Digitalopia

I have always had an interest in the features that can be produced using specialist Tilt Shift lenses. Available from both Canon and Nikon, they allow the photographer to make tilt and shift adjustments relative to the image plane. However, these lenses are very expensive unless you will be specializing in this area. Even the cheaper Lensbaby is still expensive if, like me you only want to experiment with the techniques. However, there is a cheaper alternative using Adobe Photoshop.

Tilt shift photographs can produce some interesting results, making the image seem like it is in miniature.

Even though the effect is produced entirely in software, it can produce some amazing results. I have included some links to galleries at the end of this article. You will be amazed at what can be produced, and it shows that I have a long way to go …

This article was inspired by the great tutorial from Receding Hairline. Many thanks for the great work you have put into producing that article.

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Over the coming weeks I will be publishing a rang of articles covering each of the available Mac hardware platforms and looking at their applicability to digital photography.

We cannot all afford Mac Pro’s, so I will be trying to aim the discussions towards the target market for that particular platform. So rather than give any bias towards the more expensive Apple models, I will try to provide the key strengths and weaknesses for that platform.

The main areas I will be focusing on are:

• Performance and Capacity - how well does the hardware manage with the more intensive requirements of applications such as Aperture and Photoshop
• Expandability - can the hardware be expanded to accommodate increased performance or storage requirements
• Screen Size and Quality - if a screen is provided, how well does it perform when editing photos

If you are currently looking for a new Apple, I hope we can help to provide some good arguments for and against the various options you have.

In the previous article ‘iPhoto - Emailing Your Photos, we covered the method for sending photos using Mail directly from iPhoto. This feature is also available in Aperture, and whilst it will not be as widely used, it is worthwhile including.

We first need to set up our email preferences. Unlike iPhoto, these can be found in the main application preferences. Also unlike iPhoto, there are a wider number of options available. Start by opening the Aperture -> Preferences… menu and selecting the Export tab.

The Email images using drop down allows you to choose between the default Mail, Microsoft Entourage, Eudora and America Online. The other options are only available if the respective application has been installed on your Mac.

The Email Export Preset drop down allows you to choose from a wide range of image formats and sizes, including JPG, PNG, PSD ad TIFF. Aperture has included 3 defaults for emails, Email Small, Email Medium and Email Original Size, and these would typically be used.

Clicking the Edit… button allows you to adjust the default Aperture set of export presets.

To send a photo as an email, you simply select the photo from your library and choose the File -> Email… menu. This will create a mail message with the selected photo(s) embedded using the image settings selected earlier. As with iPhoto, multiple photos can also be selected.

With Aperture 2, Apple have further integrated Aperture into Mac OS X, giving an even more seamless experience.

One of the easiest ways of sharing your iPhoto photos is using email. The integration of the iPhoto (and the other iLife applications) with Mail gives you a seamless way of send photos using email. If you want to quickly send photos to family and friends, iPhoto offers a quick and painless approach.

To start, select the photo(s) that you wish to email. If you wish to select photos across multiple photo albums, you will need to select each album whilst holding down the Apple key. This adds each album’s photos to the current view, allowing you to scroll through the albums in a single page.

Selecting the Share -> Email menu will bring up the Mail Photo preferences.

The Size drop-down allows you to change the size of the photos to be sent. Note that iPhoto will always use JPEG images, even if all of your photos are RAW. The Large (Higher Quality) option is selected by default. The other available options are Medium, Small (Faster Downloading), and Actual Size (Full Quality). The preferences dialog also includes an estimate of the size of the photos when attached to the email and the option to include either the photos title or comments.

Clicking Compose will temporarily display a Preparing photos for email message as iPhoto will perform any necessary image resizing. A Mail message will be created with the photos embedded within (including any titles and comments if requested.) You can now add contacts and update the default subject as normal.

The integration between the iPhoto applications and Mail allows you to easily attach photos to email messages without the inconvenience of exporting to a temporary location and them attaching to the email message.

This article is part of a series where I will cover the image adjustment features of iPhoto. Many users do not make full use of the adjustments offered by iPhoto. With iPhoto 08, Apple has introduced image adjustments that were usually only previously found in professional image editing applications.

Saturation, Temperature & Tint

The Saturation, Temperature & Tint controls are focused upon adjusting the image colors.

Saturation - Saturation describes the richness of the color in your photo.

Temperature - Temperature describes the coolness or warmth of the colors in your photo. Temperature is also used to define white balance in RAW images.

Tint - Tint describes an overall color cast in your photo.

For most image editing requirements, these adjustments should provide you with a very complete set of color adjustment tools. It should be noted that these tools operate on the whole photo. I have been in situations where I only wish to adjust a part of the image. In these cases, a more advanced image editing tool, such as Apple Aperture or Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop is required.

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In a move that may confuse some people, Adobe have announced that the next release of Photoshop CS4 will be 64-bit for Windows, but only 32-bit for the Mac.

