Life At Number 4: 1/200s f/8.0 ISO400 17mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EFS 17-55 f/2.8

Having used it for a while, I'm finding that Aperture 2.1 gives me consistently better images than 1.5. I notice it because in most cases I am unable to improve them: it does a better job first time and there is simply less to do, or even attempt to do. This is good. I'd rather not spend much time tweaking.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

The Aperture 2.1 SDK is now available to ADC members. This opens the flood gates to third parties who want to write plug-ins that perform adjustments like Dodge and Burn provided with Aperture.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Adjustments

Tiffen now has their Dfx digital filter suite available as a plug-in for Aperture 2.1:

Dfx digital filter suite offers precision adjustments over its range of effects that cannot be approached by any other digital filter software. A complete edition includes the most comprehensive array today, emulating more than 1,000 varied effects and gels, from factory pre-sets or custom effects, providing total creative and technical control with the most comprehensive and user-friendly filter-effect palette today.

They are offering a 15-day free trial with full availability in May.

Digital Film Tools has Light, Ozone, and Power Stroke, three tools that appear to be available right now.

Light: Using a pre-built light and texture library that includes windows, doors, leaves and abstract patterns, you can add realistic lighting and shadow to scenes just as if you were adding a light at the time of shooting.

Ozone: Inspired by Ansel Adams' Zone System for still photography, Ozone allows you to manipulate the color of an image with incredible flexibility and accuracy using a Digital Zone System. The Digital Zone System takes the spectrum of image values and divides them into 11 discrete zones. The color, brightness, contrast and gamma of each zone can be independently adjusted until you've painted a new picture.

Power Stroke introduces a simple, interactive stroke-based interface to quickly and intuitively perform targeted adjustments. Instead of meticulously selecting regions or hand-painting masks, regions of interest are isolated by drawing a few simple brush strokes with adjustments then made only in those areas. Strokes can be assigned multiple adjustments and effects such as color correction, recoloring or desaturation, colorization of black and white images, blur, fill light for dimly lit image areas and Diffusion/Glow.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Adjustments

You can now add and remove each adjustment panel from the default set. This means you can always have Edge Sharpen showing, for instance.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Adjustments

David Hassler has been comparing the performance of Aperture 2 with Capture NX for skin tones on this Flickr page.

Tags: Aperture, RAW, Adjustments

Sometimes I have an image that I want to adjust to look like another in some way -- maybe the same brightness or color. This is easy to do because Aperture can display both at the same time and I can adjust one while using the other as a reference.

The first thing I do is press the S key to select Primary Only. This has no effect on adjustments (adjustments can be applied to only one image at time), but it does very conveniently make the currently selected image very obvious. Only the selected image has a white selection ring in this mode.

Here I have the upper image displayed as a reference and am adjusting the lower image:

This also works in full screen mode (F key) and with zoom on (Z key):

If I need to adjust two images at the same time, this is possible too. Clicking on an image changes the selection to that image and I make adjustments. This technique can be applied to as many images as I can cram on the screen.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Workflow, Comparing

Flower and Sunset: 1/8000s f/3.5 ISO400 50mm -0.7ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

A Thanksgiving trip to Monterey Bay Aquarium gave me some interesting photo opportunities, not all of them involving sea creatures. Sitting down to lunch, I snapped the photo above, just after the table has been relaid, and just before people were shown to it.

I literally snapped it, picking up my camera and pressing the shutter to seize the moment. Only later did I get chance to view the result and see how the camera had been set up at the time. This is what I had:

Since I was shooting RAW, the tungsten white balance could easily be adjusted out. The image had been underexposed two-thirds of a stop on top of metering on the bright sky, so the detail on the table was lost in the shadows.

After adjusting the white balance I increased the saturation to 1.8 and then started on the levels. By boosting the shadows with the Highlights and Shadows control and making some heavy changes to the Levels control, I was able to obtain a much better image. But the shadows, now light enough for detail, showed some very ugly blotches of color caused by chroma noise (100% crop):

Chroma Blur to the rescue. Chroma Blur is one of the RAW Fine Tuning settings hidden behind a disclosure triangle at the top of the adjustments pane and is normally set to 2.0. I boosted it all the way to 10.0 to achieve the result I was looking for:

A side effect of this adjustment is that the flower petals have dark edges -- that's not as the scene actually was, but in the final image if helps make them stand out against the light background.

