Answer the following question for yourself – why do you take pictures? Really – why? Family or personal memories, recording historical evidence of things near and dear to you? Yes okay – probably pretty important maybe the most important reason to make photographs. Fantastic – what if what is near and dear to you is of interest to other people – even better because you now have an audience – if it is a big audience this might allow you to just do that thing and all will be well in the world. Can we agree on the above – the “near and dear part”? Let’s call that class 1 images no matter how “good” they are and no matter what size your audience for those are.  It really does not matter what the subject matter is – if the audience size is one or the world – those images are important.

Let’s move down the list to images of things that interest you in some way. Doesn’t matter what the subject matter is – just that it interests you. The subject – not the end result of you making an image of the subject but the subject of the image in and of itself. In other words you would pay attention to what is in front of you and spend time doing so even if you had no agenda to make an image of some sort. The difference is that these subjects are not in the “near and dear” category. Of course they may also be interesting and relevant to other people as well. Let’s call these class 2 images.

Down another notch is making images of subjects where you are way way more interested in the result you will achieve by making the image rather than the subject of the image itself. Now I was very specific in this description – I did not say NO interest in the subject – I said less interested in the subject than the result of you making the image. Let’s say that can range from zero interest to right up to the point where it hits the same interest as the end result. Let’s call these class 3 images.

Yes I know that was long and wordy – sorry about that. I do need to add one more condition to the above classifications. All of those classifications can have similar audiences and be equally as profitable – keyword is “can” but… The differentiator which is entirely a personal thing is that you absolutely would probably not be spending your time on class #3 type images if there was no reward in the end result – usually money but sometimes other currencies. Class #1 on the other hand is something you would be spending time on no matter what – images no images, reward or not. Finally Class #2 is hmmm, a maybe category maybe you would maybe you wouldn’t be spending time on the subject if there were no image making involved – maybe you would – maybe there is some external reward for making the images you make maybe there isn’t.

If we can agree above on the three arbitrary but general categories I have described then let’s move on to assign “commercial” endeavors – this is where you make money from your images. This has nothing to do with classification 1, 2 or 3. It has to do with a personal evaluation because all of three have commercial potential – I did not nor would I assign a specific subject to a classification – it is all about your personal relationship to the images you shoot. Here is a secret – the vast majority of professionals make their living on class #3 images. I am not saying that they would rather be a ditch digger 0r a bank executive – maybe they would maybe they wouldn’t but I can say that most of them make a living shooting class #3 subjects as related to themselves. Here is why – the market defines what you shoot and how you shoot it. The end.

There are a handful of photographers that make a living shooting class #2 images – they are very very lucky. If you make your living doing anything that could be class #2 subject matter you have it made in the shade and if you don’t you are in the same boat as 90%+ too bad. There are very very very few people that make a living making class #1 image or doing class #1 anything – images are even tougher than other endeavors for a multitude of reasons.

If you do photography for the joy of it I would suggest you really really think through why the heck you would waste your time on anything remotely close to class #3 subject matter – further more I would suggest that you really examine how you treat (in terms of production, post  production, and presentation) the class #1 and class #2 images you decide to make and why you do what you do with them. They can serve a number of purposes – illustration of a story, instructional, evidentiary, documentary, or “art”. Of course they can serve more than one purpose.

OOoops there is that word I warned you about – “ART”. Means a lot of different things to a lot of different people – to some it is an “investment” and the investment part is what imbues the “value”. To others it’s exclusivity and the rarity is what makes it “valuable” to them – for others it is decorative in the sense that there is some aesthetic reason for it’s existence as an object that may not be wholly dependent on it’s own individual beauty or meaning but more part of the decor. Then there are thought precesses of art as beauty or meaning that is intertwined in some strange way.

