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The Aperture Adjustments sliders give you a wide range of control for fixing most images well within the range of the slider. It doesn’t happen very often, but there are times when you’ve moved the slider to the far left or right, and it’s not enough to correct that particular image.
It is not all that well known, but if you hover the cursor over the data to the right of the sliders, you’ll notice the cursor icon changes. Then, when you click on your laptop trackpad or mouse, it changes again into a two-way arrow which, when dragged to the right or left, extends the range of certain sliders.
Here are the sliders that will go beyond their normal range:
White Balance normally from 2,500 to 10,000 degrees Kelvin, will extend from 2,000 to 50,000.
Tint normally lets you adjust from -50 to 50, but can extend from -150 to 150.
Exposure range is normally - 2.00 to 2.00. but will allow you to go from -9.99 to 9.99!
The other sliders that go above, below and beyond the normal range include Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and when changing Colors, Hue, Luminance and Range.
You might rarely need the extra adjustment room, but it’s nice to know it’s there when you need it.
Comments (6)
Thanks for the tip. Its always nice to find these little gems hidden away. I guess I have become lazy and only used the sliders.
Cheers, Ian
Just a note regarding the normal and extended range for the adjustment controls. You can type a value directly in, like 20000 for white balance for instance. The other thing that you can do with the sliders while using the mouse held over the value and clicked is use the modifier keys to change the rate the value changes:
- click and drag (left/right or up/down) = normal rate
- option + click and drag = slow rate
- shift + click and drag = fast rate.
Try it.
RB
Robert, thanks for the tips to go even further. All kinds of secret passageways through Aperture.
Steve,
You are very welcome, one more note regarding extended ranges. One of the adjustment tools where the extended range is actually useful is the color adjustment block. Normally when using this tool (which is great, has pretty much replaced PS as my standard color correction tool - another story) you are restricted in when using the hue slider to the adjacent colors on the color wheel, even when you pick a custom color using the eye dropper. For instance using the default blue the hue is restricted to the range from magenta to cyan. If you pick a color in between (using the dropper) the standard hues you are pretty much restricted to the same overall range as well, like pinkish to blue greenish. Using the extended range you can go as as far as you would like - 180 degrees opposite so you could turn blue into yellow. Comes in handy for some uses.
The other thing that really comes in useful is the extended range on the luminance range of the color adjustment blocks.
RB
This is a great tip! Thanks for sharing.
The other obvious way to do this is to TYPE IN where you want to go. You'll find the real extents of adjustments immediately when you put in a number like -9,000,000 or 5,000,000.
On a different point, I wish we had some of these controls integrated into a slide show editor as animations. Just playing with the sliders to watch the extreme effects brought this to mind.
After seeing an "extending aperture" video a few months ago, I recently tried to use Keynote as a total-control slide-show creator. Little did I realize that some things had changed in the newest version. See the unresolved thread here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1475364&tstart=0
While I'm begging for more controls, why not ask for some of these to be built in to Keynote too? Just think of all the PRECISE transition controls you'd have if you wanted to send your stuff off to a client or post a slideshow to your website. I'll be sending some feedback to apple on both of these products asking that if you own aperture, you're granted the ability to use sliders as possible keynote slideshow controls. You can respond to Apple at these sites:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html
http://www.apple.com/feedback/keynote.html
Something tells me the likelihood of this working out soon isn't too high. People have been clamoring for iWeb controls for so long (that aren't beeing seen) that I'll shortly be moving to Sitegrinder:
(http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder/)
Apple seems to want give people the easy setup with its templates. That's fine and dandy for when you're starting to learn, but once you understand the software and want it to be 'just this way,' or something along those lines, the limits of iWork and iLife software are reached. Granted, they've been getting better, but they've a ways to go before integrating both easy templates and deep controls. For now all we can do is lobby!