The Reason For Purchasing

A couple of years ago I had a no-contract cell phone and before then I had a pre-paid cell phone. I got rid of those in 2005. They were simply too expensive. Ever since then I’ve been using Skype, Gizmo or just using the house land-line to make telephone calls, which I hate to do because it’s not just my phone. Remember when your family would pick up the phone and start dialing out not realizing you were on the phone, that’s pretty much how it is here! I’ve recently started getting more calls on my SkypeIn number because that’s what I give to friends, clients, recruiters and potential employers. It’s more professional, if I don’t answer because they get my voicemail. Lately though, I have not been able to get to the computer quick enough to answer Skype. The problem is I have to go to the computer, sometimes login (usually locked when I am away), un-mute the microphone in Windows volume control, un-mute the microphone on the headset cable, put the headset on and answer the call. Heaven forbid if I’ve been using a piece of software that change’s my Skype input/output devices because if that’s the case I have to change those, too!

So you see the problem! I needed to get something that I could answer very quickly. For a while I had been wanting to get a WiFi phone for Skype. The problem is that they were still really expensive. Most of them were between $150-200. I didn’t want to spend that much. I thought about getting one of the cordless dual-mode phones but the ones that were actually affordable required you to connect them to your computer. There are models that do not require you to connect them to your computer but they cost more than the WiFi phones. The problem for me is, if I’m still in bed and a potential employer calls I wouldn’t know it because I have been turning the computer off during the night because it’s really loud and of course, I’m in sleep land. Also, the idea solution was to get something that I could take with me if I were to go on a trip, interview, vacation (ha, ha, whatever) or somewhere that was out of the area and possibly had a WiFi Internet connection.

I got onto Skype’s website a couple of weeks ago and saw the SMC WiFi Phone for Skype for $99 which I thought was a great deal. Everywhere else has the exact same model for between $130-170. The Belkin model (which is exactly the same as the SMC model other than the color and branding, in my opinion) was more expensive. I pondered on purchasing the SMC model for about an hour and I went ahead and purchased it. I have been using the phone for a week now and although I have already wrote in length about why I purchased the phone, I have a lot more to say about the phone (features, likes, dislikes, etc).

Arrival, setup, included features

The phone was shipped quickly and arrived in packaging that reminds me of typical cell phone packaging. The box contained the SMC Skype WiFi Phone, earphone, power adapter, USB cable, battery and a CD containing the user manual (nothing else is on the CD), printed user manuals (in 3 languages). In the box there is also a gift of 120 SkypeOut minutes and 3 month’s free voicemail. I was pleased with this because with my SkypeIn number I get free voicemail. With the card I was able to extend my voicemail for 3 additional months and I had just extended it a few days prior to receiving the phone. So I won’t have to do that for 6 months which is very nice. Of course I also got the 120 SkypeOut minutes but for me I do not worry much with those as I paid for the entire year of Skype Unlimited. Regardless, it’s still very nice.

Before turning the phone on and setting it up it says to charge it for 8 full hours which is fairly a standard suggestion on almost all electronics. After the phone had been on charge for 3 hours it said that it was charged. I decided to keep my anxious fingers away from the phone for a few more hours and let it continue to charge for the full 8 hours even though it said it was charged. I’m not sure if the battery was charged partially from the factory or if there is a bug with the phone. Presumably it was charged partially from the factory.

Once the phone was charged, setting it up was very easy although it did take me a couple of tries getting my password in. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to input upper case letters. The phone joined my wireless network without any issues and once I got the username and password into the phone it logged onto Skype without any issues. The phone said that it was downloading contacts for quite a long time. I turned the phone off after 30 minutes, turned it back on and my contacts were there. Other than getting my contacts to appear, set up was very simple.

