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What’s New in Aperture 2 Adjustments - Part One
I feel like a kid in a candy store! I’m so excited to be using Aperture v2 on my Canon 1DsMKIII images - as well as images from my older bodies! But it’s not just the built in support for the new cameras that’s so great, or the new interface, using the new adjustment tools has me smiling! I’m working on an in-depth article for this site about the adjustment tools, that will be available soon, but for now I’ll highlight some of the changes.
First of all, the Adjustment panel is now part of an Inspector, along with the Metadata and Project Panels. Toggle the Inspector on or off by pressing "I "or clicking the Inspector icon. To toggle among the panels, hit "W" or click on the appropriate tab at the top. The floating Adjustment HUD, accessed by "H," is also now an Inspector containing all three panels. The appearance of the tools within the Adjustment panel have been refined for a less cluttered look that includes visual clues for many of the sliders.
Once in the Adjustment Panel you’ll see that the Raw Fine Tuning brick has been changed. When you import new images, they’ll use the new 2.0 raw algorithms, but images that you migrate will still be using v1.1. Click in the drop down menu and choose 2.0 to update them. Apple feels the raw fine tuning v2 algorithms are the most accurate yet, and they’ve spent considerable time profiling each camera model to do the best job possible with the conversions. I’m noticing that some of my images that were in my old library become a bit lighter and an occasional one becomes a tad darker when I switch to the 2.0 conversion, (you can see the histogram jump to the right or left just a notch,) and many are slightly greener as well. You can go back and forth between the raw conversion engines versions 1.1 and 2.0 for images that were in your Aperture v1.5 library, but images you import directly into Aperture v 2 must use the 2.0 conversion. I’ll go into more depth about using the tools in the Raw Fine Tuning brick in the article.
As you work your way down , you’ll see that the order of the tools has changed. The order of the tools reflects the order in which Aperture applies the adjustments and is a suggested workflow. To be honest, I’m not convinced that I like the new order. My personal style is to make tonal adjustments first and then color adjustments. This suggested order bounces back and forth between the two. However I’ll give it a try for a little longer to see if I like it after I’ve used it more extensively.
White balance has been moved to the top of the list. Other than its position changing, the tool remains essentially the same.
The Exposure tools are next and there are some major changes here. The initial Exposure slider is the same - use it to set the overall exposure for the image. This is followed by the Recovery slider. This is similar to the Highlight tool, but it works more specifically just on the highlights. Use this to bring out detail in your lightest tones, for example in bridal gowns or snow scenes. The Black slider is next. Move it to the left to recapture some detail in blocked up shadow areas and to the right to set the Black point - much as you can do in Levels with the Black point slider. (Note that the Recovery and Black sliders are not available if you’re not using the 2.0 conversion.) The last slider is the Brightness slider which is unchanged and globally adjusts the middle tones or the gamma.
Tip: Hold down the Command key while adjusting the first three sliders in the Exposure brick to see clipping previews.
The Enhance brick is next. The Contrast and Saturation sliders have not changed but the Definition and Vibrance sliders are new. The Definition tool is similar to the Clarity tool in Camera Raw and adds local contrast and some sharpening. It’s well named because it adds definition to the details within many images. I’m finding that it improves quite a few of my images. The Vibrance slider is similar to the Vibrancy slider in Camera Raw in that it selectively adjusts color saturation. However it’s different in that it only minimally affects reds and yellows. That makes it a great way to boost saturation in images with people, while having skin tones remain natural. The Tint Wheels are essentially unchanged, as are the Levels and Highlight/Shadows tools.
The Color brick has undergone some MAJOR changes. You are no longer limited to adjusting the six colors in the Color tool. Instead you can specify six different colors that you choose using the eyedropper and then adjust those colors accordingly. This is a huge improvement, enabling you to adjust colors that are between the default colors.
A Devignette as well as a separate Vignette tool have been added in the Add Adjustments popup menu under the + sign. These tools make it possible to remove undesired vignetting as well as to add vignetting effects.
A number of the tools that live in the interface have also been significantly improved and I’ll go through those changes in my blog tomorrow! Just a hint, the Retouch tool is going to avoid a lot of trips to Photoshop! It’s FANTASTIC!!
Comments (17)
Sounds like steps inhe right direction. I always fix my white balance first.
Bruce Fraser wrote that you should always fix the biggest problem first. White Balance, tonality, and then colour, would be my order..
Can't wait to try it out!!