If we take that last thought there are two schools of thought on “art” one that says the beauty and meaning is in the who and how,when, and the context of the object’s making – not the object itself. The other is that the “art” is the object itself – as in what it looks like, what it is made out of, etc. No matter which school you subscribe to or a little bit of both you have to admit that a “reproduction” of such an object – no matter where it obtains it’s value or how you define it’s “artfulness” – the reproduction is somehow lesser than the real object. In fact I would go so far as to say that the espousers of the second school are a little wrong-headed, not my judgement, just my observation in none of those that subscribe to this put “value” on a reproduction – even a “perfect” reproduction. How can that be – you mean that even the object speaks for itself and has nothing to do with the artist people do not value perfect reproductions the same? Hmmm. There is a flaw in that thought process somehow, isn’t there?

All of those words – just to bring the conversation to this point. I would go so far as to say that the only context a reproduction of “art” has is as a representation of the original if it has meaning and beauty as art in the first school of thought – who, how, when, effort, context, tools, medium, etc – not as a perfect or imperfect reproduction of the object itself. That brings us to the philosophical question of digital simulations of things that are not inherent in the digital image capture medium itself and where they belong in your personal photographic endeavors.

For class #3 images anything goes and anything is valid – for the most part they are ephemeral in nature they exist for one purpose only – to do a job and they they are disposable for both producers and consumers of those images when that purpose is done. The market dictates where things like digital grain simulations, and brushstrokes, etc, etc are “appropriate”.

For class #1 and class #2 images that we make I really really question the utility, the purpose, and the motivation of the producer in the simulation of anything that is not inherent in the chosen capture and presentation medium. Digitally simulated grain? For what purpose? I am serious. If I want to go further maybe digital “Black and White” maybe not but it would be an interesting topic to discuss. Is it for purely decorative or “artistic” value? If it is then why not just use the medium that has those inherent properties? We are talking about class #1 and class #2 images here – not class #3. Is the motivation that they are personal art works? The subject is of interest to you and on top of that you feel the need to simulate some other properties it might have had if you have used another medium? Why? Are you trying to fool yourself or other people into beliving there is some sort of history or context or effort in the making of the “art” that there is not? Why does that make it better to you?  I am not making fun of anyone that does these things. It is a question I continue to wrestle with myself – for now I do not produce any end product that I consider class #1 or class #2 images to anyone anywhere for pleasure or profit that contain any simulations not inherent in the capture or delivery medium until I get to the bottom of this question for myself. I would love to hear others thought process on this – with the exception of class #3 images – market directed.

That brings me to digital “fine-art” photographers and why I make fun of this endeavor. I mock because I do not understand it’s motivation, it’s goal, most of it’s subject matter, and the objects that are produced under this umbrella – with almost no exception the images produced simulate the characteristics of other mediums and therefor make absolutely no sense in ether school of thought on “art”, they use a self imposed label of “fine-ART” but seem to possess no characteristics that make art worth much – either school of thought, and that seems to me to fall into class #3 images because the primary motivation of production seems to be to sell prints.  I am still waiting for someone to explain how they don’t. But… But… The object – C’est magnifique – well only in the sense that a CNC, laser produced machine part will blow the crap out of the finest 15th century craftsmanship but it is not the same thing as a renaissance sculpture in terms of an object d’art. Sort of defeats the whole purpose does it not? Pointless?

I will wrap this never ending 2000 word post up with a question, I have asked a few so far and really would love to hear your answers. This one is more of a multiple choice on so it’s easy.

RB

Being the ever color vigilant – I noticed something about the updates for the latest greatest ACR (supported versions) on some (not all Nikon NEF files). I am going to show you a camera that is near and dear to my heart and one that now seems to be broken – from my earlier testing and memory – it used to work in ACR 4.5, and 5 – The D200.

Let’s take a look at three quick and dirty conversions, first up is the gold standard NX2 rendering daylight WB (not as shot) and Picture Control Standard.

Next up is ACR 5 using the same profiles, and daylight WB applied -updated with the latest updates – ooops what happened?

Finally Aperture 3 with my patented D200 NEF presets and my ultra secret sauce daylight WB preset.