What I dislike about the phone

The biggest complaint about the phone that I have is how it handles voicemails. The Skype website states: “Voicemail Support: With the purchase of Skype Voicemail, the SMC WiFi Phone will record a short voice message from the caller when your are away.” I assumed that the phone would work much like the Skype software. I assumed that if I did not answer the phone after a few rings the phone would send the caller to voicemail. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In my tests and when others have called me at no time does the call ever go to voicemail. If you let it ring long enough you will get a busy signal but no voicemail.

Although the phone interface is very easy to use, the actual buttons on the phone are very annoying. I find myself having to press the buttons harder than I should at times to make them work. Sometimes it seems as though there is a delay from the time you press the button until the action you desired happens.

The phone supposedly has the ability to update itself over WiFi. I have not been able to test this because the update that I installed when I got the phone enabled the feature and there have been no updates since I installed the latest firmware. When you first get this phone you will definitely want to update it. The phone I received had year old firmware installed. Unfortunately, if you do need to update the software you can only update it on Microsoft Windows with the included USB cable. I find this amusing considering the fact that the phone is running on an embedded Linux distribution.

The time on this phone is always incorrect. Every single time I go into the time settings and change them it will always go back one hour. No matter how many times I have updated the time on this phone it always goes back one hour. Speaking of time, whenever you hold the phone up to your ear you can hear a ticking sound. It sounds just exactly like a ticking watch (and no, I do not wear a wristwatch!).

When you are holding the phone up to your ear, ticking is not the only noise you hear. If you are not in a call you can hear the phone making a continuous electronic noise. If you are listening to your voice messages and you have the phone to your ear you can hear the phone downloading each message one piece at a time onto the phone’s internal memory card.

I have made many calls to the Skype Lady (echo123) and whenever she starts speaking it’s really loud, then really quiet. Then when the bells dings for you to start or stop speaking they are really loud and can really hurt your ears. When I have made SkypeOut and calls to other Skype users it is really difficult to hear sometimes what the person is saying unless you hold the phone really close to your ear. Forget using the included earphone, it’s even worse.

The phone is awkward to hold. I really hate the back of the phone because when your run your fingers across it’s surface it sounds like sandpaper. Fortunately, it doesn’t feel like sandpaper! I wish the entire phone was as smooth as the front.

What I like about the phone

I know this is not the most important aspect of the phone but I am really pleased that it is running on a Linux distribution. I love Linux devices and love to see more and more products putting it to use.

I like the fact that this phone is upgradeable. I think that is extremely important in almost any device you purchase these days. I only hope that SMC will kick out some updates to make this phone even better.

I also love the fact that no PC is required in any aspect of setting up or using this phone (other than the initial update that I made). If I am to go on a vacation (unlikely) or go somewhere for an interview with a potential employer and have not been able to upgrade my laptop before then it will nice to be able to stay in touch using Skype.

Final thoughts and conclusion

Although the phone has it’s flaws I think the phone is a really great idea, especially for someone like me. My computer is really terrible at running Skype while it is running other applications. I normally have to shut Skype off if I am using Lightroom or Photoshop. For that alone it is worth it. It’s nice to be able to have a standalone device to be able to use as my phone.

It’s also a great concept for people who travel and need to stay in touch with their family, friends, etc. Skype is free for users calling each other and extremely affordable for calling out of the Skype network. When I am able to move into my own place I do plan on using Skype as my land-line alternative. I do plan on having something for emergency calls, though. Don’t forget that you cannot make emergency calls with this phone.

With all the above said I have hard time trying to decide whether I should keep the phone, smash it to pieces when I answer it and can barely understand what the person on the other end is saying or send it back. The phone is useful to me in the fact that it does the primary task that I needed it for, that is to be able to answer it quickly when someone calls. However, the fact that it is very hard to hear, the people on the other end have a hard time hearing me, the problem with voice mail really makes me consider sending the phone back. I don’t want to send the phone back because I really love the concept. Regardless, I feel as though I paid for a device that in my opinion does not live up to my expectations.

