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!