Peter -- I've misplaced my ACR settings and I'm no longer using Bridge.  Can you pls post a full ACR file with Process Version 2010, with your name/copyright/private secrets elided, stick able into IIP?

BTW, I got Imgestamatic as well, but find it non-trivial to transfer my existing IIP presets to it.  What's your take on Ingestamatic, and how do you transfer your IIP presets, including the ACR one?

Cheers,
Alexy

P.S.  Boy, did the syncing options proliferate since that Santa Fe workshop!  Photostream, Photosmith, Pixelsync, Photostream2Folder, Eye-Fi feeding the photo stream, Revel, etc., etc., etc.!

The whole idea of my workflow is to be able to do rating, key wording, labeling, etc., anywhere, sync back to DNG, and update from there.  Until Media Pro does it as well as Aperture, Lightroom, and others, it's fairly cumbersome to use it.  If I were using it for its own sake I might've gone through some such dance, but the whole idea is ease of use and ubiquity.  Let's see how Phase One carries forward.

Alexy

I've tested a workflow for rating using PixelSync (www.pixelsyncapp.com) and Aperture.  From Aperture, I can export the ratings via Metadata=>Export IPTC Metadata to Master, updating the original DNGs, and the ratings are seen immediately in Bridge.  If I export the ratings as XMP (via Export Master IPTC4XMP), as a sidecar next to the original DNG, Media Pro still can see the ratings, as usual.  But that defeats the purpose of the DNG and creating sidecars from Aperture requires a dialogue every time, choosing the location -- it cannot just drop a sidecar next to the original RAW or DNG.  So is it a the problem with Media Pro?

OK -- the problem was with my EXIF viewer, Media Pro.  When I checked the DNGs in Adobe Bridge, I see the ratings are in fact exported from Aperture via the Metadata=>Write IPTC Metadata to Master.  Keep in kind that I found all possivle "IPTC presets" dialogues and checked Rating and Label checkboxes in them, so I'm not sure it will work out of the box.

Now there's a great rating workflow with DNG=>Lightroom AND Aperture=>iPad rating=>Aperture=>DNG=>Lightroom.

Still have to understand why didn't Media Pro, for the upgrade to which I've just paid 60 bucks, doesn't see the ratings which the Bridge can see all right.

In keeping with Peter's great idea of using DNG as a self-contained bundle of metadata+RAW, I'm playing with Aperture 3 to see how I can integrate it into a workflow with DNG.  The main need here is to sync the metadata out of Aperture to DNG and back.

I've tried using a menu item "Write IPTC Data to Master", and then sync it to Media Pro to see the change.  When I adjust the rating in Aperture, write the metadata to master, and then sync to Media Pro, I see no change in the ratings.  In various Aperture presets, you can check "Rating" which is not checked by default.  Did anybody succeed in the above scenario, and what would it take to export the Aperture rating into the original DNG?

Cheers,
Alexy

I've read this recommendation, new to me, in the D-65's Lightroom book, so hope it's OK to ask it here.  They advise not to use any filters at all, including protective filters, for digital photography.  The only exception is a polarizer.

What do you guys think of that?  AFAICR, Peter's not using the UV filter... 

I've used to get a Tiffen "for digital" UV filter for each of my lens before I put it on camera.  Now I took them off, but am a bit hesitant...
Cheers,
Alexy

Peter -- so you can't use EM as a viewer for full-screen slideshow without original media connected, right?  I have an old tablet with 1024x768 screen, and am making previews with size 1024 so I can view my catalog full-screen.  I specified the thumbs size at 320, but when increasing thumbs size clicking on + on the top right, only the perimeter increases, with the same small thumb inside.  Are they supposed to grow in size as well?

Cheers,
Alexy

So -- the bottom line for compatibility is, if you want to see something hierarchical in Bridge and Lightroom, use Hierarchical Keywords in Expression Media 2, not Catalog Sets, right?

The only interoperability for Catalog Sets in what I use so far is ImageIngester.  I agree that Catalog Sets are more conceptually correct for many hierarchies, but syncing through DNG across all -- Bridge, Lightroom, and EM2 -- beats any other concepts so far as I'm concerned. 