Here are the final settings:

Notice that I changed the levels by moving the top triangle controls, not the lower markers. I find this often gives better control.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Chroma Blur, Sunset

A short thread on Apples' Aperture discussion board gives a possible solution to the problem of vaults that will not update due to errors on specific images:

Aperture is not letting me update my vaults. I am receiving update vault error messages when trying to back up to Vaults. I have three backup Vaults on external firewire drives, formatted Mac HFS+ (not MS-DOS) and not partitioned. My Aperture library is also on a dedicated external drive. I get the same message for all three vaults, so this seems to be an Aperture problem, not a disk problem. The error messages refer to NEF (raw) image files that do not exist in my Library (or anywhere else, for that matter). Message reads:

update vault error:
The following error occured:
Couldn't create/Volumes/LaCie/ApertureV2.apvault/Library/....

Any insights would be appreciated.

Another reader with a similar problem found a solution:

I managed to fix my problem by making an adjustment to the photo that the error message referenced.

This and the fact that all three of the poster's vaults fail to update implies that the problem is not with the vault, but with the library: there is something about the information that Aperture stores about that image that causes an error. When the image is adjusted the bad file is overwritten and the problem goes away. Vaults don't contain thumbnails or previews, so it can't be those. The master in this case is referenced, and in any case is never updated. So it must be with the sidecar files.

The original poster can't apply this fix because the image that is causing the problem apparently does not exist, so I'm investigating this with him. Update: We traced the problem to "something bad" about the folder or its contents that was being reported. By opening the library and the vault with control-click Show Package Contents and navigating down, it was possible to trash the folder. Not only did the vault update complete once that was done, but it worked many, many times faster than before. The bad news is that I think this is due to a bad spot on the disk, indicating a drive that is on its way out. If you have vault problems: back up carefully and consider that you may have a bad disk.

Vault problems can be caused by using the wrong disk format, typically FAT32, because the drive arrived that way and was never reformatted. FAT32 cannot support the characters used by Aperture in folder names and so causes errors. Another cause of problems is that the ownership of files and folders in the vault may be at odds with the current user. This can be fixed by checking the box for Ignore ownership on this volume on the information window for the volume (command I):

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Updates, Adjustments

Maple leaf: 1/50s f/5.6 ISO400 195mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, adjusted

I rarely have reason to change the contrast of my images, but sometimes it is just what is needed. The image above started life as a much paler version:

It was taken in very diffuse light and the contrast was very low. Rather than increase the saturation as I usually do, I found that increasing the contrast dramatically had the desired effect. A small increase in the exposure was also needed:

The new version has much more depth than the original because there is enough detail to separate the leaf from the background.

Tags: Aperture, Canon, 30D, Contrast, Adjustments, Leaves

Now I have a DSLR, I have sensor dust. I've one big annoying spot and several lesser spots that make their presence felt whenever I use smaller apertures . So, lacking a blower or other equipment to fix it, I use Aperture's Spot and Patch tool to deal with them. The spots are only visible against a plain background, so I don't have to fix all of them, just the really bad ones in certain images.

In the photo on the left, the original, the bad spot is visible above the horizon. After adjustment, the spot is worse because of the better contrast.
     
Once I go into full screen mode with F, the spot looks like this:

To fix it I bring up the adjustment HUD with H and then select Spot and Patch from the HUD:

This brings up a radius control dialog which allows me to drag the control to get the approximate size I want for the spot:

Over the image, the cursor turns into a target:

And once over the spot, I click and a yellow circle appears to mark my adjustment:

Inside the circle the spot is fainter, but it's not entirely gone. And it's hard to see what is going on with that yellow ring around the spot. To toggle the yellow ring off and then on again I press A, then X.

The problem is that my spot adjustment is a little too small. All it takes is a small change to the radius using the Spot and Patch controls:

I can make it vanish completely:

I press again A to restore the regular cursor and I'm done with that one. Gone!

Now I have a puzzle. I want to fix another spot, but how do I get the target cursor back? Selecting from the + menu on the HUD doesn't work -- it's grayed out -- because the control is already in use. There is no button on the control to add another spot, just a button to delete one.

The answer is to use the hidden menu at the top of the screen in full screen mode. Taking the cursor up to the top of the screen reveals the controls and shows the keyboard shortcut for Spot and Patch, X:

By pressing X, the Spot and Patch control is activated and a new target cursor appears that I can use to banish the other spots. In fact, I could have pressed X at the beginning to create the first spot adjustment had I wanted to.

