Code, Camera, Action

Aperture 3 upgrade has given lots of folks reason to shout -- Nondestructive editing everywhere, yay! Grouped preset powers, yay! Lumix support, yay! But its first-release bugs have also given lots of us reason to curse and kick.

In an earlier post I talked about how to avoid some of the frustrations upgrading your library from Aperture 2 to 3 http://elstudio.us/upgrading-to-aperture-3-for-lumix-and-micro-4. Now that's done, let's look at some work-arounds for DNGs.

The problem seems to be that Aperture 3, like Aperture 2 before it, lacks support for lens corrections in Adobe DNG files. This is odd because for many cameras -- the Lumix G1, GH1 and LX-3 -- Aperture supports those same corrections in the native RW2 format. Let's hope it's a bug that the same corrections don't work in DNG.

Even stranger, Aperture 3 seems to bail out on DNGs from any camera that *can* do lens correction -- whether or not there's actually lens correction in a particular DNG. On micro 4/3 cameras like the G1, legacy lenses don't provide lens correction, and thus DNGs may not have it. If only Aperture 3 was clever enough to check.

If you had DNGs in your Aperture 2 library from Panasonic Lumix G1 or GH1 or GF1, or maybe an LX3, you'll find they convert just fine. But you can't adjust them at all. To make any changes, you must upgrade to the latest rendering engine, which renders garbage on the screen (and eventually crashes Aperture).

Here's what you can do to work around this problem.

1. Wait for RW2 support for your camera. For the GF1, or if you've shot with Panasonic micro 4/3 lenses, this is your best option. And save those RW2 files! Extract your original RW2 files from the DNGs or pull them from a backup (you did embed the the RW2, right?). It seems that Apple views DNG support in Aperture as a secondary priority, so the original raws are the way to go.
2. If your DNGs were shot with legacy lenses, there is a good work-around. Only native Panasonic (and maybe Olympus) micro 4/3 lenses add the lens metadata. If you haven't shot with those, the only thing keeping Aperture from recognizing your photos is the camera model name embedded in the DNGs. You can use something like exiftool to change it to one that doesn't do lens correction. Here's what I use to get my G1's legacy lens DNGs to work in Aperture 3. (This is not terribly dangerous, as exiftool can just as easily undo this change.)
   exiftool -Model=DMC-L10 blah.dng
3. If your DNGs do have lens correction (as they must with the LX3) you could use a tool like DNGSanitize http://punainenkala.livejournal.com/588.html, which purports to strip the lens correction from the DNGs. This is a last-resort sort of thing to do, as you will lose that lens correction data. You would probably also have to change the camera model name, as in option 2 (try DMC-FZ50 for the LX3). Do keep backups. And, really, don't do this -- wait until the next release of Aperture when we'll find out if Apple intends to fix DNG support.

Whatever you do, test this with your DNGs. And keep backup copies. Just because option 2 works for me, that doesn't mean it will for you. And I've not had to try option 3. Also, pray you don't have linear DNGs, as only Adobe can help you then.

I can't believe that Apple would mess up DNG support this badly on purpose. In the meantime, please file a bug report to let Apple know that losing DNG support for these cameras is a big deal. You can do this from inside Aperture itself. Choose Aperture > Provide Aperture Feedback from the menu.

Good luck! And let us know how it works out.

Loading mentions Retweet

Back at the office Tuesday after a long holiday break. So lots of questions for me, and a busy day. Good to be back.

It was also the day that Google announced a new mobile phone, the Nexus. Early reviews all say it’s fabulous, as good as the iPhone in many ways. It’s got a much better screen, they say, but correspondingly worse battery life.

Not to be outdone, Apple has been leaking details of their next big thing – a tablet of some sort, to be announced late this month. There’s been lots of speculation about that on the blogs, of course. We can’t figure out what earth-shattering feature might differentiate an Apple tablet from previous, ho-hum tablets. Consensus is that it’s got to be different or Steve Jobs wouldn’t do it. Different and useful. More than “surfing the internet on the can” – which the iPhone and MacBook handle quite well, thank you.

If anybody can, I am sure that Steve Jobs and company will figure out what a tablet is good for – or at least how to wow us enough that we’ll want one, too.