Hmmm – looks like my way is now the winner. Maybe I should work on the presets some more like with curves vs the brightness/contrast sliders and start charging like ten bucks

RB

My other complaint was that I really didn’t like the way the grain simulation engine worked – from a perspective of the defaults that are built into each film simulation and far more importantly I really would like a better way to tell the software – or for the software to determine how much grain their should be. To summarize – there is no real “scale” to the grain. You absolutely need to treat the grain simulation entirely on two factors – one how many pixels your image actually has – and how big a print you are making. The other thing I didn’t really declare as perfect was that the simulation didn’t really work the way real grain does – I will say it is by far the closest thing out there.

That summarizes what I have written about Silver EFX Pro’s grain simulation and film simulations – so why do I bring this up? Well… A reader that consumed all of that as well as my rants on how wonderful film is and why you need to treat it intelligently when you digitize it and scale it in a very very nice way told me that it would be freaking nice if I said something productive instead of just complaining. Okay – so I will show you and then let you know how I deal with some issues of grain simulation – I will take Silver EFX Pro first, rather than film since I am sure that is the more productive conversation.

Here is a 100% view of real Kodak TRI-X processed in D-76 by me:

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Here is an image captured on a DSLR 100% processed with Silver EFX Pro’s TRI-X simulation:

Now – when I say 100% that can mean a lot of things – in this case it means that I upres’ed the digital image to the same pixel dimensions as the film scan and then ran the Silver EFX Pro simulation – why did I do this? Because if I didn’t it would not be a fair comparison. The relative grain to deal would be lower. In other words the grain would be proportionally BIGGER to the image detail because the Silver EFX Pro’s complete dependency on the original image pixel dimensions (remember this is something that I criticized). You might say – no RB you are wrong – because that is not what the grain engine says it is doing… I say to you – No you are wrong think about the grain per pixel thing for a couple of more minutes and then get back to me. Better yet let me show you.

Here is the TRI-X simulation run on a full size (same size as 35mm film scanned at 4000 DPI or about 25 megapixels) and then resized to approximately 4×6 on your monitor.

Here is the image resized to 4×6 on your monitor and THEN the TRI-X simulation is run on that smaller image:

Whoa… Wot? Okay it is exaggerated a little bit because the image I sent in was really small but it exaggerates the problem that I have been talking about. The image size you start with TOTALLY dictates what the grain simulation effects are.

Assuming you are following this so far let’s evaluate the real TRI-X scan vs the simulation. Depending on how picky you are you can evaluate it one of two ways as visually presented. For arguments sake let’s say you are not super picky and we’ll say – “hey it’s not too bad – in fact it is pretty close”. Okay it is pretty good but that is ONLY because the digital capture is now the equivalent of 25 megapixels – if you are shooting at say a more reasonable 12-15 it is going to be far far exaggerated as compared to the detail size in the image. Hold that thought for a second and also consider that to a large degree that digital resizing works the opposite of optical resizing. There are some things that work the same but when it comes to grain downsizing the image for display actually exaggerates the grain. It does this in areas of the image where the grain has relatively high contrast because it keeps those high contrast pixels and throws out the low contrast pixels that are the same – this is because to render things you CANNOT get smaller then a pixel, even though the grain is only a pixel or two across at 40x magnification it stays the same size even as the image gets resized smaller.

So what does this translate into in the real world of displaying images? It boils down to this – There is no one size fits all setting that works on ANY ONE image let alone across all images of differing input sizes. There are dependencies that need to be taken into account and different simulation settings. They are:

1. Input image pixel dimensions.
2. Output image apparent magnification (you can use the word size but it is really size vs. what size you want to seem like you started with 35mm, MF, LF?)
3. Output resolution/ppi/dpi

The bottom line is that you will need different settings for print vs screen at any given real image dimensions and those settings will vary tremendously based on the pixel dimensions of the original image you started with (4 mpix, 6mpix, 12mpix, 24mpix?)

If you were expecting a one shot recipe that you could stamp all over your images – sorry but that is impossible for me to deliver given the workings of the software at this point. I can give you some general guidance – compared to real life film. If you are working with 25 megapixel starting images the settings are almost right assuming you are comparing 35mm film. I would say they may be a little overboard  but it depends on real world processing factors that can only be speculated on. You be the judge based on the two images I showed you. They are way way too much for medium format and larger at similar pixel densities. So… If you are starting with less pixels and/or you are trying to simulate larger formats of film – you need LESS and smaller grain in the simulation.

