Canon EOS-1D X
Nikon D800E
Nikon D3200
Olympus OM-D E-M5
Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GF5
Sony Alpha SLT-A57

No sign of support for the Fuji X-Pro1 but I’m not optimistic that support will be forthcoming as I’m not sure the underlying architecture can support non standard sensor technology (there’s still no support for any of Sigma’s Foveon sensors)

For a complete list of cameras who’s RAW files are supported by Aperture and iPhoto check out this support page.

Related posts:

1. Apple Releases Camera Raw Update 3.6 and Fixes GH2 Problems
2. Apple Releases Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.10
3. Camera Raw Updated

The result is a set of presets I’ve decided to call “Vivid Extreme” (mainly because it sounds cool). While they all create the “Vivid” look I found that you need to have different styles depending on the subject matter so I ended up with lots of variations. Some work on enhancing greens, others on reds. I’m really happy with the results, and I hope you will be too. To give you an idea, here’s a few before and after examples. There’s lots more on the preset’s info page.

This was using the “orange smooth” variation

This was using the “Red and Orange Crush” variation. OK, one more….

Using Vivid foliage !

Actually, there’s a little trick I did with vivid foliage. You know when you take pictures on a dull day sometimes and there’s lots of leaves and they end up looking white and bleached? This is because of the reflections on the plants and while you can fix it by shooting with a polariser the effect has often ruined an otherwise good shot. Anyway, the “foliage” presets use a little aperture trick by tinting the highlights which works really well to cover up the white reflections on the leaves.

There’s a whole slide show of before and after images on the preset’s page, and as always it’s only €4. I hope you like it as I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I know this kind of look isn’t for everyone, but if you’re looking for a good “vivid” preset I hope it suits your needs.

You can learn more by visiting the preset’s info page by clicking here!

Related posts:

1. Introducing Film Candy, Our Second Premium Preset Pack
2. Introducing our first premium preset pack: Bleached Bronze
3. Some Nikon D90 Vivid Presets for you

Related posts:

1. Welcome to The Aperture Blog
2. Welcome to the Aperture Blog 2.0
3. Introducing The Photography Geek

In the video I created a preset so you can try the same effects and you can get it here.

Related posts:

1. Using the Curves Adjustment in Aperture 3 to add Contrast to an Image
2. Video: Silver Efex Pro 2 Walk Through
3. Using Curves to Add Warmth to an Image – Plus Bonus Preset !

The trial version of Aperture is no longer available. If you currently have a copy of the Aperture 3 Trial installed on your Mac, you must delete it from your Applications folder before downloading Aperture 3 from the Mac App Store.

There is one interesting did bit though. Take a look at the screen grab of the web page….

Notice anything different? Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s a new icon over the message for Aperture? Mind you, I could swear I’ve seen that before somewhere, so is it actually an old one?

[UPDATE] Never mind, I think it’s the picture off the retail box. Dammit.

Related posts:

1. Apple Adds D800 Support To Aperture
2. Apple OS Update 10.6.5 Packs Huge Speed Improvement for Aperture Export
3. Silver Efex Pro is 64bit

Whatever the reason, I have a cool tutorial video in the works which I should have up sometime this week on an alternative way to create black and white and tinted black and white images. I also have another tutorial on some advanced uses of the curves tool which I’ll post as soon as it’s finished.

I’ve also posted two premium preset packs. The first which has been on sale over a week has had a great response and I want to thank everyone who bought it, and for putting up with some of the teething problems with my e-commerce set-up. Don’t worry though, I t doesn’t mean I’ll stop posting free presets. In fact there will be one this week to go with the black and white tutorial!

Oh, and one last thing, there’s a really great discussion going on on in the comments on the “Aperture 4″ post I had previously written back in February. It’s great to have the community engaged and unlike many forums and comment sections it’s been entirely civil and constructive. So thank you to all the readers of The Aperture Blog for making this such a great community to be involved in. It’s thanks to you that I keep writing this.

