Rosario Tech

Well, this was bound to happen. Apple decided that $499 was too much to ask consumers to pay for their photo processing program, Aperture, so they dropped the price by $200. In addition, the program is now Universal, meaning that it will run natively on both the Intel Mac as well legacy Power PC Mac. The update can be downloaded here.

Now, for you suckers early adopters - those of you who bought the program for $500 - Apple is offering you a $200 “e-coupon” which you can download here (PDF link). Here’s their press release:

“On April 13, 2006 Apple released Aperture 1.1, the first Universal version of Aperture and a significant update to the revolutionary all-in-one post-production tool for photographers. In addition, Apple lowered the price of Aperture from $499 to $299. Apple is offering a $200 e-coupon good on the online Apple Store to licensed users of Aperture 1.0. Licensed users of Aperture 1.0 Academic will receive a $100 e-coupon.”

I suppose that giving back that $200 is the least they could do. Even at $299, I think it’s still a little steep, but manageable. Capture One costs over $500 and so does Photoshop CS2, but those programs do a heck of a lot more than Aperture. I’d still advise waiting until Adobe finishes up Lightroom and puts it out on the shelves. My bet is that Adobe will price it the same or less than Aperture.

Yes, noise. We don’t like it at three in the morning and we certainly don’t like it in our digital images.

Well, luckily, there are solutions to the digital noise that pops up in your digital images. Two programs called Noise Ninja and NeatImage will help you rid the noise from your images while maintain most of the good stuff. Both programs come with Photoshop plug-ins, but only Noise Ninja comes with a stand-alone application as well; helpful if you don’t own Photoshop.

I use Noise Ninja and I think it’s just great. It does a great job at eliminating most, if not all, of the unwanted noise in my images without trashing the fine details too much. Also, Noise Ninja lets me create my own camera profiles which help fine tune the noise reduction specifically for my camera at specified ISO settings (remember, higher ISOs mean more noise in the image). After creating the profiles, Noise Ninja reads the metadata of the image and applies the specific profile to that image. So, if I shot an image at ISO 400, and I created a camera profile for the 400 ISO rating, Noise Ninja just loads up that profile and applies it to the image. And that’s that; no more noise. If you don’t want to profile your camera, Noise Ninja does a pretty darn good job in automatic mode.

I’m sure NeatImage works just as well. I don’t own it so I have no opinions about it. Well, it is less expensive, but you do need to have Photoshop to use it (or another program that can use Photoshop Plug-ins).

Also, notice how both websites use pictures of hockey players as demos? Interesting.

Now as far as the noise at 3am, well, there’s not much I can do about that. Use earplugs.

I suppose all this talk about grey cards and underexposure is due to the fact that it’s a crappy day outside. Well, that probably true.

So, another tip/lesson to remember:

Grey cards are for measuring exposure, not for using to white balance digital images (white balance with a grey card? Whoa!). The regular old Kodak 18% grey card is not appropriate for getting your white balance straight with your digital cameras because it is not totally neutral in color. It does represent a mid-tone, but so does grass and so does a rich blue sky. There are slight color variations in a grey card that your camera (or Photoshop) will be sensitive to and alter the color of your images slightly.

So, with that in mind, buy one of those WhiBal® cards I mentioned earlier today and keep the grey cards for metering exposures. By the way, if you use a Kodak Grey card for determining exposures, you might find that you end up underexposing your images slightly. Read this article by Thom Hogan about the real truth of 18% grey cards.

The truth is out there! (So is the sun, I can see it coming)

Okay, now for some lessons about exposing images using your digital camera - with the help of an article over at the Luminous Landscape website.

If you’ve been having difficulty with getting the proper exposure on your digital SLR, perhaps it’s because there’s a tendency to slightly underexpose the image. We all learned, way back when, that overexposure is a bad thing. Once those highlights are gone, they’re gone. Burned away. Fzzsssst.

So, as we transition to using our new Nikon D2X, D200, or Canon 5D and 1DS Mk2, we are also making sure not to overexpose, to avoid the “blinkies” on the LCD, to make sure that histogram is not too far to the right.

