This is the second part of an ongoing series of articles that will hopefully shed some light on developing an Aperture Edit Plugin. This series is not meant to be a tutorial, but more of a documentation of my personal efforts to create a plugin for use in a two year long art project I will begin working on this fall. This art project is also going to be documented over at my website called Entropy Art. Please feel free to check it out, sign up and participate in any way that you would like. Also, I am making the source code for this plugin available as open source. As it is still just basically a template, I haven’t felt the need to choose a license for it yet, but I will eventually. For now, please feel free to download the code and contribute any ideas you would like.
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I have a need to start working on an Aperture Edit plugin for personal reasons. For the next two years I will be working towards an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore Maryland. During this experience I will be taking lots of pictures, and developing a long term documentary project. However, in addition to my traditional work, I will be adding a component to my exhibition and thesis that has to do with the visualization of my images.

You can read more about this at the website I have set up to document my project at Entropy Art.

Using an Aperture Edit plugin to manage my digital image processing makes perfect sense to me. I can create a suite of routines, have them be customizable in any way I want, and have them directly integrated with Aperture. This will keep my workflow simple and will keep all of my images and thesis work in one place.
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Micah Walter of Aperture Plugged In has released ApertureToPictage version 1.0. The update will allow wedding and event photographers to upload their photos to Pictage in a fast and easy manner. The new version includes major code rewrites and allows background export if you’re on Aperture 1.5.x (now standard in Aperture 2.0) and great time-saving features including the ability to create a new Pictage event from within Aperture. Here’s a quick rundown of all the great new features:

1. Upload speeds are now up to three times as fast as they were with the beta version.
2. There is now a really cool drag and drop user interface that allows you to edit and re-sort your Pictage categories.
3. The plugin now allows for queueing of jobs so you can rack up a number of batches and let it run over night.
4. You can also resume an upload if your computer crashes, or if you loose your internet connection. It just picks up where you left off.
5. Additionally you can also choose to save your exported files to disk for other purposes.

The update is provided free of charge to all Pictage Pro members. You can download the plugin through this link, but you must be logged into Pictage. The plugin is compatible with the new Aperture 2.0.

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I have made a couple of minor updates to the DNGExport plugin that I released earlier this morning. This newer version fixes a problem having to do with the Embed Original RAW Image option. I have also added the initial implementation for the progress bar, however it is pretty rudimentary.

To download the latest version click here.

To download the Adobe DNG Converter click here.

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This weekend I decided to try my hand at creating a simple plugin that would allow me to export images as DNG files. My idea was simple enough – create an Aperture plugin that mimics the Adobe DNG Converter.

So, I spent a good portion of the day looking online for information on DNG. I downloaded the DNG SDK from Adobe and spent a great deal of time just trying to make heads or tails of it. In the meantime, I designed an interface that looks essentially the same as the Adobe DNG Converter’s preferences panel. This gives the user a few options on export.

Eventually I found out that the DNG SDK cannot write a DNG from an arbitrary RAW file format. In fact all it really can do is read a valid DNG file, and write one (isn’t that the same as making a copy?).

But then I realized all I really needed to do was to call the Adobe DNG Converter command line tool which is hidden inside the application’s package contents.

This isn’t ideal as the user will now see the little Adobe icon popping up over and over again in the dock, and the user must first install the DNG Converter before using my plugin, but it works.

So that I could say I finished an Aperture plugin in one day, I am calling this one a BETA release. Hopefully in the future I will be able to expand on it, adding more sophisticated options and freeing myself from the constraints of the command line tool.

So, if you would like to try it out, please download and install the plugin by following this link. You will also need the Adobe DNG Converter application, which is available for free from Adobe’s website.

A couple of release notes here. I haven’t implemented the progress bar, so don’t be alarmed. Maybe I will get that done on the plane tomorrow. Also, the plugin first exports the Master RAW file to your disk, does the conversion and then deletes the RAW copy. So if you watch in your Finder window you will see the files appearing and disappearing. And lastly if you try to export an image whose Master is not a RAW file (Jpeg or Tiff) it will still export the file, but it will skip the conversion to DNG and just leave it on your destination folder.

This pluign is meant to be essentially a macro. It doesn’t do anything you can;t already do with the Adobe DNG Converter application, but maybe someday it will!

Enjoy…

PS – I have only tested this on Leopard.

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If you are one of the many Pictage.com photographers out there who use Aperture, then you will want to check out their latest plugin.

This latest plugin has been completely rewritten form the ground up.

The new version offers background uploading, keyword categorization and the ability to select from your event list or create a new event from within the plugin. For more information on how this plugin came to be, please read my post over at Inside Aperture, or to download the latest version, follow this link. You must be logged into Pictage.com to download the plugin.

The Aperture to Pictage Plug-in streamlines your workflow by making image transfers between Aperture and Pictage easier than ever.

Enjoy the following benefits:

1. Seamless upload from Aperture to Pictage via integrated FTP engine
2. Create Pictage categories on the fly using Aperture’s keyword feature
3. Schedule and upload new events or upload to existing events directly from the plug-in

http://pro.pictage.com/products_apertureplugin.htm

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