Related posts:

1. What To Do If you’ve downloaded Aperture from the App Store and Your Raw Files are coming up as “Unsupported”
2. Adding a keyboard shortcut to an Adjustment Preset
3. A New Look for the New Year

I’m proud to introduce our second preset pack here at the Aperture Blog, called “Film Candy”. There’s kind of an interesting story as to how this one came about which I’ll share with you in a moment, but first let me tell you about the pack itself. Unlike the “Bleached Bronze” pack I launched last week, this is a series of different looks but they all have the same theme. They simulate the kind of cross processed, vintage faded film look that you get from many iPhone apps and the like. There’s a series of looks each with a few different variations




The basis of each is a faded look with a gamma curve that creates a bright and pleasing image, with some strong colour tinting in the shadows and highlights. In technical terms they ended up being fairly complex, using multiple curves adjustments and also the colour brick, as well as the tint controls in the enhance brick. There’s a lot of these kind’s of looks out there, so I’ve done my best to create something unique. In particular I wanted to create something that would give you a bright punchy image even though the effect is to give subdued colours. Anyway, you can see more about the individual looks on the preset’s information page. Like Bleached Bronze this is for sale at €4 (including vat, 3.25 ex vat). There was a great response to the first preset and I want to thank everyone again who bought it. I would love to hear feedback or see examples of it in use, so if anyone has any images posted to your blog or flickr or some such site, please share the links.

So you’re probably wondering where I came up with the name “Film Candy”? Actually the whole idea for this came about in a roundabout way. I had started working on a black and white look. I was also thinking about a tutorial on the curves adjustment as this is one of the most powerful tools in Aperture, but also the most misunderstood. I had created a black and white image by lowering the saturation and playing with the contrast by doing some curves adjustments. Then it occurred to me that I could tint various ranges (shadows and highlights) by using a second curves adjustment. At first I was just creating tinted black and white images (I’ll have a tutorial on how to do this soon) then by accident I raised the saturation slider back up a bit. This opened up a whole new look that I hadn’t really started out to create. It was then that I realised that I could create some of the faded film looks that I had been playing about with in Photoshop recently.

From there they evolved as I played with them and found various images to try them out on. When I came up with the look that is now called “chocolate” I realised that the overall tone looked like hot chocolate, and the purple / blue in the shadows reminded me of a certain chocolate company’s wrappers, so the name “film candy” popped into my head. From there I came up with the rest of the names for the presets.

Anyway, that’s just a little anecdote about the creation of these looks. I hope you’ll check out the preset’s info page, and I’ve put a nice big version of the slide show on there showcasing some before and after examples of “film candy” in operation.

Film Candy: Available Now for €4 incl Vat (3.25 ex vat)

Related posts:

1. Introducing our first premium preset pack: Bleached Bronze
2. A Slight Change to the Pro Preset Pricing
3. Preset: Brownify

Because this change reflects everyone who has already bought it I’ve refunded the difference.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who supported this endeavour and apologies for the little hiccup. Here’s a sneak peak of the next pack, called “Film Candy”

Before

Preset – “Film Candy Chocolate”

Related posts:

1. Q&A: Change The Resolution of an Image Inside Aperture
2. Introducing our first premium preset pack: Bleached Bronze
3. Introducing Film Candy, Our Second Premium Preset Pack

I’ve been wanting to get this going for the longest time now, and I’ve finally gotten around to it. Today I’m launching the first “pro” preset pack on the Aperture Blog. This set is one that I use myself in my own work and it’s featured in exhibitions and in images I’ve used in my design work and in numerous projects. I’ve actually been working on it for over a year creating variations and tweaking on it. I was hesitant to release it as it was so personal to me, but I finally figured that I would share it with the rest of the community, and because it’s been so close to me and I’ve put so much work into it I have decided that it will be the first “pro” preset.