Photos of the SMC WiFi Phone on Gizmodo
SMC WiFi Phone Homepage
SMC WiFi Phone Firmware Update Page
SMC WiFi Phone on Skype Store
My photos of the phone on Flickr

Last night I decided to go ahead and try to get the official Nvidia drivers installed for my GPU on Fedora 7. I was hesitant to do this because normally whenever I try to do this I break something and wind up having to re-install the entire operating system because I can’t figure out what I need to change in my x.org configuration file to make it work again. Fortunately, last night I had better luck.

I followed the instructions on this site first. When I’d reboot, the X-Server wouldn’t work probably. The text login screen would blink three times then a blue screen would come up saying that X was unable to be started. Eventually it would fix itself and I was able to login graphically. The driver was being installed but it was not directly rendering.

I then found this entry on another site that said SELinux causes the driver to not install correctly. I thought that might have been the issue so I disabled SELinux and the firewall, restarted, still got the same thing.

After about 30 minutes I finally found this entry on another site that made me realize that I was installing the wrong drivers for my video card. The GeForce2, 3 and 4 (including MX) cards are not supported by the 97xx drivers, you have to use the 96xx series.

I finally got the correct drivers installed and everything working properly, even the desktop effects work. I thought in case I have to do this again and in case someone else has the same card that I do I would make an entry about how I got the drivers installed:

• Open up a terminal window, login as root by entering su - and pressing enter at the prompt. Enter your root password and press enter.
• Enter the following command: rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm and press enter.
• Enter the following command: rpm –import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-livna and press enter.
• Enter the following command: yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx and press enter. (Remember to put spaces between the two applications)
• Once everything has been installed enter the following command service nvidia-96xx restart

At this point, I rebooted the machine just to make sure everything was installed correctly. Upon restart you should see a green Nvidia logo pop up, it may fade up depending on whether or not the desktop effects were enabled during the installation.

I went ahead and posted my own instructions for doing this because I wasn’t able to follow the instructions on the last link the way they had it wrote out. I did link to them so you can see where I got most of the information from.

I’d highly recommend removing the Livna repositories from your YUM sources. I had issues trying to install other software while Livna was still in my sources list. To remove Livna following these steps:

• Open up a terminal window, login as root by entering su - and pressing enter at the prompt. Enter your root password and press enter.
• Enter the following: cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ and press enter.
• For me there were only 3 Livna repository files to remove, I used the following command to remove them: rm livna-devel.repo livna.repo livna-testing.repo. (Remember to put spaces between each file name). When you press Enter you will be asked if you sure you want to remove the files, enter “Y” for each and press enter.

The only thing I’ve yet to figure out is how to get the TV-Out functionality to work. I know it’s possible, it’s just going to take some tweaking on my part. I got it to where I could see some text on the TV last night but it wasn’t readable, nor was the text on the default display so I had to kill the X server everytime (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace). Luckily it would reset itself back to the standard everytime.

Hope someone finds this article useful. I know I will be appreciative of it in the future if I have to re-install Fedora.

Last month (May 2007) I wrote a blog entry about Aperture. At the time I was house sitting for my sister who had just got a new iMac. When I came home I was disappointed that I didn’t have a similar application to use for working on my photos. Last fall I had played with the Adobe Lightroom Beta and it was extremely slow on my computer so I didn’t really give it much thought. Then I decided to download the trial and give it a shot anyways after thinking that it might actually perform better now that I have a dedicated graphics card with 128MB of memory instead of the motherboard’s integrated 32MB GPU. The following will be my thoughts of Lightroom and I will be comparing a lot of it’s features with the experience I had with Apple’s Aperture.

Features I Really Liked

When you first open Adobe Photoshop Lightroom you are asked where you want to import images from. You can choose to import images from your camera or from a location on your computer. Once you choose and your images have been imported they are placed into the Library. You’ll also probably want to change the view from “Loupe View” to “Grid View”, this will allow you to see all of the images that you just imported. Also, it’s easier to go ahead and rotate your images from this view before you get to adjusting the images. Once you do get your images rotated and you are ready to get to adjusting them, click on an image that you want to work on and then click on Develop, this is where all the adjustments will take place.

