Yet Another Aperture Fanboy Post
Just a quick post to say, once again, how much I fracking LOVE Aperture. I shot some sunlight poking through the clouds, in what was an amazing and inspiring scene. But when looking at the RAW files, they looked a bit flat. Dull colours, no “pop” and not at all what I remembered. Less than one minute later, and Aperture 2 let me tweak it very easily to match almost exactly what I remember seeing. Below is the before and after versions of the photo:
My tweaking involved clicking some checkboxes, and dragging a couple of sliders. Easy peasy:
- Auto Exposure adjustment (camera exposure was a bit high because of the directish sunlight, so Auto Exp. dropped it down a bit by -0.27)
- Auto levels (B&W)
- Black point adjusted higher (to 7.56) (crushed the blacks a bit, dropping some of the details in the trees and houses to make them more silhouette)
- Contrast nudged up +0.04 (to give a bit more punch to the sunlight coming through)
- Definition nudged up +0.09 (again, more punch to the sunlight, and helped with the edge definition of the trees, and defined the shapes of the clouds a bit more)
- Saturation set to 1.18 (brought out the colour in the clouds, and some of the orange above the treetops)
- Vibrancy +0.51 (refined the clouds and orange light)
- Highlights +18.9 (dropped contrast in the brightest parts, bringing back some details in the brightly lit cloud portions)
That’s it. 2 checkboxes and 6 sliders, all done as fully interactive realtime adjustments. It took me 15 times longer to write this blog post (and make before/after image) than it did to tweak the photo in the first place.
I need that. I’m about to give up on the cam because it doesn’t show what I see.
Wow – nice photo, especially after the tweaking. I am convinced that Aperture is a necessity for my photographic life. Why do you prefer it for photo management over something like iPhoto 08. Automatic events is my favourite feature. Anything similar in Aperture?
Jen, are you shooting RAW on the fancy new XTi, or JPEG? If you shoot RAW, you’ll always have to do some post-processing, but if you shoot JPEG, the camera does its best guess about how to process it as it bakes the RAW data down to the JPEG file that gets saved.
@rob – not sure why, but Akismet thought you were an evil spammer. Hopefully it won’t do that again… The thing I LOVE about Aperture as opposed to iPhoto is the nondestructive processing – I can toggle any processing effect in any order, and the image is rerendered from scratch – I don’t need to create new versions of the image to retain various steps. This makes it sooo much more powerful for playing around with processing, because I don’t have to worry about messing anything up.
Jen’s blog thinks I’m a spammer too. Is there something I don’t know? Maybe it’s my breath. Don’t be afraid to tell me the truth – I can handle it.
Agreed about the non-destructive editing. What I like about Aperture 2 is that I can use iPhoto for cataloging and import directly into Aperture to make use of all it’s goodness. It seems like an awkard workflow though. I might change that around once I get a permanent copy of Aperture.
I’m finding Aperture 2 is so much faster than 1.5.6 and the recovery/definition tools are amazing at pulling out blow out details. Before, you would have to compromise quite a bit to get the same effects that you do with just those two sliders.
@Raj: I’m finding Aperture2 generally faster, but the Loupe is really frustrating now – it feels sooooo much slower. Makes operations that use the eye dropper selector (like white balance) a pain to use.
But, I’m really loving the Definition and Vibrancy sliders, and being able to scroll through thousands of photos without any pause
@rob: it flagged you as an evil spammer again. I’ve sent a support email to Automattic to see if they can clear it up.
Wow great results – I haven’t moved to 2.0 yet, but it looks and sounds like a winner. An accomplished photographer friend of mine also uses lightzone:
http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/index.html