The pack is called “bleached bronze” and it contains a few variations of the  core look, which creates a bronze coloured bleached bypass effect.

Here’s some images with the various presets applied:

There’s more examples with before and after shots on the preset’s page so check it out and let me know what you think.

It’s on sale now for €4 (Including Vat). I’m using e-junkie for managing the cart as it seems to be reliable and its what everyone else seems to use, but I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who purchases this on the actual buying process. If you have any issues, or if you think it’s ok, please let me know by sending an email to webmaster@theapertureblog.com

[Updated to reflect change in price]

Related posts:

1. Introducing Film Candy, Our Second Premium Preset Pack
2. Preset: A Better Vignette
3. Preset: ND Grad

Related posts:

1. New Camera Support Added
2. Apple Adds D800 Support To Aperture
3. My Aperture Workflow For Working With Canon 5D Mark II Files

If you’ll forgive me for a brief moment of shameless self promotion, I just wanted to share with you all a new website / tumblog I just started. It’s called “The Photography Geek” and it’s a collection and round up of various news items and stories about the geekier side of photography. What do I mean by that? Well, Gear, of course but also some of the cool photography related knick knacks that turn up all over the web and the like. Anyway, if you like that sort of thing, please stop by and check it out. It’s still pretty new so there’s not much there yet (well, there’s still the remnants of the previous tumblog I was writing with I’ve since moved to its own wordpress blog), but stay tuned. It’s all just a bit of fun but you might come across something you wouldn’t have come across otherwise!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming……

Related posts:

1. Aperture Wins an Award from Popular Photography
2. Some Shameless Self Promotion
3. Introducing our first premium preset pack: Bleached Bronze

- Upload a photo to 500px without leaving Aperture
- Add a title and description
- Set the category of the photo

Requirements:

- OS X 10.7 (Lion)
- Aperture 3
- 500px account (free or paid)

It’s available now on their website for $4.99. There’s also a free trial available.

When I get a chance to give it a quick review I’ll let you know what its like. (If anyone tries it please let us know what you think in the comments)

Related posts:

1. Some Tips for Using Plug-Ins with Aperture
2. Impressive new plug-in: “Perfect Layers” heading to Aperture
3. Video: Image Editing With Plug-ins in Aperture

Related posts:

1. Canon 5D Mark III Raw Support Added
2. Apple Adds another Camera Raw Update!
3. Raw Support Broken for Panasonic GH2

• Canon PowerShot G1 X
• Nikon D4
• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GX1
• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ35
• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ38
• Samsung NX200
• Sony Alpha NEX-7
• Sony NEX-VG20

No related posts.

Related posts:

1. Aperture 3.1.3 Released
2. Aperture 3.1.1 Released
3. Another Slideshow Update released for Aperture

Eastman Kodak, the bankrupt inventor of the hand-held camera, has agreed to sell its online photo services business to Shutterfly for $23.8 million, kicking off the bankrupt photography pioneer’s relaunch as a much slimmer company.

Apart from the sad nostalgia of a company like kodak  going through such troubles, this could directly affect Aperture users. Because Apple uses kodak’s online print ordering for is print services, (at least it used to) its not clear how this will affect the future of that service. Now its more than possible that Shutterfly will continue to operate the service as normal without any interruption. I’m also pretty sure that Apple could probably switch service providers without much of an issue either, but if you use Apple’s print ordering directly through Aperture, you might want to start looking around for other options just in case, especially if you rely on it for business purposes. Like I said, it’s unlikely there will be an interruption but there’s no harm in taking precautions.

[UPDATE] It’s been a while since I ordered any prints, so it’s possible that Apple no longer uses Kodak. John in the comments notes that his last print order was on Fuji paper, so perhaps this is a non issue. The only information I can find online suggests that Apple uses Kodak, so if anyone has any concrete information I would love to hear from you. I’m also wondering if Apple uses different providers in different parts of the world.