When you’re in the “Develop” mode there are a lot of adjustments that you can make. The first adjustment that I usually correct (if needed) is the lighting, white balance, exposure and contrast. Lightroom has a few pre-programmed presets for adjusting tone curve and this is what I usually use because they seem to work pretty well for me. If you find yourself applying the same adjustments to more than one or two images you can create additional presets.

The next adjustments that I make are of the colors. This is my favorite feature and one that really makes Aperture and Lightroom worth their pricetags, in my opinion. My camera doesn’t do a great job of applying saturation to images, which is OK in some instances because the camera might apply too much and it would be hard to correct in post processing. I usually find myself increasing the saturation of blues to make skies bluer and greens to make leaves much more vibrant. If the color you see is a bit odd from what you remember seeing you can change it’s hue and luminance.

I want to talk a little bit more about the lighting adjustments that you can make using Lightroom. You can use the tone curve tool or you can use sliders to adjust the lightness or darkness of highlights, dark areas, light areas and shadows. You’d be surprised by just how much better you can make an image look by slightly tweaking the tone curve.

An adjustment that I find myself needing quite frequently is a sharpening tool. Lightroom’s got one and you don’t have to add it to the panels every time you open a new image like I did in Aperture, but, I have never seen any difference when I have used this tool. I don’t know whether it’s so subtle I just don’t see a change or if my monitor just isn’t all that great. Even when my 17″ LCD was working, I could never see any changes to the images when I tried to adjust the sharpness. What I’ve been doing is when I’m finished with the photo I export it out and sharpen it up in an external editor.

When you have finished editing the photo and are satisfied with it you can add a star to it. You can add 1-5 stars to each image. I usually apply a 5 star rating to images that I’m going to export and upload to Flickr. There is also a feature that let’s you add images to a “Quick Collection.”

If you’ve got multiple images of the same thing and you need to compare them, Lightroom has you covered there as well. The only downside to Lightroom’s comparison feature is that you can only compare one photo at a time.

In addition to the comparison tool Lightroom has a tool that I really like called “Before & After.” I really like to use this to see just how much better my images are once I’ve adjusted the lighting, saturation, etc.

Another great feature of Lightroom that most good photo editing applications are incorporating these days is non-destructive edits. Like I mentioned in the Aperture review, it is really nice to be able to make changes to images and a year later come back and still have the original images. You’ll want to make backups of course, which is built into Lightroom, but, every good photo editing application will have this.

I am happy to say that cropping images in Lightroom is much easier than it was in Aperture. At least the figuring out how to do it part. When I was using Aperture it took me a while to figure out how to crop an image, in Lightroom it was much easier to understand. What I really liked about Lightroom is that when I cropped an image and made changes to the image, if I zeroed the image out the crop would stay. I thought that was really nice.

What I Was Not So Happy With

Lightroom is really resource intensive. I know I don’t have the most powerful computer on the planet, but still, it’s resource intensive. I couldn’t use the application if my computer’s display was running at 1280×1024, I’d have to decrease to 1024×768. I had to close out of all other applications that I was running, even running Skype and Lightroom at the same time would cause my computer to lockup. Even with closing all applications Lightroom still isn’t very fast, sliders occasionally become unresponsive and images take their precious time loading. You really need a modern computer to use Lightroom effectively, something faster than my AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 128 MB GPU and 1 GB of RAM.

Features I Would Like To See

If you need to see what your image looked like before you applied an adjustment you can use the history panel. In my opinion it’s not as nice as Aperture’s ability to hide an effect by clicking on a hide icon beside of the adjustment.

Another feature that I really miss from Aperture is full screen editing. You can hide panels very easily in Lightroom, too easily sometimes, but it doesn’t compare to being able to edit an image in full screen mode. I really miss that and hope to see it in Lightroom soon.