If I have other images with spots that I want to fix, then as long as the camera has the same orientation, they will appear in the same place in each image. So I can use Lift and Stamp to get a head start on fixing the spots in those other images. Pressing O to select the Lift tool and clicking on the image gets me the Lifted parameters:

By unchecking the items I don't want and deleting all the adjustments except for the Spot and Patch (why no checkboxes for those?), I end up with what I want:

Now I can stamp that spot adjustment onto other images that need the same set of spots eradicated.

Unfortunately I can't rotate the coordinates as I Stamp to mimic rotating the camera. So for each of the three other camera orientations, I have to create a despotted image to have spot removal ready for Lifting. And the tool does not have a numeric coordinate input like the Crop tool does, so I can't just move numbers around to move the spot between orientations.

I also find that images with spot adjustments are very slow to process, at least on my machine, so I do them last. After the other things that are slow in fact: Straightening and Shadows and Highlights.

When I get a Rocket Blower, we'll see how well it works. The final image can be viewed here on Smugmug.

Tags: Aperture, Sensor Dust, Spot Tool, Adjustments, DSLR

Having been playing with getting back-lit photos of ducks, I accidently left the exposure compensation set to -1ev and proceeded to underexpose everything else. However the photos were quite easily adjustable.

Here is the original image of a type of duck I have not seen before (what is it?). I caught it just as it had shaken the drips off its bill, but before they had hit the water. If you view the full-size final image you can see the sprinkle of drops frozen in the air.

After cropping and adjusting the under-exposed original in Aperture I was able to get this much more pleasing result:

1/2000s f/3.5 ISO100 195mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, adjusted

It still looks a little dim, but I prefer it that way, and the sun was fairly low anyway. I was quite surprised that I could under-expose so much and still get a good result. It helps that I was using ISO100. The adjustments looked like this:

I could boost the exposure and the brightness on this image because the highlights were very small. As long as I didn't diminish the color in the drops or lose the feather detail it was OK. I used a little shadow boost as well. In other pictures from the same series I have found that the colors adjustment is very useful: I can desaturate the color of the water to focus the eye on the colors of the ducks.

I am also finding that the 70-200 zoom is not enough for bird pictures: a 1.4x TC is probably on the horizon. One of my reasons for going for the f/2.8 over the f/4.0 version of the lens was so that I still had a decent aperture with a teleconverter.

Tags: Aperture, Underexposure, Adjustments, Canon, 30D

Deck roof: 1/40s f/11.0 ISO100 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped

The Aperture Users Professional Network has published the first of a seven part series on image adjustment. I recommend that everyone read this series. There are a large number of controls in the adjustment panel and I'm sure that nobody understands all of them.

Now I'm shooting RAW most of the time, I'm doing more adjustment than I was (but still trying to minimize it) and I find myself poking around in this panel trying to understand how everything affects the image. What I have to adjust is a good way to learn what I got wrong.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, AUPN

One answer to the highlight problem is shooting with an exposure offset. I'm experimenting with -0.3ev. The photos I get don't suffer such a problem with the highlights, but are dark of course. Here is one:

I have found by trial and error that the best way to get the image back that I remember is to adjust the Exposure up just enough to get the highlights I want and then use the Shadows control for the darker areas. That's it. The other controls mess with the image in a way that makes it worse. Here is the adjusted version:

You can click it to see it full-size.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

I'm finding that RAW lets me do some pretty wild things with images. This is a fountain back-lit by the sun:

It came from the image below by setting the Exposure to -2 and the Saturation to +2:

I also took this terrible sunset-ish photo by pointing the camera in direction of the setting sun and clicking the shutter:

By cropping and playing with the adjustments so that they looked like this:

I was able to get a more artistic result. Notice how the exposure is set below -2. How did I do that? The slider only goes to -2, but if you keep clicking on the triangle in the numeric control or type a number in you can go beyond the sliders.

The only real details that are visible are the power lines, so I called it Electric Sunset (click to see full size).