Cheers,
Alexy

John -- I've just tried and founs that you can use both '>' and '|' characters when entering hierarchical keywords, with the difference being the direction of the subsumption in the hierarchy: '>' does most specific to most general left to right, and | does it right to left.  Example: these two are equivalent:

alexy > family > people
people | family | alexy

Cheers,
Alexy

Peter -- can you please remind us, how do you set up your EM2 catalogs:

-- What preview size do you use?
-- What thumbnail sizes do you use, and what quality? 
-- Do you make EM2 extract them from DNG -- when you know they have full-size preview, right? That's Preferences=>Media Rendering=>RAW=> Use embedded preview, if available.  I remember you recommended setting it, but I get only small thumbs out of DNGs, and so wonder what else should I do to get larger thumb sizes.
-- Do you catalog in Media view, with one image, or in thumbs view?  The latter allows to drag many images at once to catalog sets/hierarchical keywords, but one needs to have larger thumbs to see well.

Since one of the advantages of EM2 over LR2 is smaller catalog sizes, I feel we need a very specific tradeoff -- thumbs and previews sizes big enough to catalog things, but not bigger.

Cheers,
Alexy

Peter -- what are your thoughts now on the out-of-camera DNG workflow, such as Pentax's?  Looks like it's the way of the future!  Although I switched my Pentax back to PEF when traveling through Siberia, as it's twice smaller than its DNGs, I wonder whether it makes sense to shoot in DNG right away when space is not an issue.  It still helps to run the Pentax's DNG through the Adobe DNG converter, as they shrink in size almost back to PEF's size, but I'm not sure of the implications/necessity of those Pentax DNG=>Adobe DNG conversions...

Cheers,
Alexy

Paul S -- exactly right, thank you!  I forgot for a sec that I can specify the preview size as 1024, which is exactly my tablet's resolution.  The size is pretty good -- 50 MB for every 500 images.  EM2 on Windows reads an archive created on a Mac just fine.

Alexy

Peter -- right, I was pondering what stacks/HDRs/Panos do to the idea that DNG is self-contained, and it's pretty tough to think of how to overcome that.  Basically, given we have unique names for files, the only reasonable thing to do would be to insert the names of the other files in the sequence into each of them as metadata...  Or make a jumbo DNG with all of them!  Now that would be scary.

How about the Hierarchical Keywords compatibility bertween EM2 and LR2?  I read that you can type | in LR2 to create the hierarchy on the fly, will it work with EM2 or the other way?  (Gotta try...)

Alexy

So I was intrigued by the reviews of Seth Resnick & Jamie Spritzer's ("D-65") book, "The Photoshop Lightroom Workbook: Workflow not Workslow in Lightroom 2" -- especially the quote of George Jardine, "Adobe Pro Photo Evangelist," literally: "The only complete end-to-end guide for professional digital photography on the planet."  This is, for the lack of a better word, a blatant misstatement.  The DAM Book was and still is that, even in its 1st edition, preceding D-65's by 2-3 years.  I am rereading it now -- it's so much more thorough, communicative, and systematic!  Take the value of ratings, for instance.  In D-65's book there's no such index entry.  OTOH, Peter foresaw the importance of managing huge collections very well, and devotes a fantastic section to it.  Another example is Quick Develop in LR -- one has to use it to quickly fix for further catalogging, but D-65 just mention it in passing, saying they prefer to do it all in Develop.

I'm quite disappointed in that George Jardine guy's endorsement -- surely he should have known of the DAM book?  Or is it because of the Expression Media? 

Cheers,
Alexy

I'm wondering what's the right strategy to catalog in EM2 with an eye on keeping DNGs independent.  Building a hierarchy via keywords -- HK -- can be read into LR2, although it has its own ad hoc convention of HKs, with the pipe | symbol, right?  But if the idea is to sync back into DNG, so is it still preferable to use HK instead of Catalog Sets (CS) for portability?

I also wonder what happens with images which are parts of a sequence -- a stack or HDR set -- in EM2 vs LR2?  How do you mark photos in EM2 as belonging to a set and then see only one, e.g. the normally exposed member of the HDR triple shot?

Cheers,
Alexy