Anyhow, using my Garmin eTrex HCx to navigate our way to and back from The Wave, I was able to use the excellent HoudahGeo to geocode my images. I then used some of those images to build a photographic journal of our hike.

To take the virtual hike yourself, download this KMZ file and open it in Google Earth.

I love technology.

I’ve avoided buying most Aperture plugins mostly because they’re really freakin’ expensive. I have issues with paying more for plugins than the thing that they plug into. One such plugin is Nik Software’s Viveza. It is part of a whole suite of tools that seem overpriced, but it is definitely the one that gets all of the attention and has received some glowing reviews from people whose opinions I trust.

So I’m going to try Viveza for 15 days to see what it can do. Hopefully I won’t find it useful and won’t have to make any tough purchasing decisions in a couple of weeks.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, Viveza

http://brettgrossphotography.com/2008/05/04/how-to-geocode-with-aperture-houdahgeo

Thanks Will!

Geocoding with Aperture before version 2 was almost a non-starter. With the addition of the ‘Update EXIF’ command it is almost too easy. Here are my tips for good geocoding on Mac OS X with Aperture and HoudahGeo.

First off, you’ll need a GPS. I recently started using a Garmin eTrex Legend HCx. So far so good. Apparently the track log issues have been addressed and now I have what appears to be the perfect geocoding GPS. I bought a 2GB MicroSD card when I bought the GPS and the unit will log tracks directly to the card. That amounts to a lot of GPS tracking data.

I recommend setting your GPS up so that you can see the time (with seconds) on screen with your current position. With my eTrex it took a little fiddling but I got that plus a lot more on the screen at once. In order to make sure your GPS and camera are in sync, you should set your camera’s clock to your GPS clock.

I also recommend making your first shot a picture of your GPS. That will allow you to verify the clocks are in sync during post and it will double-check your work when you are done.

You can easily adjust your pictures’ time using Aperture 2 by choosing Metadata > Adjust Date and Time… Select all of your images and set the time of your first image (the one of the GPS) to be the same as the time shown in the GPS. Aperture is smart enough to know that you adjusted the time by +1:17 and will adjust all of the other images accordingly.

Next, make sure your images are not in the Aperture Library (ie they’re Referenced Masters) and Control(right)-Click on an image and choose Show in Finder. Make a quick backup of this folder in case something bad happens to your master images.

Better safe than sorry.

Launch HoudahGeo and drag the master images onto the main window. Tell HoudahGeo the time zone the camera was (you don’t need to worry about time difference as there isn’t any anymore because we fixed it in Aperture). It’ll take a minute or so for HoudahGeo to get ready to work with the images.

Plug your GPS into your Mac and turn it on (one of the great features of the Legend HCx is that it has USB). Then tell HoudahGeo to import your tracks. If you have a Garmin GPS that has any saved track logs, HoudahGeo will alert you that saved track logs don’t contain any timestamps and are therefore useless for geocoding.

Bad Garmin. Good to know, though. So don’t save your track logs, always import the live track log for geotagging.

If HoudahGeo found track log timestamps that match your pictures’ times then it’ll automatically fill in the position for your images. Once you’ve done that all you need to do is save that data to your images.

Yes, it really is that easy.

Choose Export > Write EXIF Tags… and make your export dialog box look like mine:

Once it is done switch back to Aperture and choose Metadata > Update EXIF from Master

You now have geocoded images!

Important note: The geocoding info will not ‘stick’ to exported images unless your masters are stored outside of your Aperture Library (AKA are Referenced Masters).

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Geocode, HoudahGeo, Mac OS X, Photography

My source images were 4 photos taken in Yosemite National Park with a pretty broad exposure range.

The images were converted from Canon RAW to JPEG in Aperture and run through 3 HDR tools. My goal was to do as little processing as possible and to that end, I did the simplest merge option for each tool and then did a quick shadows/highlights adjustment in Photoshop CS3 for each.

Here were my results:

Photoshop CS3

Photomatix Pro

enfuse

What does this show? Absolutely nothing, really as I didn’t tweak the settings for the tools. Photoshop’s colors are punchier, but I could have pretty easily tweaked the colors/contrast in the other two to get a similar appearance.

But it does show that I can get a pretty good merge using enfuse so I’ll wrap a quick AppleScript around an export/merge/import and that’ll make things just a little simpler for me.

I firmly believe that iVMP is the single best image cataloging & managing application anywhere, ever. Workflow applications like Apple’s Aperture (which I love) and Adobe’s Lightroom are nowhere near as powerful at the file management part of the equation but iVMP can’t touch Aperture’s nondestructive workflow.