But, wow, that it has come to this. Three years ago, the iPhone turned the cell phone handset business upside down. Now that the competition has caught up, Apple is moving on to something completely different – presumably an entirely new product line. They’ll still be printing money with iPhones.

And we have come to expect that the Steve Jobs won’t do something that’s not revolutionary.

Back to that Google phone. The hardware looks fine, an iPhone knock-off almost as minimalist as Apple’s wares. On the Nexus, the iPhone’s one-button-to-rule-them-all gives way to four buttons and a roller-ball nose.

(See Amit’s post on the back button vs home button design philosophies for the benefits of multiple buttons.)

Based on a brief hands-on with a Droid, I have no doubt that it will handle Gmail and Google apps much better than any phone on earth.

Oh but that home screen – it’s ugly as the Nexus’s name. Google’s marketing shows a wallpaper gray boxes that the reviews say ripple to follow your fingertip on the screen. The reviewers say it’s cool, but in still images make the gray cubes look ckunky.

And yet, in three short years the competition has gone from pushbutton phones (remember Motorola’s Razr) to two iPhone-quality choices – one an Android clone that’s better than the iPhone in significant ways.

And it sounds like Apple plans to respond with something completely different.

Tech products are becoming differentiated as much by aesthetics as features. It’s not about making products that secure a market position (though Apple’s app store policies use some of those old-fashioned tricks, too). It’s about fast teams. Teams that can get things done and drive products to market.

The Google and Apple competition is so interesting because of the firms’ different approaches to innovation. Google’s approach is driven by data, drawn from testing of thousands of users, in hundreds of iterations. Apple’s designs seem to come full-born from the head of Steve Jobs.

Exciting times we live in – and a great time to be shopping for a phone.

Loading mentions Retweet

Yesterday Apple updated the digital camera raw support for both Leopard and Snow Leopard. 

That's good news for folks with new Canons or Nikons, as the update adds support for recent cameras.

But Micro Four-Thirds users are still left crying in the wilderness. 

• No support for the Olympus EP-1's ORF raw format
• Still no support for Panasonic RW2 raw in the Lumix LX3, G1, GH1, GF1, etc. -- that's any Panasonic camera released since the fall of 2008
• No support for DNG 1.3 lens corrections, which means there's no good work-around. Adobe DNG Converter can turn these raw formats into proper DNGs. But OSX can't read them.

I'm beginning to get worried. 

The trick with these micro four-thirds cameras is that the camera corrects for lens distortion in the raw files. That helps Olympus and Panasonic save money on lenses, while still producing stellar images. But decoding these raw formats adds a layer of math, which complicates image processing. 

I used to think this was a problem that Apple would fix in Snow Leopard. I hoped the new operating system would add lens corrections to its image processing. But this is the first raw update for Snow Leopard. 

Does Apple ever intend to support these raw formats? 

Maybe they won't -- unless we ask them for it. The Aperture feedback form is the place to let Apple know we want raw support for micro four-thirds cameras:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html

In the meantime, there is one alternative. Adobe Lightroom does supports micro four-thirds raw. 

Please, Apple, don't push us away from Aperture and iPhoto. Please add support for micro four-thirds cameras. I like my G1 and I like it raw.

Meanwhile, here's what the update does provide --

Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.7

This update extends RAW image compatibility for Aperture 2, iPhoto ’08 and iPhoto ’09 for the following cameras:

• Canon EOS-1D Mark IV
• Canon EOS 7D
• Canon PowerShot G11
• Nikon D3S
• Nikon D300S
• Nikon D3000

Loading mentions Retweet

Geoff Livingston responds to Kristin Ivie and my previous posts about new nonprofits. 

Entrepreneurs look at things, see how they can be improved, tear down models, and rebuild them. So when we’ve experienced enormous successes in the for-profit world and then turn our eyes to higher causes, it’s only natural to think the same approach will work.

Granted there is ego at play, but are you going to tell someone who successfully sold a business or took a company public, that they can’t win again in a different sector? Good luck with that one!

via geofflivingston.com

For Geoff, an entrepreneur and blogger, advice to slow down is like reigning in the horses as they dash for the barn. Good luck with that one. And he's right, of course. 

