August 22nd, 2007
Back in high school and college, I was really into photography. I used to carry my Ricoh SLR around with me everywhere, and even had my own black and white darkroom set up in my parents’ basement. This was of course back in the days of film, when you couldn’t look at the back of the camera to see how your shot turned out, and the charge on a camera battery would last a year or two instead of a week or two. Three-ring binders full of negatives, and old Ilford boxes full of prints were my prefered method of photo organization (and I use that term very loosely).
After taking up digital photography five years ago, iPhoto replaced the binders and boxes. Even more recently, this past spring I replaced my Canon Powershot S50 with a Nikon D80 digital SLR, and replaced iPhoto with Aperture.
Aperture is a great tool for organizing and retouching photos. Apple has done a nice job of making the interface very intuitive, however there are a few simple-but-useful tricks that may not be immediately obvious. Here are a couple that I’ve found.
Go Wide
After launching Aperture, hitting “H” on your keyboard brings up the Adjustments HUD palette. This palette has sliders for adjusting exposure, saturation, and more.
The default size of the Adjustments palette is pretty narrow though, which makes it difficult to tweak the sliders by very small increments. To make your life easier, and give yourself better control over your adjustments, grab the lower right corner of the palette and make it wider.
Doing this gives you more space to work with on the sliders, and allows small movements to translate into small, careful adjustments.
(Yes, you could use the numerical widgets next to the sliders for even more precise control, but I’ve found that they tend to be kind of balky, at least on my older, low-RAM, lame-vid-card G5. Your mileage may vary.)
Leveling the Playing Field
Aperture suffers from the unfortunate absence of a curves adjustment. It does have a levels adjustment, but its default configuration is lacking in power, having only sliders for highlight, shadow, and midtones.
To make the levels adjustment earn its keep, click on the “Show Quarter-Tone Controls” button in the top right corner of the levels adjustment area. This adds two more sliders to your levels adjustment.
By nudging those quarter-tone controls in towards the center slightly, you can increase the contrast of your midtones without losing detail in your highlight and shadow areas, much like using an S-shaped curve in Photoshop’s Curves palette.
RAW vs. JPEG
This last tip isn’t Aperture-specific, but I’m throwing it in anyway: Consider taking advantage of RAW. Apps like Aperture and Lightroom are designed specifically to work with RAW images, and you’re missing out on a lot of flexibility if you’re still shooting JPEGs. RAW gives you 12 or more bits per channel to work with, whereas JPEGs only have 8 bits per channel. Greater bitdepths equal a larger amount of usable data, which equates to more potential detail in your images.
Here’s a practical example. The photo on the left is the master RAW image. The sky around the horse’s head looks totally blown out - the color reads as pure white in Aperture. If this was a JPEG, there wouldn’t be too much you could do with this. Your horse would be stuck riding off into an unnaturally-white sunset.
However, since it’s a RAW image, there is actually recoverable detail in there. Pulling the exposure slider down darkens the exposure and brings out that detail. As you can see in the image on the right, there were actually clouds in that blown out area.
RAW does require a bit more work to get a final image. When you shoot JPEGs, the camera is essentially doing post-processing for you, bumping up sharpness and saturation. RAW images give you data straight from the camera with no post-processing. So they will need a bit more tweaking on your part, but they’ll give you a lot more to work with. If you enjoy processing and tweaking your images to perfection, it’s definitely worth it to give RAW a try.
Aperture is a great digital darkroom. It has some rough edges, but is still very powerful, fun to explore, and it definitely beats a three-ring binder and a dark basement full of smelly chemicals.