Digging deeper into the story reveals it is linked to Apple’s recent announcement that they will no longer be developing a 64-bit version of Carbon, and will concentrate instead on Cocoa. Carbon and Cocoa are 2 Mac API’s for developing OSX applications. Apple has been trying to drop Carbon support for some time and fully concentrate on Cocoa. However, many applications that have been available on the Mac for a long time were originally developed using Carbon (as Cocoa is a relatively new API). This has previously impacted Microsoft, who had to update large parts of Microsoft Office 2008, and now Adobe has indicated that they would need to update or review up to a million lines of code to be fully Cocoa compliant. Obviously a tall order, and it seems that they may well take a few versions of Photoshop to complete the migration.

A very thorough description and analysis can be found over at CNET.

The biggest issue that will face photographers is the ever-growing size of image files. With a 32-bit operating system, only 4GB can be used by a single application. It is not unknown for Photoshop to use much more memory when working with images with multiple layers. Also, as more Mac’s may be able to support 8GB or 16GB of memory in a couple of years, such a restriction may be too much for some Mac users.

This article is part of a series where I will cover the image adjustment features of iPhoto. Many users do not make full use of the adjustments offered by iPhoto. With iPhoto 08, Apple has introduced image adjustments that were usually only previously found in professional image editing applications.

Highlights & Shadows

The highlights can be considered the lighter areas of a photo. However, it should not be confused with the overall brightness of a photo, as when you adjust the highlights it does not change the overall brightness of the photo, but concentrates the adjustment on areas considered to be highlights, leaving the lower and mid tones alone. It is easier to understand after you have made highlight adjustments on a couple of photos. Increasing the highlights will darken the highlights, that has the effect of increasing the detail in the highlighted areas.

Shadows are the converse of highlights. Adjusting the shadows will adjust the darker areas of the photo, whilst leaving the mid and high tones alone. Increasing the shadow will lighten the shadow areas, that has the effect of increasing the detail in the shadow areas.

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Adobe have announced the public availability of Lightroom 2 beta. Hot on the heels of the Aperture 2 release, Adobe has included some very interesting features, such as localized editing (as per Aperture Edit API and the Dodge & Burn plugin), multiple monitor support and 64-bit support.

One feature that is causing a lot of discussion on the Internet is Lightroom’s implementation of localized editing. With Aperture 2 (using the Dodge & Burn plugin as an example), Aperture generates a TIFF image that is passed to the plug-in. Updates are destructively saved to the TIFF image at the pixel level when the plug-in is saved, rather than storing them as separate metadata to the RAW image (as per the other adjustments available through the main Aperture interface.) However, Lightroom extends its non-destructive architecture to support localized editing that does not require an additional TIFF image, with the changes stored as metadata alongside the original RAW image.

I am not convinced that the approach taken by Apple is the best way to implement plug-ins, as I would have preferred for the plug-ins to be fully embedded into the Aperture workflow. Also, there is no way to make changes to the plug-in’s effects or to undo the changes of a plug-in (other than delete the generated TIFF), so you will need to be careful when applying edits early in the workflow, as reverting back to an earlier image will remove all changes made subsequent to the plug-in.

It is not clear how long the beta period will last before the full version 2 release. Adobe takes a different approach to software releases (especially with Lightroom), where they will release a number of beta versions before launching the final version. Apple only typically releases full software versions, with beta testing performed internally and by a select few chosen users.

The Adobe Lightroom beta is available here. Note that the version 2 beta will not update an existing version 1 library and is only valid for 30 days if you are not already a Lightroom user.

For further details of the changes in Adobe Lightroom 2, please refer to the Release Notes.

This may be common knowledge, but I found a real gem when researching my iPhoto Adjustment articles.

When you are adjusting an image using the Adjust HUD, if you press the Shift key, iPhoto will display the original image before the adjustments were made. This is a really quick way of previewing your changes and seeing what changes they have made to the original photo.

We have so far covered the Levels Adjustments and the Exposure & Contrast Adjustments. We will be covering the other available iPhoto adjustments in upcoming articles.

This article is part of a series where I will cover the image adjustment features of iPhoto. Many users do not make full use of the adjustments offered by iPhoto. With iPhoto 08, Apple has introduced image adjustments that were usually only previously found in professional image editing applications.

Exposure & Contrast

The exposure adjustment controls the overall lightness and darkness of the image. Similar to its meaning when taking a photo, a low exposure describes a darker image and a high exposure describes a lighter image. Even though the exposure adjustment can change the overall exposure of an image, it will not add any detail lost if the original image was either under (too dark) or over (too light) exposed. You should always be trying to take shots that are correctly exposed, ensuring that maximum detail has been captured.

The contrast adjustment changes the differences between the lightness and darkness of the image. By increasing the contrast, the lighter parts of the image become lighter and the darker parts become darker. Conversely, if you decrease the contrast, the differences between lighter and darker parts of the image decreases.

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