I say all of that in the context of making prints where your real output resolution is at or above 300ppi. Images to be displayed at web sizes on the screen require far less grain for the given film sizes – the issue is that what settings are appropriate are highly image and resize method dependent.

Someday I wish Nik would provide parameters that are conceptually similar to what they have done with Sharpen Pro vs what they have with Silver EFX Pro at the moment. Maybe something like film format, output magnification, and output medium or ppi. The the software could render the appropriate grain simulation taking into account what you were after. You could spec something like 35mm, 8x (8×10), print (vs monitor). Nik would take over and render the appropriate grain simulation based on film type and give you an image that looked appropriate no matter what you input image size was.

Hope this was at all helpful to any fellow Silver EFX Pro fans/users.

RB

Ps – yet another reason I run Nik filters in PS on smart objects.

A few people have emailed me about my last post to 1) thank me for pointing out the obvious – they were using BOTH Aperture plug-ins AND Photoshop – duhhhh and 2) Ask me my thoughts on CS5. Especially since I advised waiting – at least in the context of using it as a filter consolidation platform – as I do for the most part – namely with Nik Software. It is pretty useless if your filters/plug-ins are still 32bit. They wanted to know what I thought overall.

Here is the short version – I think it will be a worthwhile upgrade when all the pieces come together. I think the content aware fill is awesome – sort of wipes out a lot of what we all learned to do the hard way or the “right way”. Amazing stuff for panos and such. What I cannot stand is the stability of it – or lack there of. If you complained about Aperture 3 – brace yourself. Both people that wrote me experienced the same issues as I did. Specifically it only runs for about 5 minutes, if that, before unpredictably consuming all available memory.

All of us running OS X 10.6.3 and 10.6.4 – doesn’t matter. Here is how it goes – open up CS5 on a small 100Meg-ish image file, everything is fine memory stabilizes with CS5 using about 200-300 Megs, add a curves layer, maybe another one – everything fine still about the same. Select a new tool over in the toolbar or bring up a dialog – lots of seemingly random dialogs like say the new HDR toning, or color picker, or the lasso tool, with no seeming rhyme or reason – bam – CS5 is now gobbling down 3G of REAL ram with a giant virtual foot print for no apparent reason.

So three people that I talked to in the last hour have seen this – why is it not all over the web? Is it and my google is not working or something?

Anyone else know what is going on with CS5? For the most part I am sticking to CS4 for now.

RB

Being a Nikon digital shooter since the way way back time of a decade ago, I am very familiar with Nikon Capture – as ugly as it was, it has grown over the years and it’s current incarnation is NX2. Capture NX2 is not a supreme work-flow tool but it did give me an introduction to Nik Software’s control points because they are built in. After using them you become extremely spoiled and do not ever want to use a brush again for masking – nor anything else. At least not for the most part. Having been active in fashion and commercial photography I am no slouch when it comes to Photoshop either. Enter Nik Viveza and then Nik Silver EFX Pro, and then Nik DFine, and then Nik Sharpener. You get the idea. I love them all but…

I do not use the Aperture plug-ins. I use the Photoshop plug-ins. I do this not only because I own Photoshop but also because it is a far far better work-flow than using the Aperture plug-ins. If you have ANY need for Photoshop or even if you don’t but use more than one image filter in any frequent way on the same image what I am about to say might be for you.

My work-flow for just about any image that requires localized corrections and ANY image tilter like Viveza or Silver EFX Pro, or anything else is ALWAYS – “edit with…” CS4 from Aperture. The reason I do this is two primary factors – space efficiency and work-flow efficiency. All of my local adjustments and filters are packaged into just one 16-bit PSD that is only a little bit bigger than EACH AND EVERY file you create if you use more than one Aperture plug-in. The second and bigger reason is that I immediately create a smart object in Photoshop CS4 that does a couple things – it is a bit of a space saver for filters vs. multiple bitmapped layers and better yet every single thing I do is saved and can be tweaked without having to re-invent the wheel to go back in my work-flow.

