Some of what could possibly be awe-inspiring landscapes that begs to be photographed are bathed in extreme, tricky, bland or just plain difficult lighting. Master landscape photographers recognize this fact. It seems that the more extreme, tricky or difficult the lighting, the better the photograph that can potentially come out. It is how a photographer expertly deal with these types of lighting, in both shooting and in post-production, that can make or break a photograph.

Let's take, for instance, a magnificent sunset that happens to miraculously present itself. We cannot resist photographing it. It has the most tantalizing cloud formations we've ever seen playing off several gently graduated hues of deeply saturated colors. And yet, we need foreground details to perfectly anchor the fantastical sunset. However, these details are unfortunately shrouded in a shapeless and meaningless black silhouette. If only, we can fathom and coax out details from out of the foreground shadows. But if we expose for foreground details, we know what will happen to our sunset sky. It will be blown out! How do we manage something like this?

Because our digital cameras can inherently capture a limited exposure range, we have to reach out to other possible solutions to dynamically extend that range. We shoot on a tripod, we bracket, and possibly, we submit and bow to the technological wonder of HDR.

But, it is possible that we do not need to go that far. With a little know-how mixed in with shooting on a tripod, bracketing, and using Aperture, we may already have all the ingredients we really need to use.

It's true that Photoshop CS3, or an HDR software such as Photomatix Pro, will most likely give us the kind of photos we've imagined in our minds, but knowing how to identify, recognize, correct and treat the blown-out highlights of any image is the first necessary step that's worth learning.

You can do this in Aperture. It is possible to identify, and then recover, most of the details in areas that seems to be hopelessly blown out.

To reveal the clipped highlights in Aperture, do one of these 2 things: press Option-Shift-H or go to Menubar > View > Highlight Hot Areas. In your selected or highlighted picture, you will see red pixels appear. The parts of your photo in red signifies that the highlights appear to be overblown.

But do not be alarmed. Not yet anyway. First thing to do is to assess whether it is really hopelessly blown-out white or not. The numeric value of featureless white is 255. In RGB mode, for an area to be really, really white, each of the R, G and B channels, and add to that the L (for Luminance), should have a color value of 255. In most cases, when you put your cursor on a particular pixel, using the Centered Loupe Tool with the Color Value enabled for example, you will see that not all the channels may have a uniform value of 255. This is good news because this means, in one or two of the channels, there may still be some sort of details that can be pulled out and recovered.

So, when you bring out your HUD (heads-up display) to work on the process of recovery, and with the Highlight Hot Areas still turned on, you can begin the creative process of bringing out the details using a combination of Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, and also Highlights and Shadows. Play around with the slider controls, and see how much of the red pixels you can effectively eliminate (or in some cases and for particular purposes, live with) while editing the image into the way you want it to come out.

The feature Highlight Hot Areas in Aperture is an excellent way to help you visually assess your images. The appearance of red pixels gives you an almost instantaneous visual feedback. Of course, knowing the color values of each channel may be enough, and you certainly can do it by the numbers while imagine the possible outcome. But Aperture's Highlight Hot Areas makes it so much easier, and consequently, faster. This is one of the incredible tools in Aperture to help you fine-tune your photo images. Use it to your advantage.