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Sunset, RAW, Fountain

Aperture's levels control can be used to easily add color to otherwise gray images. This original photo of stacked chairs has a range of grays that exist only on the chair backs and seats:

By selecting the Blue channel on the levels control, I can alter the amount of blue in the gray part of the chairs. In this case I'll boost the darker tones significantly to give a blue tint:

With some boosting of the saturation with the exposure control and a crop to focus attention where I want it, I get my final image:

Of course the colors can be cut or boosted individually or in combination to get any color. The Colors control can also be used to adjust the color once one is applied.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Color

[Update: Aperture 2.0 kills this workflow dead. Apple has changed the behavior of album picks so that creating a new album from non-pick images no longer automatically makes those images the album picks in the new album. Send feedback to Apple if you want the old behavior back]

This article shows a powerful technique for managing adjustments to large numbers of images. It brings together stacks and albums and shows how they can be used as part of an efficient workflow. It was prompted by a posting on the Apple message boards for Aperture:

Here's the conundrum: I have 800 event photos in an Aperture project. I stamp adjustments to all of them. So, now I have 800 stacks, each with a master RAW image and an adjusted version. In each stack, the unadjusted master is the default pick. If the stacks are closed and I Export Versions, I get 800 JPEGs rendered from the unadjusted masters. If I open all stacks, select all, and Export Versions, I get 1,600 JPEGs rendered from both the masters and the versions. How in **** do I select the 800 adjusted versions for export without having to command-click on each one? Is there no way to automatically export just the versions?

The only approach I've found is to select the versions and make them the picks in their stacks, one by one. Then I can close the stacks, select all, and Export Versions. This is painfully time-consuming. I can't even just select the versions one by one and then batch promote them to pick status. I not only have to select the versions one by one, but I also have to promote them one by one. Argh! Am I missing something here? Please help.

Here is a project with some images that I am going to adjust. There could be thousands: the workflow is the same.

Before I start adjusting I select the three images I want to work with and create new versions by pressing option V:

This creates duplicates of the three and puts each duplicate into a stack with the original as the pick. This is where the difficulty lies as the person with the problem found. Since those new versions are in stacks but are not the pick then Aperture will not use the adjusted version for exports.

To turn this to my advantage (without clicking anywhere else so that the duplicates are still selected) I control click one of the new versions and select New From Selection > Album:

Pressing command L has the same effect. The new album is created and displayed and I can rename it to something meaningful, such as Adjusted:

The new album shows the stacks just as the project did, but this time there are check marks on the duplicates showing that these are the album picks:

An album pick is the image that will be on the top of the stack for this album only. Look what happens when I close all the stacks with option semicolon:

Just the album picks are left showing. That's the preparation complete. I have an album which will show me all the new versions, so no changes to the original project are needed. Now I adjust the images. For this example the changes are rather radical, so the difference is obvious:

I could have adjusted just one image and used lift and stamp to process thousands.

Selecting the original project shows that the adjusted versions are still in the stacks, and are not the picks as they are in the album:

Closing the project stacks will show me the originals. Closing the album stacks will show me the adjusted images. So by selecting either the project images or the album images I can choose which I export, print, or continue to process.

This technique can be used any number of times with any number of selections and albums and should be part of your standard workflow.

Tags: Aperture, Stacks, Album Picks, Adjustments, Workflow

The undo/redo feature of Aperture can be used to quickly compare a set of different adjustments without creating new versions. I show it here using the crop tool, but it works with any of the adjustment tools.

Here is an image I selected and displayed in the viewer:

I press C to bring up the crop tool and then make a crop, but I don't press A to end the crop yet:

Now by making several alternate crops either with a new rectangle or by dragging the one that is already there:

I get Aperture to remember this series of adjustments in its undo buffer.
Finally I press A to accept the last crop and show it:

Now by pressing command Z to undo and shift command Z to redo I can go back and forth through the crops. This works best in full screen mode, and I can press F at any time to go into or out of full screen.

When I find the one I like, I just stop and go do something else. The alternatives are forgotten automatically. If I don't like any of then, I press C again and adjust or replace the currently displayed crop.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Tips And Tricks, Undo, Cropping

The levels adjustment control has a nice row of draggable knobs along the bottom and Aperture users are familiar with these. What is not so obvious is that the four points across the top that just look like markers are draggable too. It's an odd interface design that gives otherwise identical controls a different appearance.

Here is the levels adjustment control with the quarter points shown (click the button below the cog to switch between one and three control points):

And after moving the output (top) points, still leaving the source (bottom) points alone:

Unfortunately there is no numerical display or input on the output points, and that reinforces the idea that these points are fixed. How do I communicate the values that I have chosen to someone else?

There is more than simple dragging. Option-dragging will keep the lines at the same angle and move both end points. That is how I got this:

Command-clicking an end point will straighten the line keeping the clicked point stationary, like this:

And this gives a way of figuring out the numerical value of the output points. Command click on one of them to straighten the line, then read off the value from the box at the bottom. Use command Z to undo that, and then repeat with the other two points.