Now that Aperture 3 is 64bit and Nik plug-ins are still 32bit I am even more glad that I choose to do this vs struggling with switching modes and all the issues of running 32bit plug-ins in Aperture 3. That brings me to my next point about the state of affairs with Nik plug-ins, Aperture 3, Photoshop CS5, and any other 32bit plug-ins you might already have. If you are wondering what do to about upgrades, etc. JUST STOP for a second and consider the following.

CS5 is 64bit but a whole lot of plug-ins, including NIk’s are 32bit. They can work but not well – they actually have MORE memory space under CS4. If you are going to upgrade seriously consider waiting for your plug-ins to be 64bit before doing so. If you own Nik’s 32bit plug-ins for Aperture seriously consider buying the 64bit versions of PHOTOSHOP plug-ins rather than upgrading your Aperture plug-ins. If I am right Nik is going to charge a bundle for the 64-bit upgrade for existing customers – they always do. Do yourself another favor – nag the crap out of them to allow you to “upgrade” your Aperture plugins to Photoshop plug-ins for some fee. This is not an available option last time I checked but I do know of some few that were successful in convincing Nik to allow this – don’t know the details.

My own plan is to upgrade my CS4 to CS5 when the Nik plug-ins are 64bit unless I have a really really good reason to do it sooner. I would have about 3 years ago or 10 years ago when my giant film scans were active work but now I scan only a little bit of film – I can wait.

RB

Ps. Attached is stupid ass cloud image snapped with D2H and processed with Silver EFX Pro

The main points of her inquiries can be summarized as follows:

• Why do I hate digital – considering I use it and write about it and obviously know the digital world so well.
• Why do I hate speedlights, built-in flash, and for that matter just about any little portable flash units.
• Why do I hate HDR
• Why do I hate new cameras and innovations.

I will take these point by point but first I want to say that I don’t hate any of them – not one. I can see how one would think that I do based on quite a few flippant remarks and asides woven throughout the site – especially if you do not know me and we have never spoken. In general I would have to say I take the devil’s advocate’s position on what I would lump into the category of silver bullets, the emperor’s new clothes, over-hyped technical solutions to problems that don’t exist, over complication, and last but not least – snake oil salesmen that prey on the faithful in need of a cure.

Let’s cover digital first. This obviously is in the context of film vs. digital. I don’t hate digital, I am not an either or person. I just love film in certain contexts and applications. A lot of film has an inherent beauty that digital just does not reproduce – it has a different “look”. I bring this up a lot because I feel it is important if you have a love of photography that you find some way to experience using film. I do this because the vast majority of people that I run into in 2010 that are photography enthusiasts have never really experienced film in a meaningful way, if at all.

I love the fact that more people are actually “into’ making good photographs because of digital – the downside is that they really don’t have an appreciation of film and some of it’s wonderfulness. That wonderfulness extending to some things that are considered weaknesses. Yep – limited exposures, time to process, one ISO, less options for the treatment of color, actually choosing and knowing that you are shooting either color or black and white at capture time, grain, all of that stuff can be strengths and either teach or bring back an appreciation of subtlety. That last one – tiny, minuscule differences are one of the essential things that make or break a photograph – hopelessly lost in the age of digital where wild swings in color, saturation, sharpness, contrast, etc. are the norm. I don’t think most people can even evaluate subtle differences any more. In my book this is a bad thing.

Moving right along to portable/small/built-in flash. I don’t hate them either. I hate that built-in, autoflash, in the worst possible position has become the default. I think the default ruins most pictures people take. I think that the default makes people extremely lazy where they don’t even think about the actual light in the scene anymore.