Having seen a few horses in this business, though, I was hoping to point out how the economics of nonprofits can work against that entrepreneurial spirit. 

As a nonprofit, it can be a challenge to know if you're making progress, much less to best organize around it. 

Can you imagine this conversation taking place in the private sector?

Nonprofit entrepreneur: I want to take a fundraising job for a nonprofit that's really changing the world. What do you think?

Mentor: Be careful not to get pigeonholed. "Once a fundraiser, always a fundraiser." 

Maybe Sasha's example here is just isolated old-school thinking. I hope so. And maybe, as Geoff says, entrepreneurial spirit and gutsy social enterprise will be what shakes up slower organizations.

But I can think of a couple of things that could help speed that day for more entrepreneurs --

• Competitions with incubation or startup coaching (a la Y Combinator)
• Metrics for success. Government provides some of these statistics, larger NPOs and NGOs provide others
• Market valuation for social enterprises. For another post, but in our attention economy, this may be possible.

What else should be on this list? 

Who wants to help?

Loading mentions Retweet

David Roodman's long post is a great explanation of how Kiva works. It's also critical of the way Kiva markets.

Here's the issue. Let's say you make a $25 loan on kiva.org. You pick an entrepreneur, you make a loan. The web site makes it look like you have funded that particular entrepreneur. But that isn't really how the microfinance organization works. For practical reasons, that entrepreneur has already been funded by one of Kiva's partners on the ground. On one level, Kiva is open about this, providing dates of loans and so forth -- though its marketing simplifies these details. The post is well worth reading if, like me, you're a fan of Kiva or of microfinance generally.

There's a bigger issue here between the stories that motivate donors and poverty in the developing world. Do donor stories help fight poverty -- or do they put drag on the efficiency of the fight? 

Kiva brings microcredit and microchips to child sponsorship. Like sponsorship charities, it is all about stories: it was inspired by them and it succeeds by telling them. As a result, it operates in a pincers between the giver’s desire for personal connection and the costs and constraints that imposes on business of serving poor people. In fact Kiva can be seen as an ingenious finessing of this old tension. Technology has brought down the cost of transmitting stories and images.

via cgdev.org

Though the cost of bringing these stories and photos back to sponsors has come down, it is still significant. Can we afford the photos and stories of entrepreneurs? How can we not afford them?

Hat tip to @tactphil for sharing the post.

Loading mentions Retweet

On Earth Day, 1971, a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful launched TV ads to persuade people to stop littering.

If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons in the '70s, you'll remember them.

Each one featured an American Indian paddling or riding or walking through a trashy landscape and a grave voice over, ending with "People start polution. People can stop it." At the end of each ad, the camera zooms in on the Indian's face, onto a single tear.

The crying Indian got America to stop littering.

That ad is the one I remember most.

Do watch it. Then forgive me a guess about what you're thinking: Powerful TV, but really.

Of course, the '70s were top-down times. One example: Elvis Presley, master of media, had three TVs built into the wall of this basement at Graceland. Three televisions were all he needed to watch everything shown on TV in America. There were only three channels, so The King was set.

The Indian in the ads was a career actor named Iron Eyes Cody. He became known as The Crying Indian -- better known for those ads than for any other role in in his career, which began when he was 12. While Iron Eyes lived his life as an Indian, Wikipedia says he was born Italian-American, from Louisiana.

And there are all sorts of conspiratorial accusations against Keep America Beautiful. The organization purportedly got its funding from corporations and fast-food vendors. Wouldn't it be better, the accusers say, to encourage people to buy less styrofoam than to clean up litter?

Yet the ads inspired genuine feeling. And people did (mostly) stop littering. A mark of their power today: their YouTube comments are mostly positive.

What's the Crying Indian for our time? And, post-network-TV, what's the medium? The net, surely -- but which net? A thousand blogs? Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? (And do all the brand names in that list creep anybody out, is it just me?)

I want to know what kind of campaign it would take to stop pollution -- really stop it.

People start pollution. People can stop it.

But how?

Loading mentions Retweet