I agree with the notion of fixing the biggest problem first - and in the days when people shot mostly JPEGS, WB was usually the biggest problem. But I find that most cameras and raw converters do a reasonably good job with Auto WB, and studio users often have preset temps they use. So at least in my experience, the biggest problems are usually making exposure/tonal tweaks. WB changes are usually subtle and not something I find I need to do on all or even most images. However this may be an issue that varies according to the type photography you do.
Anyway, have fun taking Aperture 2 out for a test drive!
Ellen
BUT the supplied serial number Apple send out is not valid for the trial (tried 3 times, 3 mail addresses - identical serial number) - own goal??
Man, I'm so excited! It's going to be great trying 2.0. You know Apple really caught me by surprise here…
I almost always adjust white balance first (my WhiBal is one of the few things I always carry in addition to the camera). Most of my shots are indoors and subject to who-knows-what kind of lighting.
I'm excited about the changes, and am going off to read more about them now.
Nick, if at first you don't succeed: try, try again. I registered about seven times. The first three times I used the same email address. Then I tried different ones before it finally came correct. The trial downloader downloaded 1.5.6 many times, too. Could be a caching issue.
Anyway, it does work. It's on my G5 now!
So, 2.0 is out. The interface looks a little less "pro" and a little more like the iApps. Could be me, but I did notice that some of the marketing terminology seems to have changed. "Import images in a flash. Manage them like a pro." LIKE a pro? Hmm...
Anyway, there's some cool new things in there. Tethered shooting! Wow. Now I need a notebook to tether to. Faster importing, better management of thumbnails, quick preview, selective color editing (YEEEEESSS!), better RAW decode, rule of thirds cropping...
All nice new stuff. I wish some of the features were in Aperture before trickling down to iPhoto, though.
Let me get back to playing with 2.0.
Thanks for the article.
Scott
Nice. I wish I could buy it :-(
Bought Aperture 2.0 this morning only to find out it does not support Olympus E-3 raw files. Canceled the order.
Jerry even if the camera is not supported, Aperture will now support DNG files from the camera. It's a little awkward but if you run the Adobe DNG converter on your Olympus E-3 files you can use Aperture 2.
It may be to little too late.
While there are some definitive improvements over 1.5 and better performance overall, it may not be enough to bring Aperture users from Lightroom.
For example, the cropping tool still way too slow (although faster than 1.5).
And some of the develop "module" sliders still do not respond real time.
What's is missing? Global presets... Now, I did see something called plugins... I wonder... It would be nice...
Now, there are some very nice additions like recovery, vibrance and definition as well as selective colors. Those are very nice and work well.
So, for those hardcore Aperture users, this is a welcomed upgrade. But I don't think you may see many Lightroom users crossing over...
We will see...
David, one of the HUGE advantages of Aperture over Lightroom is the lack of the restricting "modules." I'm finding all the sliders as well as the crop tool work extremely quickly. I'm not sure why they would be behaving more slowly for you. The straighten tool has been dramatically improved as well.
I agree global presets would be nice. I believe that Apple is making sdk available to enable plug-ins for Aperture 2 but none are available yet.
As to crossovers? Who knows, for me Aperture is far more efficient since I can adjust while culling through images without changing interfaces.
Speaking of cropping: one of the most ANNOYING shortcomings of Ap1.5.x was the lack of cropping presets and its habit of reverting to its own idea of what crop percentages you want. Very difficult when cropping multiple images to a common proportion (e.g. web placement specs).
Does anyone know if this problem is now fixed? There was certainly no lack of complaints on various boards about it, so hopefully Apple got the message.
I have mentioned the ridiculous lens ID thing elsewehere in the blog. Now what gets my goat is lack of a link to Google maps for GPS info. Lightroom has had both of these things for ages.
The Retouch tool is probably what I shall put down my money for - worth it's weight in gold.
"The Vibrance slider is similar to the Vibrancy slider in Camera Raw in that it selectively adjusts color saturation. However it’s different in that it only minimally affects reds and yellows. That makes it a great way to boost saturation in images with people, while having skin tones remain natural."
No it isn't - it is the same. That is precisely what ACR/LR does.
I'm looking at Aperture 2.0, with a view to switching from iPhoto. Is there a way to get Aperture to tell me the GPS tags for the photo, like iPhoto and Preview will do?
Gordon, yes, there is. On the metadata pane, at the bottom, there are buttons like "Keywords," "Exif," etc.. If you click on EXIF, there are optional fields for GPS version, latitude, and longitude that you can add to your metadata set (see our book Aperture Exposed for information on how to make custom sets--it still applies to 2.0 even though the fields have moved :) ).