Related posts:

1. Some Printing tips and how to avoid some gotchas in the print dialog box
2. Preset: Art Print Red, plus a bonus tutorial!
3. Q&A: Change The Resolution of an Image Inside Aperture

Ever since Adobe announced the beta version of Lightroom 4 a few weeks ago, speculation has understandably turned to the next release of Aperture. There has been a flurry of opinions on various blogs, but no concrete rumours. While some have questioned whether or not we will even see an Aperture 4, the general consensus is that we will. Derrick Story had an interesting podcast this week on the topic and you should check it out. Personally, I think we will see it and whats more I believe we will see it pretty soon. I went so far as to make a bold prediction on twitter earlier in the week that it would be released this Tuesday, but in truth I’m as much in the dark as the next person.

So, reading the tea leaves then, what do I expect will be in Aperture 4? I know I’ve done similar posts before, but since then I’ve honed my expectations. We also now have an idea of what the competition is up to, so just for fun I’m going to take one more stab at a guess as to what will be in Aperture 4. (Oh, and for those asking, I believe it will be called Aperture 4 rather than Aperture X, but I could be wrong – At the moment I’d give it 70 / 30 in favour of “Aperture 4”) I’m just going to pick a few possible major features. There’s lots of minor things I’d like to see, but as it probably won’t be long till we find out for sure, I won’t go into too much detail.

Essentials

1. Lens Correction. This is an absolute essential in my opinion. I’ve blogged several times about the importance of having lens correction and I think that if Apple doesn’t include it in Aperture 4 there will be a lot of disappointed people. What requires a lot of tweaking and the use of several plug-ins in Aperture can be done automatically on import in Lightroom, so this needs to be added. For me, personally this is make or break. As this is a feature I use all the time, if Aperture 4 doesn’t have lens correction I’ll probably move on to something else unless the other features are outstanding.

2. Multiple External Editors. This is another Area where Lightroom has the advantage. With so many cool photo processing Apps available on the App store it would be nice to be able to set up more than one external editor. In lightroom you can do this, so you can use apps like “flare” or “Analog” almost as a plug-in. I’m pretty sure this can’t be that hard to implement, and I know people are crying out for it, so lets hope Apple ave listened.

3. Better Noise Reduction Aperture’s noise reduction is ok, but it’s not great. It was good when it came out, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what the competition can do now, so lets hope this gets addressed.

4. Camera Profiles Lightroom has them. Corel’s new Aftershot Pro has them. With Apple’s history of developing coloursync and the colour matching workflow, it would be nice if they provided Camera profiles so that what was shot in Raw matched what you see in the Camera. There is no reason why they can’t do this, it’s down to a matter of resources and if they want to commit them to it, as it would require in-house profiling of every camera available. Unless of course they could buy this in. Anyway, fingers crossed.

Not Essential, But Would Be Nice

1. Better Raw Processing. I know some people will probably take offence to my suggestion that Aperture doesn’t offer the best RAW conversion out there, but, well, it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very very good. I would rate it in the top 3 but it’s easily beat by Camera Raw (in my opinion). Images from Camera Raw often address moire and aliasing issues that appear in Aperture. Aperture has problems with very fine detail too, which Camera raw renders much clearer. You can see this in particular in areas of fine foliage. I know for most people this is needless pixel peeping, but some clients and services (especially iStock) require pixel perfect images. Like I said, it’s not a huge issue – I just wan’t Aperture to be number 1.

2. Automatic Scaling Of Brush Masks. If you make presets or use presets a lot you will probably want this. One of the things you may have noticed if you use brushes in your presets, is that when you move from an image from one camera to another with a different pixel count, the brushed adjustments don’t scale, so you’re left with hard edges. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, you probably want this feature too.