Like I mentioned previously, in my opinion the sharpening tool does not do anything for images. I’d like to see this corrected. Also, I’d like to see some sort of tool to go along with the sharpening tool so you can further define where you want to apply the sharpening to.

Final Thoughts

Although Lightroom is missing a lot of things that I really liked when I was using Aperture, I think Lightroom is a great piece of software. It’s only at Version 1.0 at the moment so I’m sure better things are to come. If you’re needing photo editing software and you’re on Windows, I would highly recommend Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If you’re using a Mac, I’d recommend sticking with Aperture. Both Lightroom and Aperture are $299, which in my opinion is a bit steep, however it is cheaper than buying a copy of Adobe Photoshop and both applications are much easier to work with than trying to learn how to edit your photos in Photoshop.

You can download a 30 day trial version of Lightroom from the link below:

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

On Monday morning my 17″ LCD monitor decided to kick the bucket. I guess it was time for it to go out, the 3 year warranty expired in January so that’s usually when things go out. Since then I’ve been using my iBook a lot more because it has a brighter display than the CRT monitor I have attached to the PC. Since I’ve been using the iBook more and it is in front of me now, I decided to start using it to work on my website projects.

I had heard of Taco HTML Edit before and had even had it installed. When I first installed it I honestly did not give it a good chance. I guess since I needed to use it I gave it a better chance and I am glad I did. I have found a lot of great features in the software and am really enjoying it so far. Let’s look at some of the features.

Grouping Files As Projects

The first feature that I immediately used was the projects feature. I use this religiously in Macromedia Dreamweaver and was very pleased to see that a similar feature was available in Taco (I think I’m going to be craving tacos by the end of writing this entry). This feature allows you to define a folder as a project. Whenever you open a project you have all the files in that project at hand, you don’t have to go hunting all over the place for everything, it’s really nice.

When you open up a project the files will open in a new window with the files on the left and a text editor window to the right. The window looks really bare from what you see when you first open Taco. There are no icons in the project editor by default. I usually work with projects rather than single pages and I decided to add more icons to the toolbar, it’s easy enough to do: right click on the toolbar and click on customize, drag and drop the desired icons.

Code Clippings

The next feature I want to talk about is clips. You can put code into clips and when you need to insert that code into your file you just click on that code from the clips menu.

It’s like having code permanently copied so you can always paste it. I’ve been using this a lot this past week on a client’s project where I need to use the same biographical header information on several of their artist’s pages.

Tag Organization

I think I’m fairly good at writing code in a clean, easy to understand manner. However there are times that it can become cluttered. Luckily, with Taco you can clean up your code by using “Organize tags” under the Syntax menu.

Normally I would be hesitant to use a feature like this out of fear that it would jumble my code. I’ve used several text editors and they’ve all done a horrible job at this, however, Taco done a really beautiful job of cleaning up the code and making it look really nice on the screen and easy to follow.

Batch Find

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with designing WordPress themes for my clients and I like to do most of the work offline. This means I have to link files to a local network server.

Once I am ready to put the project online on the client’s hosting account I have to make sure the links to the local network server are pointing to their domain. I usually use Dreamweaver for this task but I am really pleased to see that a similar feature is available in Taco.

Syntax Checking

Unfortunately we all make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time when I’m writing code, I’ll forgot to close a tag, add a parenthesis, etc. Silly mistakes usually that take time to find. Fortunately, Taco has a built in Syntax checker. It doesn’t check for compliancy with the W3C, but you can do that through their website so it’s really no big deal in my opinion.

Format Tags & Quick Insert

Two features that are pretty useful are the format tags and quick insert feature. The format tags dropdown menu gives you options for making text bold, italic, underlined, etc. These are nice and very useful when you don’t feel like typing the syntax out. The other feature, quick insert is even more useful. It lets you insert punctuation, math symbols, vowels and even Greek characters. I personally really like the Quick Insert feature because I can never remember the numbers that represent each symbol.

