aperture

Links for 2011-02-28 through 2011-03-04

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Links for 2011-02-28 through 2011-03-04:

  • Legendary game maker Graeme Devine on iPad game development pitfalls – Even seasoned, large iOS developers have dropped into the unfortunate habit of simply scaling up the graphics in their games but leaving interface and other game elements untouched – and from Devine’s perspective, this is a huge mistake. — this is a mistake we made with Removr.
  • APP ICON TEMPLATE – Photoshop template & actions to create iOS icons
  • Aperture Presets –
  • How to Make Anything Signify Anything – Detail from a photograph of World War I cryptographers trained by William and Elizebeth Friedman, Aurora, Illinois, early 1918. By facing either forward or sideways, the soldiers formed a coded phrase utilizing Francis Bacon’s biliteral cipher.
  • Jeybee – Taking the Advantage with App Store Screenshots – Forget your app description for now, because 90% (80? 70?) of viewers will be doing the same. Apple knows this, and it is evident in the iTunes store. They only show a single line of your description, keeping the screenshots in view on any resolution. You see a similar thing in the iPad store. I suspect the only reason the iPhone store is any different is that the current setup is familiar to millions of people.

Posted by Postilicious

iPhoto 09 vs. Aperture

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After trying iPhoto 09 for a few days, I’ve decided to go back to Aperture for several reasons. Although I like iPhoto’s faces & places feature, it’s still missing many of Apertures features. Hopefully faces & places will be added to Aperture 3.

Here are my favorite Aperture features that are missing from iPhoto:

  • Aperture lets you store your photos outside of the library, even when importing from a camera. Aperture also lets you move your originals at any time after it’s been imported. I like to keep my originals on an external drive to save room. Even with my originals offline, Aperture still lets me see previews and do anything that doesn’t require a high resolution image, such as set desktop or sync with iPod or iPhone.
  • Aperture gives you a lot more power & flexibility in selecting and organizing photos. You can group similar photos in a stack and view them side by side to choose the best of the group.
  • Aperture supports editing plugins such as Hydra HDR, which can avoid a trip to Photoshop in many cases.
  • Aperture gives more options for viewing & editing metadata, including the ability to embed a copyright notice.
  • Aperture gives more layout options for viewing your photos, including thumbnails only, thumbnails plus large photo, and list view plus large photo.
  • Aperture lets you maintain multiple versions of a photo as well as the original, so you can try different edits.

Aperture tip: track photos uploaded to Flickr

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I don’t know if this is documented anywhere, but I found that it’s possible to create a smart album to track photos that have been uploaded to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin.

Smart Settings: Uploaded to Flickr (Photowalk 2)
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

FlickrExport adds a metadata tag with the Flickr URL when it uploads a photo. When you create a smart album, one criteria you can use is ‘other metadata’, which you can select from the ‘+’ popup in the top right of the window. One of the metadata options will be ‘Flickr URL’. Choosing Flickr URL is not empty will select all photos which have been uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, ‘is empty’ will select photos which haven’t been uploaded. Combining these options with star ratings make it easy to choose photos to upload when you have a lot of them.

Using that trick I managed to finish going through the rest of my photowalk photos and uploaded many more today.

Beach Access

Watermark

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The Watermark plugin is fully working. I’m now working on the documentation and I hope to release it in a day or so.

Baby Bird

Here’s my first official copyright marked picture, which I took today. This baby bird is nesting outside my neighbor’s window.

Plugin Progress

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I had a chance to do a lot more work on my watermark plugin this weekend and I made lots of progress. Most functions work, but I still need a few days of QA & testing before I can release it.

Success!
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Black Star Rising tells why you should add your name and copyright notice when posting a photo, which is the reason I wrote this. I noticed that almost all of the pictures by the professionals from last week’s photowalk have a copyright notice, so I wanted to make it easier to do with Aperture.

HDR plugin for Aperture

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Creaceed has released a new version of Hydra, which includes a new HDR plugin for Aperture 2.1.

It doesn’t offer as many options as Photomatix, but the results are very nice. These were created with the same source images I had previously processed with Photoshop and the Photomatix plugin. The results look very natural, although it can’t produce some of the more extreme effects.

Hydra HDR

HDR Aperture Plugin

Aging Photos

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I really like the aged photo effect you can create at this Japanese website, so I attempted to duplicate the effect in Photoshop. These pictures I took in San Francisco last year seemed to be a good subject.

For my first attempt, I used the Aperture 2.1’s sepia tone & vignette effects and then used Photoshop’s film grain filter. The result was a little too bright and didn’t really look aged enough.

IMG_4573.JPG.jpg

Finally, I got an effect I really like with a few Photoshop actions. I used the Sepia Tone Grayscale action, the Spatter Frame action, and the add noise filter.

IMG_4572.JPG.jpg

Here’s the original version of the second photo.

IMG_4572.JPG original.jpg