Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
The Levels Menu
A second, tonal histogram appears in the Levels menu, on which you can move black
point, mid-point, and white point, to change the distribution of tones within the image.
With these controls you can easily correct landscapes that lack contrast or “punch.”
Advanced Levels
For more subtle tonal adjustment, Aperture offers quarter-tone control points. Like the
midtone control of the Levels menu, these have lower and upper sliders. The right way
to use them is to select the range of tones you want to treat separately with the upper
slider, and then use the lower slider to brighten or darken those tones. The technique
is not quite as familiar to photographers as setting the S-curve in Photoshop, but it does
the same job.
The Color Adjustment
Because they can have an impact on color, tonal controls need to be used before addressing
any color issues. To make changes to hues, you need to go to the last item in the
Adjustments Inspector, the Color adjustment. As well as conventional Hue, Saturation,
and Luminance sliders, Aperture 2.0 lets you choose custom hues by selecting them
directly from the image. By this means you can change skin tones with great subtlety if
you choose a narrow range of affected hues using the Range slider.
Aperture’s Key Features
There are several features in Aperture that are worth highlighting on account of their
excellent ergonomics or genuine usefulness to photographers.
The Quick Preview
In this special mode, accessed by pressing P, Aperture loads only the preview, not the master
image. This makes it much faster to browse, search, compare, rate, or select images,
speed being one of the vexed issues in early versions of Aperture. You can always tell when
you are in preview mode because the preview images (which are always superior to mere
thumbnails) are outlined by yellow rectangles. If you need to work on an image, press P
again to change to full resolution. After making the adjustment, pressing P once more
takes you back to Quick Preview mode. Aperture will use whatever preview is available,
even when you have not made any, defaulting to camera-generated previews for newly
imported images so you can get up-and-running immediately after shooting.
The Lift and Stamp Tools
Apple has refined Aperture’s Lift and Stamp tools to make them really useful for speeding
the photographic workflow. They allow you to lift metadata and adjustments from
one image and apply them to another. To reach them, you go to the toolbar to launch