Code Preview

When you’re finished writing your code (or while you’re working on it) you can preview your code using either the Preview option which opens the page you are working on in a web browser window or you can use the Live Preview which opens the page you are working on in another window inside of Taco, as you change the page this window will update to reflect the changes you are making.

Color Tags

Taco has a feature that lets you choose colors from a color wheel, however, I was unable to get this feature to work, one of the only features I was unable to get to work. Everytime I would click on it, nothing would open. Fortunately, for me, I usually already have color choices set before I begin working on a project.

What it doesn’t have

Some people will be disappointed by the fact that this application doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor. I am fine with the fact that it doesn’t because I prefer to code my pages by hand instead of letting an editor do it for me. There are exceptions to this when I just need a simple page, but for the most part, I like to do it myself.

Also, Taco doesn’t have a built in FTP client. For me this is also not an issue because I normally work on files on my local network and once I am done working on the files I’ll normally use a standalone FTP client anyways to upload files to the website I am working on. For some people though, this may be a problem.

Great Alternative

I’ve been using this software for a week now and am extremely impressed with it’s features and simplicity. I am really enjoying it and look forward to using it even more. I personally feel as though this is a great alternative to Macromedia Dreamweaver, especially if you cannot afford it’s hefty pricetag. Taco is free! I greatly appreciate that!

Taco HTML Edit

Last night I was chatting with my friend Steve and he mentioned that I should install the Aperture trial. I thought it was a great idea, I hadn’t even thought about it. Today when I went to the house (remember, I am currently house sitting somewhere that I can only access the Internet via dialup) I downloaded and signed up for the Aperture trial. I brought it back up to the house I am house sitting at and installed it on the iMac they have.

When you first start up the application you have several options to get started. You can import your photos or one of the best things about the first launch that I like is the fact that they have provided quick start tours. What I hate about these quick start tours is that you have to access them online. I know people would complain that Apple was taking up even more disk space if they included the videos, however, in situations where you are on dialup, it would be really nice to have them offline! However, with that said. I think the quick start tours are very handy if you are new to the professional photography application. Personally, I think Apple needs to include these video tutorials for everyone of their products, at least the ones that come with a new Apple computer.

As you would expect from an Apple product, importing your photos is easy. However, the image import process seemed a lot slower than it does when I import photos through iPhoto or manually off of the memory card. My guess would be that when the photos are imported, EXIF data and a lot of other information is determined about the photo instead of waiting until you actually open the file. That is my guess.

As I patiently waited for my images to import I looked around the application and liked what I saw. The application appears to have a lot of features but they don’t clutter the application up with a ton of icons and make it hard to understand. Once my photos had imported I was playing around with my photos in no time.

The first image that I opened and started playing with I wanted to sharpen the image up a bit. It took me a little while to find the tool to do it, I had to add a panel to the adjustments panel. Once I did, I was WOW’ed. Not only did I use the sharpen feature to sharpen up the image but there was also a way to adjust the radius of the sharpen effect. When I did this I said WOW, out loud. I was extremely impressed. The image I was working with was a little out of focus but that feature really, really improved the image. WOW! I used this technique on several other photos and it really brought out parts of the image that I would not have saw otherwise.

The technique above works really well and really makes a lot of my images look so much better. The only problem with this is that everytime you open a new photo to edit. You have to add the sharpen panel to the screen again. Annoying. I also don’t see anywhere to make this a standard option.

The next thing that I am completely in love with is the fact that when you are in full screen mode, looking at your images, you can move the toolbars around. You cannot do this in iPhoto or Picasa, which is what I primarily use on my PC at home. Although this feature may seem like a small one, it’s definitely a great feature for me when you are looking at portrait type images where the main focal point of the scene is at the bottom. Also, you can add the panels for adjusting your photos while you are in full screen mode.

As you are working with the images you can uncheck the checkbox beside each adjustments panel to hide those effects. It’s really nice to not have to undo each effect just to see what it looked like previously.

