Hands on with the New Aperture 3 Adjustments

I’ve been playing around with the new adjustments options in Aperture 3 and I’m really impressed. Here’s an example. It’s a pretty bland image to start with.

Note the sky is completely burned out. The recovery slider would only bring it back in so far, but thanks to the new extended range curves adjustment I was able to recover much more of the sky. Here’s the final result after playing around for about half an hour:

I used multiple instances of adjustments and lots of brushing to get this result. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s far more interesting than the original. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I did. I’ve put a screenshot of the full adjustments panel and if you click through you can see it full res. As you can see, I added lots and lots of adjustments to try and push it. It never slowed down or crashed on me, and remained very responsive despite stacking on more and more.

The first thing I did was add a black and white adjustment. I didn’t really touch the settings on this, as it was fine for what I wanted. I then added an extended range curves adjustment and recovered more of the sky. I also darkened it down a bit. As it was darkening the whole Image I chose to paint the curves in and painted over the sky with a large soft edge brush.

I then added a second curves adjustment and did some overall contrast adjustments. I still wasn’t quite happy with the sky so I used the clone tool to add some detail to the areas that were still white. I then added another curves adjustment and brought the sky down a little more. I again brushed this in to the areas I wanted, but focussing on the top of the sky to create more of a gradient.

I then set about dodging and burning some other areas of the picture. The house was a little dark so I brought it up with the dodge tool. The road was a bit bland still so I added a second “enhance adjustment” and pushed up the contrast and detail and then painted that on over the road area. I used another burn quick brush to darken down the road a bit more and added an overall vignette.

I noticed that the trees had been completely crushed to black during the adjustments, so I first tried bringing them back in using the doge tool but it wasn’t really working too well (they’d gone to far). So I added another curves adjustment and brushed that in. This worked a treat. The detect edges option in the brushes hud allowed me to keep the adjustment inside the trees.

One of the cool things about Aperture is that its adjustment pipeline is entirely 32bit. What this means is that if you at any time push values beyond visible white or black they don’t get clipped. You can always bring them back in with another adjustment. Unlike some other applications which have a “raw” adjustment area and a RGB adjustment (post raw conversion) area. In that case you can recover and manipulate out of range values in the RAW area but adjustments outside that area, in the RGB (post raw conversion) area will clip. In Aperture this doesn’t happen. I’ve always liked that about it, and with the new tools it becomes even more valuable.

In conclusion then, while this isn’t an award winning image by any means, I think it gives you a good idea of what Aperture is capable of. You could certainly keep pushing it and I don’t think there would be much of an issue. I’m amazed at how responsive it remains. I initially had some stability concerns but I’ve been working with it all morning and it’s been solid. I’ve always liked Aperture and I really like the new version. There will always be the inevitable comparisons to Lightroom, and while Aperture 3 still lacks some features that Lightroom has it makes up for it in so many other ways. Of course if you need any of those features then you’ll undoubtedly be happier sticking with Lightroom, but give it a try (and a proper try – not just a few minutes) before writing Aperture off.

[Update] I’ve posted a few more before and after Images to this flickr gallery.

(Please read the Comment Policy before posting a comment)