Dec
26
(2007)
I ♥ Aperture, episode #423
Filed under: fun. Tags: aperture, photography, raves.
This post is another in what feels like an endless series of love letters to Aperture. I’ve been using Aperture exclusively for a year now. At first, I was in way over my head. A complete amateur, lost in a professional tool. Now, I’m a complete amateur, able to salvage photographs pretty effectively in a professional tool. I’ve dabbled with iPhoto recently (using it to manage the photos from my son’s Fisher Price camera, because sending a 5 year old into Aperture felt like overkill) and I’m positive I could never go back. I’ve imbibed deeply of the Aperture Kool-Aid. It’s entirely possible that other apps (Lightroom?) could do what Aperture does, but Aperture works so amazingly well that I won’t bother to check out the other apps for awhile.
To illustrate just how amazing Aperture is, here are 2 photos I took this week. When posted to Flickr, they looked decent, even passable as non-crap. But that was only after some photo rescue applied from within Aperture.
Photo #1 (12 Mile Coulee Road on Christmas Day) was taken on Christmas Day, as I went for a bike ride around my community. I was booking it down a country road (the first country road you get to in my neck of the woods, and the one that marks the NW corner of the city of Calgary). I saw a pretty breathtaking view of the foothills, including a farmer’s field with scattered hay bales, and the Rocky Mountains off in the distance. I pulled over, and took a few shots. After getting home, I opened them up, and noticed that the photos all looked flat and lifeless. Drab. Dreary. It was a pretty much overcast and flatly lit day. But 15 seconds twiddling bits in Aperture brought the photo back to what I remembered seeing.
The left half of the image was “in camera” without touchups. The right half is after (literally) 15 seconds of tweaking in Aperture. I set the white balance (eye dropper on the snow) and tweaked levels and exposure. Bumped up contrast and saturation. Done. 15 seconds from boring, flat shot to a half decent photo of the foothills.
For the second shot (Santa Ball), I’ve been dabbling with a DIY lightbox. I’m just using whatever lights I have laying around (in this case, halogen and CF lamps collecting dust in the basement), so the white balance is pretty much crap, and not bright enough to make the images pop. I took this photo today to try a new combination (having been thwarted by Boxing Day closed stores and unable to pick up a set of more consistent lights).
While the final image isn’t bad, the “in camera” version is absolute crap. The warm light makes it look orange, almost brown. And it’s not bright enough. This one took a bit longer to clean up properly. I think I spent a whopping 2 minutes. I set the white balance (eye dropper just below the bottom of the ball), bumped up exposure, saturation, contrast, and tweaked levels a bit. Hopefully after picking up some decent lights, the amount of lightbox post-processing tweakage will drop dramatically.
Although there’s no replacement for getting a photo right in camera, there’s also nothing like having the tools available to consistently rescue a photograph with pretty minimal effort.
You’ve pushed me over the edge of convincement. I’ve had Aperture laying around and have yet to take time to sort out its dizzying array of tools. I’m also eyeballing one of those fast fixed Sigma lenses for my Rebel, which has seen little use since I got a spiffy pocket camera. I love the spontaneity of the little guy, but am really missing the richness of the big gun.
I actually do a fair bit of cropping, exposure adjustment in iPhoto- its not horrible, but I know its limits, and often jump over to PhotoShop for the more demanding stuff. But I’, putting on my list of offtime this week to look into Aperture.
Just curious of you are playing at all with the light temperature settings on those lightbox shots. Its a vast improvement, but still needs a bit more “punch” IMHO.
Keep on tinkering (and posting, of course)
For a fast fixed lens, I _LOVE_ my Canon 50mm f/1.8. I mean love in an almost unhealthy way. It might be a touch long for some shots, but for about 90% of what I shoot, it just feels right. I wouldn’t mind picking up a 30mm f/1.8 (or so), and something wider, but the 50mm is my main lens.
I love that all edits in Aperture are non destructive - including crops. At any time, you can just uncheck any adjustment, and it’s removed from the render chain. And you can start a new version of any image at any time, so experimenting is nice and safe. Very liberating and fun stuff!
I’ve tweaked the light temperature about as much as I can, but might go back to play with levels, contrast and saturation a bit more. The Christmas Day mountain photo was shot in JPG, so there’s not a lot of data to work with (and there are even some compression artifacts visible around the hay bales - ick!), but the Santa Ball was RAW so I could probably pull some more oomph from it. The Santa Ball photo is also a bit soft because I was shooting at f/1.8 due to crappy lighting. I’ll reshoot it at f/8 or so once I get decent lights in place. That should make it much sharper and more vibrant (sharper due to narrower aperture, vibrant due to better/brighter/whiter light).
Yes, D’Arcy… we all know about your 50mm love. Heh.
Does Aperture do anything that I can’t do with PS? I tweak levels and saturation all the time. And in 12 seconds.
But seriously, does Ap do anything else?
In Aperture, the tweaks aren’t producing separate versions of a file. They’re just XML that get rendered on the fly, so there aren’t 10 versions of a file as you tweak it (edit in TIFF? save .jpg and .tiff versions?) You just start with one RAW file, and tweak to your heart’s content, without having to think about file management.
first photo to profossionel , congratulations…