Well, you still don’t want the “blinks” (indicating overexposure), but getting that histogram over to the right a bit is not as harmful as you might think it is. Read this article by Michael Reichmann at the Luminous Landscape.

The short of it is that if we make our exposures biased towards the left of the histogram, then we are not allowing the camera to capture all the tonality that it is capable of receiving, especially in the highlight area. Slightly overexposing the image and then pulling back the exposure using a RAW convertor (this applies only to RAW images - with JPEGs, all bets are off) results in an image that contains greater tonality. What this accomplishes is a couple of things: highlight data that is seemingly gone is actually there (and recovered) and the noise and “posterization” is reduced in the darker area of the image.

Anyway, read the article and send me any questions you have.

See, I knew digital was better than film.

So we’re all wishing for a little balance in our lives. Well, your whites can be balanced, at least in your digital pictures.

Head over to RawWorkFlow.com and watch these videos about a product called the WhiBal®. Essentially, this is a video manual for the WhiBal® white balancing cards, but offers a lot of useful information about grey cards and white balance in general. The host and inventor of the WhiBal® product, Michael Tapes, makes a simple presentation, understandable to all. He seems like a nice, regular guy. Even I learned a thing or two. For instance, white balancing for JPEG and RAW requires different shades of grey.

And remember, when you shoot RAW, white balance can always be set back at your computer. Although it will be a lot easier if you use a product like the WhiBal®.

I intend to buy these products as I can see their usefulness (I guess the videos did their job).

If you ever want to learn anything about Photoshop, you should consider reading every Photoshop book written by Scott Kelby. I know I have.

He’s just released a new eBook (electronic book not in print) about Adobe’s new digital photography program, Lightroom. The Adobe Lightroom eBook for Digital Photographers is inexpensive ($22.49 or $17.49 if you get free membership to InformIT - use a free Gmail account since you’re bound to get spammed) and is very thorough. Since Lightroom does not currently come with a manual, this ebook is a great way to learn all of the little subtleties to the program. When the final version of Lightroom is released, you will surely have a head start on everyone else. It’s worth the $$$ if you plan to get and use Lightroom.

I’ve already read the book, so I have a head start on you.

Mark Goldstein, over at the Photography Blog has reviewed “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers” by Peter Krogh. Here’s an excerpt:

“Peter Krogh’s book is an unashamedly personal affair, in that it is based upon Krogh’s own digital archiving system. “The DAM Book” is not at all theoretical, instead it has been written by a professional photographer who uses the techniques described in his daily work. This approach makes the book immediate and most importantly trustworthy - after all, if the system works well for Peter Krogh, it should also work for you.”

I have this book on order (maybe I’ll get it today) and I’ll try to post my opinion about it after I read it. You can download a sample chapter here (PDF link).

Forbes Online is reporting today that Adobe will not be releasing its new version of the Creative Suite (CS3) until the middle of next year.

In the article, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe said, “Acrobat is coming in the fourth quarter of 2006. [Design software package] Creative Suite 3 will be introduced in the second quarter of 2007. Acrobat will take advantage of the Macromedia assets. And you’ll see a lot of activity in the CS3 launch. There will be a lot of integration between [Macromedia] products and [Adobe] products as part of those offerings. By the time we launch CS3, the value of the two companies will be clear.”

So, the bad part of this is that we may have to wait until June of 2007 for the next version of Photoshop. That sucks. The good news is that Adobe will be releasing LightRoom sometime in the Fall. This program should keep us digital photographers busy until CS3 comes out next year. The cry-baby part of this is…. Why do we have to wait so long!? I want CS3 NOW!!!!!

Anyway, there have been rumors that Adobe would be releasing a version of CS2 that will work on the Intel Macs around the time LightRoom is released. This is just a rumor, but it’s something to hope for.

Speaking about updates to updates…

I received this message from an Adobe program the other day:

I just quit.

Now you have no excuse not to calibrate your monitors. For, as we all know, calibrationess is next to Godliness (well, that’s not a real word, but so what).

Macworld Online has a little preview of an $89 monitor calibration device called Huey, by Pantone. Pantone knows a thing or two about color. In fact, I think it was Pantone who invented color in the first place.

Anyway, read the article and check out Huey and calibrate for Dog’s sake!