3. Better Vignette Controls. I love vignettes. They add focus and dimensions to images and used creatively they can be great. I hate Aperture’s vignette controls. They are basic and limiting and are not much use creatively. Compared to the vignette tools in virtually every other piece of software they are woefully underpowered. Hopefully Apple will add something comparable to Lightroom’s Post Crop Vignette or even better, Nik’s vignette controls (from its plugins)

4. Better Social Media Integration. I would love to see Aperture integrate better into the various social media sites. Now that Mobile Me is dead, I think it’s important that they add more sharing options. Twitter sharing is noticeably absent. Facebook pages need to be supported too. I would mention google plus support but I can’t see that happening. 500px support would be nice too. Of course the obvious thing to do would be to make the sharing section extensible via a plugin, which would solve all problems.

Long Shots but Would Be Awesome

1. iBook Authoring. How cool would it be if Apple took the book module one step further and enabled you to create photo books for the iPad directly within Aperture? Ok, I could be dreaming here, but it seems like the next logical step.

2. Extensible Rendering Engine. This isn’t going to happen but one could dream. Imagine the actual raw conversion could be given an Api and you could allow plug-ins to replace the raw processing part of the Adjustments tree. I know this sounds far fetched, but I don’t think it’s entirely impossible. As it stands, RAW conversion is handled by the OS so Aperture is calling those routines. Theoretically, it would be possible to allow a plug-in to do this. You’re probably wondering what the advantages of this are, but think of it this way: manufacturers could write their own Raw conversions engines. Cameras that weren’t supported could be supported by the developers themselves or by some third party. It’s highly unlikely to happen, but one can dream !

Anyway, that’s my thoughts on the subject for now. Feel free to chime in in the comments, or head on over to the Forums if you want to discuss it further.

Related posts:

1. Editorial: Brushes, Aperture’s Secret Weapon
2. Aperture Road Trip (Or How I got on running aperture on a MacBook Air)

Here’s a link to the plug-ins I used in this Video:

PT-Lens

Sharpener Pro

Color Efex Pro 4

Related posts:

1. Video: Silver Efex Pro 2 Walk Through
2. Video: Show the Adjustments and Metadata Panels Together
3. Video: Reconnecting Moved Masters

I’ve got the beta of the the Forums up and running. For the initial phase I was accepting members by invite only but now I’m opening it up to anyone who wants to take part. Simply head over to community.theapertureblog.com and follow the sign up process. You’ll be asked to confirm your email before being accepted. This is an anti spam measure and your email won’t be used for anything other than the forum.

Also, it’s still in the testing phase so your posts may get deleted if there are issues and I need to reset it, but it seems pretty solid at the moment. With all that’s happening in the photography world right now it’s a good time to get some discussions going.

As with any forums, I ask you all to please play nice.

Related posts:

1. Raw Support Broken for Panasonic GH2
2. A New Look for the New Year
3. Aperture 3 vs Lightroom 3 Beta 2 Noise Reduction

On Sunday I came very close to a disaster here on the Aperture blog. I awoke to a nice tweet from someone on my Twitter list wondering what had happened to the blog. So I went online to check and sure enough, where the homepage once was, a 404 page was coming up. What the hell? I logged into the back end and all the posts and pages were gone. Again, what the hell ?

So, long story short, the database had crashed, for some bizarre reason and the table that had contained the Posts and pages was corrupt and nothing I could do would fix it. Luckily, and it’s a sheer fluke, I had installed a plug-in ages ago to back up my database and theme to dropbox every few days. Restoring the database was a nightmare, as the database is so big now that I couldn’t restore it using the web interface and had to do it through the command line. Luckily I have some unix experience from several years of working on Silicon Graphic workstations some years ago.

Anyway, the site is back up now, and I don’t think I lost anything other than a few comments (so if your comments are missing, apologies). It has thought me a valuable lesson though. You never know what might happen to your data. I never thought I would have a problem like this with wordpress but there you go. The same could easily happen to your Aperture library (that has also happened to me!), so you should always try and have a backup of some kind.

Related posts:

1. Some Updates, and a Note About Comments