Here is where it get’s really complicated. I also believe that most great images out there taken by ANYONE are not lit in anyway but ambient conditions.  After making hundreds of thousands of photographs both professionally and personally combined with my own viewing experience from masters to my mom – I think the best photographs employ only ambient light. This doesn’t mean that there is not a place for “lit” photographs – of course there is. I made a living from this for 7 years. In fact some photographic endeavors are best served via strobe either aesthetically or practically or both. The other reason I pooh-pooh the current little light craze is because I think there are way too many people that know better purveying a bunch of nonsense for profit reasons – in other words telling people to do exactly the wrong thing to achieve a set of results – TTL automation, off-camera lights, expensive battery powered small units to achieve results that are easier, less expensive and better via manual large strobes.

HDR – now here is a topic that is sure to win me a curmudgeon of the year award. This one ranks right up there with things I consider wayward fashion trends that took too long to go away. I could be wrong here but I think HDR will go the way of the dodo bird real soon. Don’t take this the wrong way – I mean HDR as it sits now – with that nasty Photomatix software and such things. When someone says HDR what they really mean is Photomatix or something just like it.

The act of translating the very very contrasty world onto a piece of paper has been in existence since cavemen started drawing on cave walls. Painters do it – good painters to it very very well. Black and white photographers have ALWAYS done it – black and white film captures an amazing amount if information. Slide film shooters and digital guys do it and always have with graduated filters and balanced fill light of sorts. Even digital guys do it with multiple exposures long before the advent of automatic blending nonsense like Photomatix. In fact I think some of the multi-exposure composites I have seen are fantastic – I linked to a guy that does this a long time ago – I think I titled it “HDR done right” or something.

By the way – the choices of what goes black what goes white, where there is detail, where there is not, where there is high midtone contrast and where there is low contrast is the art of making a photograph – both at time of capture and when it comes to making a print. The HDR that I hate – and I do hate it is the rubbish that I see run through Photomatix et, al. Yea I know, I know, we will all agree on the generality of “good” and “bad” HDR but I am going to go further – it is all rubbish. I have given it a chance, I have let it sit. Even the work of the “masters” of sliding those Photomatix sliders – guess what, a year later even the images that I thought I liked look ridiculous to me at this point. Without fail my desire is to see a “regular” version of the same scene done well. Polyester leisure suit of the early 21st century.

I will not bother to answer the last one because I in no way hate innovation. Hope that clears up my position on things a bit more than just a flippant remark pointing to idiotic things like the 9 speedlight ring flash.

RB

Here are the mini-interviews All of these people sum up the reasons I continue to say that photojournalism is the highest form of the art of photography – the one unique thing that still photography does that no other medium does. They also sum up the reasons I so detest what I used to do – commercial fashion. No matter what you shoot and why I guarantee you these people will help you and you will not regret spending the few minutes.

The first guy – Steve Christo is probably the photographer that I agree with everything he says and identify with the most, even though he shoots mostly sports – something i have no interest in. The second photographer – Brendon Esposito is spot on – even thought his opening contradictory comments are hopelessly false, the reason they are contradictory is a quintessential truth all thoughtful photographers wrestle with. All of them shoot amazingly powerful images and there are some themes that they ALL say – either implicitly or explicitly. Get close to your subjects if at all possible, both physically and psychologically (note focal lengths used for the best stuff). Really great images are really really hard to make and they have NOTHING to do with resolution, etc, etc, etc. Even being talented, dedicated, and doing it every single day for decades – they claim only a handful of really great images.

Please – watch and listen to this. A very rare moment when some people who know their stuff drop the pomp, and the bullshit, and provide invaluable photographic education.

RB

First off – I do not want to claim that this is the end all be all answer to this but I am willing to publish it based on every single case that I have looked into turned out the same and I see the same thing on all of my own Aperture 3 installations. If you are experiencing something different than I describe please do not hesitate to contact me via email – I would love to get to the bottom of this. So far the bottom line is – Aperture is not guilty, the brushed in sharpening is being exported exactly like it appears within Aperture – with one caveat – when viewing the suspect image at reduced size within Aperture vs say Preview the effect is exaggerated. Here is what you can do to show this clearly.

