Photo management software winner: Aperture

posted by Jeff | Monday, February 11, 2008, 11:27 PM | comments: 6

The last part of the workflow before uploading photos to a Web site is resizing and watermarking with the copyright. So I already established that it's easy to manipulate the exposure and levels of camera raw files in Aperture, and then copy adjustments, set them as presets, etc. It's too sweet for words. Then I realized that the export function has presets.

So I created a preset that resized the image to be not taller or wider than 850 pixels, JPEG 5 quality, and here's the kicker, put a Photoshop file as a watermark, alpha preserved, in the lower right. Behold, a folder full of images to upload. Perfect.

But it gets better. It'll export the EXIF and TIFF metadata as well in the new JPEG. That means I can even slug it in Aperture, and the data is preserved. And even more exciting (for a dork anyway)... there are plenty of free .NET class libraries out there that can suck the metadata out of the file, which means after uploading I could extract that data and associate it in the database with the image. I could actually, with no extra work, show that it was shot on a 5D at 50mm, f/1.4 and at ISO 400. Yes, I realize that this is all stuff that Flickr can do, but the idea that I could do it excites me. I'm a dork like that.

Aperture wins.


Comments

Drew

February 12, 2008, 2:54 PM #

Did you get 1.5 or the new version?

Jeff

February 12, 2008, 3:10 PM #

I didn't get anything yet, but what an amazing coincidence that v2 came out today!

Neuski

February 12, 2008, 3:19 PM #

:)

I had no idea that 2.0 was close to being done. Surprise!

Aperture 2 Features

eightdotthree

February 12, 2008, 6:22 PM #

Since when is it only $200?

Jeff

February 12, 2008, 6:27 PM #

Since today.

eightdotthree

February 12, 2008, 7:08 PM #

Hmm, gonna have to try out the new 30 day demo, I like Lightroom, but I don't love it.


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