Steve Harris

We recently celebrated our sons birthday with a big party, as with most events like this hundreds of images were taken and once collated I faced the daunting task of selecting a small percentage for a short slideshow.

I usually do this by rating images in Apple Aperture, first going through and giving anything worth a second look two stars, these I review and tidy up before rating them with three stars or higher if the image is ‘exceptional’.

At this point I like input from my wife, but sitting a Windows 7 user down in front of a Mac where the mouse is funny and maximise does not maximise things is more hassle than its worth. So I searched the iPad app store and found one of those perfect IPad apps – Pixelsync.

In short its a small app on your iPad and a helper application on your Mac which allows for projects in your Aperture library or iPhoto to be viewed, rated and flagged on your iPad. There does appear to be a restriction that like iTunes and the iPad or iPhone sync the library must be open in Aperture although Aperture does not need to be running at the time. It would be nice if this restriction could be resolved in both iTunes and Pixelsync but that is probably an Aperture restriction so outside of the control of the author of Pixelsync.

With the helper application on your Mac configured to open your library from the iPad you can select which projects within that Library will be synchronised to your iPad. Once synchronised you can rate and flag your images before synchronising back to Aperture.

The application works perfectly and my wife enjoyed rating the images while sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of tea far more than sitting in front of my Mac using a funny mouse.

I believe Pixelsync has been available for a while, and I meant to write this a while back. The appearance of Photosmith for the iPad which appears to be a similar app but for Adobe Lightroom reminded me to put finger to key and post this.

Pixelsync can be purchased on the app store and more information along with the helper application can be downloaded from http://www.pixelsyncapp.com/.

Taking input from a couple of sources used to improve eyes in lightroom I have applied a similar method to aperture. I have not found notes elsewhere on the web so have made my own.

Disclaimer: I’m not expert as I have been using adobe lightroom for a year or so to organise and tweak my photographs and have exported the finish products to iphoto to geotag and add faces to each. With the release of aperture 3 I thought I would see whether it could replace lightroom for me. Initial thoughts were no, despite places, faces and a nice project organisation I think the editing/developing is behind that of adobe lightroom. There is a benefit of keeping everything in once place though rather than export the finished product to iphoto and effectively duplicating data so I am sticking with it for a while longer.

With that in mind here are notes on improving eyes using aperture standard controls.

Improve white of eyes

Two ways of doing this with pretty much the same results, first method:-

• select the saturation quick brush;
• zoom in to the eyes using cmd +;
• drop to a small brush with a small softness of about .5, tick detect edges;
• brush over the whites of both eyes;
• back to the adjustment panel and lower the saturation until the whites turn more white and less blood shot;
• select the dodge quick brush (optional);
• brush over the whites of the eyes (optional);
• back to the adjustment panel and raise amount a little bit e.g. no more than .5, do not go crazy (optional)

Second method:-

• select the definition quick brush;
• zoom in to the eyes using cmd +;
• drop to a small brush with a small softness of about .5, tick detect edges;
• brush over the whites of both eyes;
• back to the adjustment panel and lower the saturation until the whites turn more white and less blood shot;
• select the dodge quick brush (optional);
• brush over the whites of the eyes (optional);
• back to the adjustment panel and raise amount a little bit e.g. no more than .5, do not go crazy (optional)

Improve iris

In lightroom you could improve the colour and clarity of the iris, in aperture I have not found a way of improving the colour however brightening the iris does help:-

• select a new dodge quick brush (if you dodged the whites of the eyes make sure this is a new dodge adjustment not the same one);
• brush over the coloured portion of the iris making sure to avoid the pupil and dark rim of the iris which runs around the iris separating it from the white;
• back to the adjustment panel set the dodge amount to taste.

Darken pupil and rim of iris

Final tweak:-

• select a new burn quick brush;
• brush over the pupil of the eye;
• reduce the size of the brush and cover the black rim of the iris;
• back in the adjustment panel set the amount to taste

Other possible improvements

At this point the eye brows and lashes could be improved using another quick brush to sharpen the detail. However by now my ten minute playing about with a single picture rule would be up!

I’ve been playing with the idea of getting a mobile broadband USB key for my laptop on a network other than Vodafone. I was opting for Three networks 5GB for £15 1 month contract but figured I would first try the iphone internet tethering on O2. Same money a month, although 3GB not 5GB and the same 1 month notice period.

Internet Tethering by sdharris, on flickr

I have no idea how much data I will use so I do not know if that 2GB will be missed but at least this way I can try it for the next couple of months and find out. It also means I do not have to carry a USB key with me or install more software and I save £9.99 by not having to buy the USB key. Plus I read yesterday Three are going to sale advertising space on their broadband software

After waiting a bit longer than the 24 hours O2 stated tethering was enabled today so I tried it out, the connection was not great even in the middle of Bristol but it worked well enough. Will try it for the next couple of months.

It is a shame that you have to jump through a series of menus to get to the internet tethering option though, and you must remember to turn it off!

Reset BT Openzone MAC Address

Originally uploaded by sdharris

BT Openzone and most likely the Cloud use the MAC address of your iPhone to grant or deny access to their network. This is setup the first time you connect by entering your mobile phone number in to a branded O2 page on the Openzone hotspot.

If you have had an iPhone previously and used that iPhone on an Openzone hotspot you will not be able to connect with your new handset. Each time you attempt to do so and supply your mobile number you’ll receive an internal server error.

I spoke with O2 today and was told all you need to do is text wifi to 2121 as pictured and within an hour the MAC address will be cleared and you should be able to connect to BT Openzone networks.

I’m still not decided on whether to stick with the Vodafone 3G mobile broadband or change to Three, but for now I have installed the mobile connect software from the Vodafone site. Since doing that I have noticed a new process and login item called mac_swapperdemon. Apparently this changes from the USB dongle from a memory card to a modem once inserted. I usually try to keep the login items clear but this little guy is persistent so I will need to be sure to uninstall if I do change to Three.

To uninstall you need to have kept the original .dmg file, rerun setup and select uninstall from the dropdown on the first screen.

Taken from http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=472441