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Lift and Stamp Tip
It's funny how when you don't use a tool for a while, you forget about certain features. In this case, I'm talking about Lifting and Stamping a specific change. For those of you who haven't used the Lift and Stamp tool before, it's a quick way to lift adjustments or metadata from one image and stamp those values onto multiple other images at once. A common use case is that you want to set the white balance to the same value on multiple images.
When you pull up the Lift tool (choose Metadata > Lift Metadata & Adjustments), you see a window with different sections for different types of metadata and adjustments as well as checkboxes next to each adjustment. It's fairly clear that you can check and uncheck different sections, e.g RAW Fine Tuning, and when you stamp onto another image, Aperture will only stamp the checked sections.
What's less obvious is if you only want to lift one setting within a section. As an example, if you have an image that you cropped, adjusted the exposure, and changed the while balance on, how would you just lift and stamp the white balance onto other images? The checkbox in the window is for Adjustments, and if you uncheck it, you won't lift any adjustments.
Well, the feature I forgot about (and a co-worker reminded me of earlier yesterday) is that within the Lift and Stamp window, you can open up each section, select the items you do NOT want to stamp onto other images, and press the Delete key. Aperture will remove the item from the table. Going back to our previous example, I would select the crop item, press Delete, select the exposure item, press Delete, and then stamp the remaining item, white balance, onto the desired images.
Keep in mind that when you delete an item, it's not undoable. If you mess up, you'll have to start over by selecting the Lift tool again.
I know I won't forget about this again :)
Choosing individual changes from adjustments, and adjustments within them (ie. color sliders) was something that I started using Lift and stamp for from the beginning.
However, I only recently discovered its usefulness for effecting large EXIF data changes. Isn't it funny how we can lag behind the obvious uses of a tool for months before seeing them all? I'd prefer this scenario of not knowing all the tools uses to how we had it before- begging Apple for additional features.
I use Lift and Stamp religiously, the HUD is almost always open, when I'm making adjustments. For event based photography (hundreds of images under similar lighting conditions and exposure) it's a miracle tool. Lift and Stamp a great way to keep a series of images looking similar, versus adjusting each one separately.
There's no steadfast rules to the Lift and Stamp tool, but I've developed a kind of system when applying adjustments with this tool. I separate the bricks, philosophically, into two categories: A) those that can be applied to multiple images without adversely effecting the image too much (RAW Fine Tuning, Edge Sharpen, Color, Vignette, Enhance) and B) image-specific adjustments that vary too widely to use Lift and Stamp (White Balance, Exposure, Retouch, Straighten).
When I'm adjusting a series of images, I usually adjust one image to get the style I'm looking for, and then lift the adjustments to the HUD and then delete the "image-specific" adjustments from the list and stamp the remaining adjustments to the series of images. I then tweak the stamped settings and make image-specific adjustments, image by image.
Obviously there's no golden rule when choosing which adjustments to lift and stamp. As Josh's example shows, you can definitely lift and stamp things like White Balance or Exposure, if you're correcting lighting problems or pushing the series of photos in a specific style.
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Relatedly: notice that you can add or replace adjustments, this is an incredibly powerful choice. My question is: there's seems to be missing an option, how about the option to delete adjustments? for instance, if i've applied Edge Sharpening to an entire series of images, I'd like the ability to delete that adjustment from the series of images using Lift and Stamp versus having to remove the adjustment individually from each photo in the series.
I concur. The lift stamp tool is a great asset. I am always forgetting to set my white balance on my camera. I load the images and oops what is wrong with the colors. Luckily, I normally take a picture of a small grey card I carry with me. I find that image, set the white balance, lift it, select all, and stamp. Very cool. Yes being able to lift something off a crop image then deleting the crop is very useful. Thanks for the tips.
Question: This might not be the right place for it but let me ask. I do as much as possible in Aperture in terms of cleaning up pictures. Every so often I have to load the picture up in GIMP and clean it up even more. It ask me if I want to change the color profile from Adobe RGB to sRGB. Should I do this while I am in post processing? Normally, I don't change to sRGB until I am ready to export and send to a print lab. That said, I proof in sRGB under Aperture. Thanks.
It is definitely more enjoyable to have plenty of options and to discover more features with using them as opposed to having limited options :)
Ed, I usually work the way you do, which is why I forgot that you can delete specific items. I'll make a white balance adjustment to a bunch of images and then go crop specific ones.
Although I don't think you can delete a specific adjustment, try this for a work-around: Add that adjustment to another image but leave it set at the default value. Then lift and stamp the default values onto the image you want to remove the adjustment from.
Calvin, leave it in Adobe RGB (or whatever color space you have that gives you the most flexibility) until you need to go to a smaller color space (sRGB) for a specific reason.
Great hint! To think I was using L&S less often just because the idea of un-checking the boxes seemed too tedious. Now I'm gonna turn it up to full extent!
"if i've applied Edge Sharpening to an entire series of images, I'd like the ability to delete that adjustment from the series of images using Lift and Stamp versus having to remove the adjustment individually from each photo in the series."
You can do that. Lift the adjustments from the first image. Delete Edge Sharpening. Select the rest of the images in the series. Change Add adjustments to Replace adjustments and stamp. ( this does of course assume you want to retain the same colour balance etc in the series so its maybe not as flexible as it could be)
"You can do that. Lift the adjustments from the first image. Delete Edge Sharpening. Select the rest of the images in the series. Change Add adjustments to Replace adjustments and stamp."
this works in very few rare cases. assumably you have image-specific adjustments (straighten, crop, retouch, levels, etc..) on each image. using replace removes them all from a series of images.
I do use Josh's method of lift and stamping a zeroed out adjustment, but it seems there's definitely a hole in the workflow there.