To set the output points given a set of values, type the values into the boxes at the bottom, straighten the lines by command-clicking on the bottom (source) points, then adjust the source points to their correct values.

Tags: Aperture, Tips And Tricks, Adjustments

I'm very new to Aperture, and am still struggling with stacks, though. My problem is that I'd like to put multiple versions of a single photo in a stack, cropped for different print sizes (with keywords of "5x7", "8x10", &c). But I also want to use stacks for selecting the best shot of several similar ones. My problem comes when I want to do both: Stack several shots together, but have multiple versions of the "pick." How do you do this without getting very confused?

[Update: A reader pointed out to me that filters on regular albums do include stacks that have members matching the filter. This behavior is not the same as projects (no match) or smart albums (match and extract images). I have amended the article to include this].

It is not obvious, but Aperture already does this for you: if you put images in a stack and then create versions, those versions are grouped with the originals. But there is a twist: if you leave the variations in the stack then a regular project filter cannot find them. The only way to find them is with an album: a smart album will find and extract the images; a regular album will find the images in the stack, but not extract them.

Look at this rather contrived example. Here are four images in a stack, with the pick on the left:

I want to manage two different crops of each of these. I'll make the crops really obvious so they can be distinguished in this example: one set of crops will be vertical and the other set horizontal. In real life they would have more realistic aspect ratios. I will start with the pick. I duplicate the version and drag it out of the stack (option drag does that in one step):

Then I crop it and keyword it:

Then duplicate the same original with option drag and crop it again, this time vertically, and keyword it:

Now I repeat that for the other images in the stack, just leaving them loose in the project:

A big mess. But that is OK because they are tagged and have the same file name as the originals. I can still find anything I need.

To find all the cropped images based on, say, the third image in the stack I have to do some filtering. Selecting that image and bringing up the inspector with control D lets me look at the file name (add the file name to the display using instructions here if it is not visible):

I copy the file name from the field: "Pine tree chopping22.JPG" and paste it into the project's filter dialog in the Other Metadata section:

And select is as the condition:

Here are the resulting images:

Notice that the original does not show up. That's because it is inside a stack in a project -- and only albums can see inside stacks. That is why I left the cropped versions loose in the project.

That found all of the crops based on one image, now what about the opposite: all of the images with one crop? To find all the horizontal images I filter on that keyword in the project. Since the cropped versions are loose in the project they are found:

Now let's do an experiment and see what happens if I tidy up the loose images. I select them all and hit command K to create a new stack:

Those grey rectangles inside the new stack have collected together images that are derived from the same original. What happens if I drag all of that stack into the original stack? This:

The originals and their versions are neatly grouped together! This is great, except that filtering the project on Horizontal now gets me this:

Nothing. Since this is a project filter and the pick does not match Horizontal, the whole stack is ignored. So I have to create an album.

A regular album will find any stacks that include the keyword, but will not extract the images. This tells me where to look, but not what to look at. In this case it is not very useful because every stack with a horizontal crop will be included along with all the other crops available in those stacks.

A smart album will match the keyword I specify and will extract the images. To create the smart album I select the project (important because I want the scope of the filter to be limited to that project):

And select the keyword I need, and check the Ignore Stack Groupings checkbox. That is the magic that lets the filter look inside the stacks and extract the images:

And as you can see, the four horizontal images have been displayed. But now I have lost my stacking information: which one was the pick? That is an inconvenient, but not unworkable problem.

So there are some trade-offs in the way that Aperture has implemented filtering and displaying stacks. I would do everything inside the stacks and have no loose images. I say that because the most important selection will be of the image. The crop follows. Once you have found the image in the stack that you want you can click on the crops and look at the metadata to pick the one you need.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Stacks, Adjustments, Versions

Is there a way to set up a Smart Album for photos that have not be edited or adjusted? I looked for a parameter to do that, but can't find it. I know edited photos get marked and I could manually keyword the unmarked ones, but I wanted to see if you found a more automatic way of collecting together unedited photos in Aperture.

There is no way to do this with Aperture 1.5.1. I have seen it requested a number of times and could certainly use it myself. It's a pretty basic workflow requirement. Aperture should be able to filter and sort on any image attribute. The list view does give access to a column that includes the badges:

but alas sorting does not work on that column. So although there is a compact visual way of finding the unadjusted ones, it is not even possible to sort all the badged items to one end of the grid view.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Adjustments, Filtering

Here is another adjustment example. This one includes rotation and color balance.