• Brush in your sharpening and view it at 100%
• Export that image as a full size tiff (just to eliminate JPEG compression but it doesn’t really matter)
• Open the exported image in preview and view at actual size (command – zero)
• Look at them side by side both at 100%

In every case doing this has shown identical results The sharpening is present and identical in both images- the “issue” comes in when you view the images at a reduced size to fit on the screen. When you do this the reduced image within Aperture shows the sharpening much more clearly than Preview. Why is this? most certainly it is due to the resizing method used – what is broken? In my opinion nothing. This kind of thing has always been the case when smashing down a big image to view on screen – different software will produce different results.

Again I would love to see a case where the brushed sharpening is actually not being exported.

RB

Tell me – does this look like an attractive alternative for a ring light to anyone out there? If so please, please enlighten me as to the rationale where this becomes a brilliant solution instead of a laughable endeavor.

What not to do with six speedlights.

RB

After using Aperture 3 for quite some time, actually almost immediately my excitement waned somewhat. It is sort of a glass is half full, half empty sort of thing depending on what day it is. I have lived so long without color labels in Aperture that I found them completely unnecessary at this point because there are so many other, possibly superior, ways to control your work-flow (like albums). The reason for my initial excitement was that I envisioned using color labels as a simple and efficient way to provide communication across the many tools that access my RAW master files. That is the only reason I could think of to actually use them – as a signaling device that is shared among software that accesses my masters – that’s it. Honestly I can live without them in the context of Aperture alone.

Alas the one thing that I found them useful for does not work due to the continuing ridiculous split personality that Aperture 3 exhibits. The split personality that I am referring to is that all of the bits and pieces that are there to suggest that it is useful as a universal tool to coordinate a broadly diverse work-flow that plays well with others. The harsh reality is that it goes 80% of the way there but for reasons that I cannot fathom in my wildest hallucinations leaves out what seem to be small but absolutely critical details.

Okay we have core IPTC supported, we have read/write IPTC sync capabilities with our masters from Aperture, we have color labels. Oooops  we forgot one thing – they are on the list of things that DO NOT get written out as part of the sync with the master files – along with rating. What the F…? We’ll why the hell not? We’ll that’s okay – we’ll just make it so we don’t read labels or ratings from masters either – there we go – all fixed up. Again WTF?

The same kind of thing goes for other data elements as well, along with the seemingly “can’t get there from here” behavior with XMP sidecars. Yep you can write them any time you want but… you can only read them at initial import – that’s it. I guess that is an improvement from not reading them at all in Aperture 2 but again – why the F..K not? Why oh why oh why may I ask put in the vast majority of the effort to make multi-product integration via metadata a reality and then stop at the last tiny little bit to make it useful? This has continuously caused me to invent and implement bizarre manual rituals to implement my ethnically diverse products into a cohesive whole sharing my RAW masters.

Just so all of you new readers don’t think I have all of a sudden turned into an Aperture basher (I have always been a bitter critic of Aperture’s shortcomings, there is some good news on this front. The IPTC data synchronization that is there performs brilliantly. Especially compared to the truly bizarre behavior of Aperture 2 (where any tiny little master file change had the more infuriating habit of completely decimating EVERYTHING you did in Aperture without warning or notice – even some Aperture plug-ins caused this). The new behavior, which is largely automagic, does an incredibly brilliant job merging metadata in Aperture – even if it was not previously synchronized to the master file. I actually use this to overcome a bizarre decision by the Aperture team to provide no option to deal with embedding the keyword hierarchy.

No product is perfect – heck Adobe can’t even make bridge play well with Lightroom – it has unexplainable quirkiness and a complete lack of options regarding XMP sidecar vs embedded metadata as well as truly bizarre behavior when there are both present but at least you can figure out a some sort of work-flow with the features it does provide. Maybe it’s just me but due to the lack of ability to communicate color labels outside of Aperture via the way EVERYTHING else in the photographic universe works, I have subconsciously boycotted their use within Aperture. Has anyone found a fantastically good use for them that is not already solved by other long existing Aperture features?

RB