Imagine yourself walking down a lovely San Francisco street, whistling a merry tune, only to be confronted by the sudden appearance of a menacing robot packing a shockingly massive and entirely unnecessary... ray gun, of sorts. What would you do? If you were Deke, you'd snap a picture and correct its colors. And not in any standard way, either, but in a way that permits you to apply radical color adjustments while leaving a virgin-like histogram in your wake.

The Levels adjustment is a comfortable tool for many photographers. In part, because it allows you to individually adjust the shadows, midtones, and highlights with the assistance of a histogram. In this screencast, Derrick Story walks you through the basic levels adjustments in Aperture.

In many ways, music technology has become a numbers game. Today's digital instruments are often sold on specs, not sound. In this episode, the Fat Man goes back to basics, gleefully playing everything from an ancient test-tone generator to a spicy Excaliburrito to demonstrate that one glorious note may be all you need.

Tim Grey, author of the just released Take Your Best Shot: Tim Grey Tackles Your Digital Darkroom Questions, sits down with Derrick Story to answer submitted questions about photography during this video interview from Photoshop World Orlando. Tim addresses a number of topics including film vs digital, megapixels, sharpening, color management, and more.

Aperture's Retouch tool has both "Repair" and "Clone" modes to help you tackle a variety of imperfections. In this screencast, Derrick Story shows you how to use the Repair mode for removing spots, such as sensor dust. He then demonstrates the Clone mode for larger cleanups.

We all know digital photos can be modified. So much so that, at least in the popular lexicon, Photoshop is synonymous with turning fact into fiction. But at least one facet of digital photo, a variety of metadata called EXIF, is supposed to be secure. EXIF records when and how an image was captured, and if credible, might actually be judged admissible in a court of law. But not if Deke has anything to say about it. To hear Deke tell the story, metadata forensics is pure baloney. Learn how to cook your own EXIF in this episode of dekePod.

The book making tool in Aperture 2.1 goes well beyond the handsome stock templates that Apple provides. It's actually a sophisticated layout tool that you can use to design posters, fliers, invitations, and more. In this screencast, Derrick Story shows you how to use these tools to design a postcard with imagery and metadata from your Aperture library.

Last time, DIY guru Michael Dean revealed how to capture high-quality audio at home. This time, he shares mic tips, clever soundproofing ideas, and his personal gear recommendations. Bedcasting, anyone?

If you've ever read a computer magazine, you know the idea behind "101 Tips." One gala issue, lots of first-rate contributors, lots of quality information. And lots and lots of pages. But when's the last time one lone guy tried to capture 101 tips in video? In just 5 minutes of video? Set to music? This is the realm of dekePod, the once-every-other-weekly series from Deke McClelland. It's bold, it's brash, it's ridiculous. It's a podcast with serious issues. Enjoy.

Don't fix it in the mix — get it right the first time! DIY guru Michael Dean explains how to capture a clean signal so you don't have to mess with balky noise-reduction software after the fact. Get field-tested mic tips, computer tips, and more.

DMI hits 25! Listen in as we explore our favorite moments from the first 24 episodes and unearth some never-before-heard bonus material. From vocoders to space-helmeted cover bands, from the secret sound of Goldfrapp to harmonious fat men, here are Digital Media Insider's greatest hits.

Would you like to know the exact lens you used for every shot in your Aperture library? In this podcast with Joe Schorr, Derrick Story learns about the new "Lens Model" field and how to use it. Plus Joe explains how to update your previously uploaded images in Aperture to also display this information. Other helpful techniques include tapping the power of the Query HUD and changes in Aperture 2 to help you better look inside Stacks.

In the movies, smart homes automatically greet you when you return after a hard day's work. But in reality, this hasn't been very easy to do. In this article, Gordon Meyer shows you how you can program your Mac to know you're there. Once you get started, you'll find all sorts of useful ways your Mac can welcome you home.

After capturing 65% of the voice-recorder market, Olympus has now aimed its zoom lens at portable WAV/MP3 recorders. Guitarist Mark Nelson tests this 24-bit, curvaceous, aluminum-clad beauty and likes what he feels and hears. Telephoto mics, anyone?

Continuing the trend started with Amazon's Elastic Cloud (EC2), Google plans to make their vast resources available to developers who wish to deploy massively scalable applications on the Google Infrastructure. In this tutorial, you'll get a look into the APIs and database capabilities that Google is providing, and how to leverage them in a sample application.

One of the fun things about running the "Inside Aperture" site is receiving reader contributions. Every now and then a clever new technique shows up in our aperture@oreilly.com mailbox, many of which I try. But why should I get to have all the fun? So, this week I'm sharing a handful of reader-submitted techniques. My guess is that you'll find one or two particularly useful.

Cloud computing has become the new hot thing (Web 3.0?) Amazon was one of the first vendors to offer a cloud development environment, the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. They followed it up with a storage capability called S3. This tutorial will show you how to set up and get started developing applications on EC2 and S3.

With an exotic OLED display, baby-simple controls, good sound, and an attractive price, the Marantz PMD620 aims to stand out in the crowded world of portable digital audio recorders. How well does it perform? Mark Nelson frails a gourd banjo to find out.

Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl.

After several years away from anything resembling enterprise software, chromatic accepted a challenge from SAP Labs to try their new software development platform. What lessons have they learned from dynamic languages and frameworks? Has developing big serious software truly become more agile? In this second of three articles, chromatic uses SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment to build a bare-bones application from the data model to the UI.

XML Databases, coupled with the power of XQuery, offer a potentially paradigm-changing way of dealing with data. The Oracle Berkeley DB XML database provides a rich XQuery-based engine that can be manipulated via XQuery, opening up possibilities for any web developer.

Aperture 2.1 includes a more versatile book-making tool than we saw in earlier versions. So powerful in fact, that calling it a book making tool is really selling it short. It's actually a flexible layout application with some very useful output options. In this podcast, Derrick Story talks with Joe Schorr and tries to uncover all the hidden gems buried in Aperture 2.1.

Ubuntu 8.04 (code named Hardy Heron) is out, and Brian DeLacey not only has the scoop on the new features, but a look at some of the players who made it happen, places it's in use, and what machines it's running on.

This article is an introduction to Flexive, an open source Java EE 5 application development stack. The authors have extracted a complete application template and describe its use.

ScreenFlow grabs audio and video from the computer and external sources, provides a timeline for editing these recordings, and offers a range of effects aimed specifically at creating on-screen software presentations. This screencasting studio is easy to use and affordable. And if you have a Mac running Leopard with ScreenFlow loaded up, you're suddenly in the educational movie making business. Jochen Wolters reviews this application and provides plenty of video samples.