SmuginForAperture Beta2 Now Released

Foolishly given how tired I am right now I have released the second beta of SmuginForAperture with various bug fixes and improvements following feedback from the first beta. I’m tired because I have been chasing very fast bugs!

The weekend was fun with a field trip to a woolshed somewhere in the back of beyond. Fortunately the photo club members brought 4x4s as we crossed rivers and followed gravel roads into the hills. A good trip and a very patient (and very lovely) model in some nice lighting although I suspect I could have done better. I guess that is why I keep practising.

The image needs a little bit of work but that can wait until I am a little more awake 🙂

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Quail Island in HDR

Last weekend I had some time out to take my kids to Quail Island, an island off Lyttleton near Christchurch. The island has been used for many purposes over the years; for human and animal quarantine, a leper colony, for training dogs for the Antarctic and is currently a recreational reserve.

One of the interesting features is a ships graveyard – a number of ships were scuttled off the island and these are visible particularly at low tide. We were lucky enough to be there at low tide and got right down to the wrecks and my kids had a great time exploring and getting very muddy! I took the chance to take a few photos while I was there of the wrecks, a heron which landed there and the jetty where the ferry stops.

Beta is now closed

Thanks to everyone who has provided comments and feedback, and thanks to everyone volunteering as beta testers. I now have enough beta testers for this version of SmuginForAperture. The good news is the plugin appears to work as expected (so far at least) nut I now have a couple of minor bugs to fix along with some very useful improvements which have been suggested. The improvements may make it into the first release but if not will definitely make v1.1.

The improvements involve better options to select default captions (version name, IPTC caption, IPTC headline), showing the albums in a hierarchy to make it easier to find the correct gallery and finally to provide access to the gallery quick settings templates when creating a gallery.

I will provide updates on this blog once I have decided which changes must go in the first version. In the meantime I hope my next post will have some photographs 🙂

SmuginForAperture Beta

Thanks to everyone who has left comments and suggestions and to those who have volunteered for beta testing. Assuming I don’t find any major issues in the beta build I intend to send out details to beta testers this evening (New Zealand time). If I do find an issue it will be tomorrow.

Aperture to SmugMug Plugin

When I am not taking photographs (most of the time unfortunately) I write software. I use Aperture to manage my photographs and SmugMug for storing and displaying my images. There is an export plugin ApertureToSmugMug which works well but I wanted a few more features and I have been busy developing a new export plugin to add those features.

I am now at the point where I need some beta testers for the plugin which comes in two flavours, a free ‘lite’ version (SmuginForAperture ) which does basic export, gallery creation, caption and keyword editing and SmuginProForAperture which allows the SmugMug ID, album and URL to be added to the image metadata after export. This allows Aperture smart groups to show all the images currently uploaded to SmugMug by looking at these custom fields.

If anyone has amy feature requests I would love to here from you and if anyone would like to beta test these plugins please let me know. The bad news is that they are SnowLeopard only (Mac OS X 10.6) and therefore only work with Intel Macs. The plugins work with Aperture 2.1.4 or Aperture 3.x.

SmuginForAperture Screenshot

If your are interested in beta testing the plugins email me at ‘support @ nzwidgets.com’ or leave a comment here.

More Sunsets

Since yesterdays sunsets went down well, and I have a few moreI have been playing with I thought I’d share them. Actually I need to do a bit more work on the images, I have a few I want to stitch together and if I am feeling very brave I might try stitching some HDR panoramas although I think that will take some time.

Believe it or not the colours are pretty much as I saw them.

My next post will not be sunsets…or sunrises.

Things not to do

I went out to take some sunset photographs tonight, absolutely beautiful with the sunset over the Southern Alps. Reds, oranges really lovely. Unfortunately it was very dark by the time I stopped and somewhere I managed to drop my memory card so I lost the images from the first half of the evening which is a real shame I’m sure I had some fantastic images on there. Fortunately my second SD card survived.

This one has been tonemapped although I’m not sure it needs it.

Lesson learnt I hope, be more careful with memory cards!