When I got to the point where I wanted to crop an image I was a little bit confused as how to crop the image. I knew to go to the toolbar item at the top and to select the area of the image that I wanted to keep. The problem is, I didn’t understand how to apply that effect. Finally, I clicked on the pointer icon in the toolbar and that applied the crop. Although it’s simple once you figure it out, it takes a little while to figure out.

When I first launched the application I really did not feel as though this application was necessary, for me. To me, it simply looked like an expensive application to organize and do some more advanced changes to a photo than you can in iPhoto. However, I have been playing with Aperture the past few hours and I have noticed that there are a lot of changes I can make to an image, a lot of subtle changes especially, that make the photo a whole lot better.

A feature of Aperture that is a truly must have for any photo organization/manipulation tool is to not overwrite the original images. Using Picasa I have had this feature for a while now and would not want to have it any other way. It’s really nice to be able to make changes to an image and then a year later come back and still have access to the original files.

Where Aperture really shines is the RAW support. Taking RAW photos gives you the ability to adjust virtually every detail of a photo. The camera takes a picture of what it sees without adding any effects or adjustments to the saved image. Once you pull the images from the camera you add the sharpness, color saturation, exposure, etc.

iPhoto has RAW support but it’s very limited in what you can adjust. Aperture on the other hand gives you tons of options for adjusting your photos. You can take an image that was a little too bright when it was captured and make it a little darker, more saturated and sharp to enhance the beauty of the image. Aperture will truly show you the reasons an image captured in RAW format is so much better because you can truly make it an impressive photograph.

If you are like me when you take photos you’ll wind up pulling 10 or more (ok, usually a lot more than 10) images off of your camera of the same thing. For me this ensures that I get a great image. Most photographers do this as well. Usually if I take more than one photo of the same thing I reduce the risk of someone’s eyes being closed or sometimes they’ll be slighty turned in one photo and you didn’t really think about them being turned that way but it turned out really well and you’re glad you took more than one. Aperture really helps out in this. You can add stars to your images. You can add 5 stars to perfect images and 1 star to a poor image.

Another way Aperture helps out in the multiple photos department is stacking. Aperture looks at your photo collection and groups similar photos together. This allows you to easily see the different groups of photos so you can easily find the image you are looking for. I was really impressed with how well Aperture was able to separate the images where I had simply moved the camera to a different angle but not separate images that the camera was still in the same location but moved slightly due to the simple fact that I was holding the camera freestyle.

If you’ve ever used Picasa or a similar photo editing application, you’ve probably tried to increase the saturation of the colors in your images but if you went too far you’d get a lot of little blue splotches. Instead of increasing the saturation of colors overall which is how most other photo editors increase color, with Aperture you can increase a specific color. Aperture doesn’t pull out every single color of your image but it does have a palette that allows you to choose a basic color then you can increase or decrease that color. This is something that you would typically only be able to do with Photoshop or a similar application.

Aperture has so many features, I’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s a great application and I have had a lot of fun with it. The images that I have edited using the software look absolutely fantastic (even if I say so myself). They look a whole lot better than anything I could have done using what I currently use, which is Google’s Picasa. The final question boils down to this, “Is it really worth the $299 price tag?” To answer that question I would have to say yes. I’d say yes especially if you cannot afford Adobe Photoshop. Aperture gives you so many tools to make your images look great and makes it really easy to do. Even though this application has tons of tools for editing RAW images, the other photo editing tools are great for even a point and shoot camera. The non-destructive editing feature of this application alone is a major plus. I haven’t really mentioned the great photo and project organization capabilities. There are a lot of features! I’ve had a lot of fun with it and hopefully, someday, I can afford a copy of it!

Apple Aperture

Update 5/19/2007: I came home today from house sitting and I have to say. Picasa sucks. OK, it doesn’t suck for what they are offering. BUT, I really, really want a new Mac and Aperture now!