magnification levels between 50-100%
• Fixes an issue that could cause Aperture, running on OS X Lion, to display the incorrect color profile on externally edited images
• Import window now includes an option to delete photos from iPhone and iPad after they have been imported into Aperture
• The Lift & Stamp tool now displays the correct cursor icons when being used in Split View and Viewer only modes

As always, if you spot anything that isn’t addressed that claims to be, or see any new issues, report ‘em here!