The image on the left is the original and on the right the adjusted version (click on these to view the full-size images):
   
This particular image is the best out of a bracketed set that I took of the window. There is a huge contrast between the outside brightness and the inside brightness, so I wanted to have some leeway. The challenges here are getting more detail into the dark and light areas (trees and wall), improving the color so it is more natural, and straightening the lean to the left.

The first thing I am going to attack is the color. It's too blue outside and the curtains are bland. So I adjust the color temperature a little in the White Balance section to reflect the morning light that was actually present:

I find the sliders hard to use on a slow machine, so usually either opt for typing in the numbers (double click to select, type, but TAB out of the field -- if you hit Enter you select the Compare image), or clicking and option-clicking the little triangles. Option-clicking increments in smaller amounts.

I also increase the saturation a bit:

and that results in the following:

Next is to play with the Highlights and Shadows to get the wall and trees looking better:

Then finally rotate it to get the center straight. To do that add the Straighten adjustment from the + menu first:

I find that numerical is the only way to go with this tool. It is just too slow on my hardware. And the method of straightening is really clunky. Much better would be to let me draw a line that should be horizontal or vertical one the image is straight and let the computer calculate the amount. The result of the slight rotation is below:

This image is smaller than what I started with. Why? Because straightening automatically crops off the odd triangles that result.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

While I wasn't intending to get into adjusting much, it turns out that I am doing more and more of it. I know that the images that are coming out of the camera are not same as the scenes that I took the pictures of, so adjusting it is.

Look at the two versions of the image below. The one on the left is the original and on the right the adjusted version (click on these to view the full-size images in a new window):
   
It did not take all that long to enhance this image, and the results are definitely worth the time. I'm doing this with JPEG images from a Canon S3 IS and using an iMac G5 running Apples' Aperture program. The G5 is slow at doing adjustments, so believe me, I'm not interested in perfection or in doing much to every image.

The original image looks dull:

It must have looked more interesting than this when I took it, otherwise why bother? The clouds have little detail and the trees are all dark. The sky is pale.

I do all my adjusting with Aperture in full screen mode (F) with the adjustment HUD up (H). I pick a thumbnail and hit F H and I am adjusting. I almost never use 100% view (Z) when adjusting. There is no point looking at pixels.

The first thing I notice in the HUD is that the full dynamic range is not used. There are no pixels in the image that occupy either the dark or light ends of the range, as shown by the histogram curve not reaching the left and right ends of the graph:

So the first adjustment is to tweak the levels at both ends to match the range:

That results in an image with slightly better contrast, but darkens the foreground trees:

So I adjust the exposure a little. I move the Exposure slider up by 0.1 and increase the saturation by 0.2:

Now the image is brighter and the colors better, but the trees are still very dark and the cloud is all washed out. So I add the Highlights and Shadows adjustment by selecting it in the + menu on the HUD (or more conveniently by hitting control H):

Then I adjust the highlights (for the cloud) and the shadows (for the trees) as shown:

The highlights slider selectively applies contrast to the clouds in this image, nicely bringing out the detail. The shadows slider isolates its action to the foreground tress and lightens them. Here is the final result:

There is a set of Advanced settings for Highlights and Shadows, but I have not played with those yet. Also notice that I am not sharpening this image. Sharpening is dependent on how the image is output (or reproduced) and at what size, so that is done on a per-application basis, not on a per-image basis. Aperture automatically sharpens on export anyway.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

Inside Aperture has some very detailed information (PDF) about using the adjustment tools in Aperture. That's not an area I will be covering: I don't do a great deal of adjusting, I don't use RAW (yet!), and I certainly don't understand all the sliders and options as well as many people.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

I've been using Aperture to adjust some images. Adjustments are slow on my machine (iMac G5), but usable. I'm using JPEGs as the original, so I have a limited amount of dynamic range.

When I first tried Lift and Stamp it seemed almost impossible to use. Once you click on Lift and the HUD comes up, the cursor changes to stamp. But it is not possible to select images to stamp because the cursor is not the selection cursor. And you want to select the images to stamp because you want to see the effect. While image selection is possible via the arrow keys, this is not very practical.

Then I found that the Command key changes the cursor to the select cursor and you can select images. Option changes the cursor from Lift to Stamp or vice versa. Once you know this it is quite efficient to apply changes to one image and then make similar adjustments to others. In particular you can use the Apply Stamp To Selected Images button.

I am also experiencing a problem whereby the displayed numerical pixel value changes to ... for R, G, B, and L. It only occurs on adjusted images.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments