Last week I talked about recovering highlight areas from your RAW files, this week we move to the dark side with shadows and black point.

I’m a firm believer that black is beautiful in many photographs. When there are rich, deep blacks and no detail, that’s okay. Too often, I see images where the photographer has used Aperture to show detail in dark areas of the image that only distract with noisy shadows that don’t add to the visual communication of the photograph. When I look at the work of photographers like Antonin Kratochvil or Michael Ackerman. I’m often amazed how much can be communicated with highlight and shadow, creating mood and atmosphere without much detail.

That being said, the Black Point and Shadow Controls are amazing in Aperture.
As with the Recover Slider, Black Point is only available in 2.1.

Black Point is an exposure adjustment parameter used to set the blacks in your images. Slide it to the right and you can deepen the blacks to pure black; slide to the left and increase the threshold of shadow information in the image, revealing much more detail.

As with the Recovery and Exposure Sliders, by holding down the Command Key and moving the Black Point Slider, Aperture will show you the clipped areas, even telling you which color channel the clipping occurs in, with white representing all three colors and other colors identifying the specific channel. (In Preferences-Appearance, set “clipping overlay” to color) When there's a combination of colors in the mask, Red & Green =Yellow clipping, Red & Blue =Pink and Blue & Green represent Cyan.

As you drag the Black Point Slider to the right, you in effect, turn any shadow areas with detail into a pure black, which “clips” the shadow areas, and that’s okay. Like many of the adjustment controls in Aperture, it’s a personal interpretation and it’s your choice as to how the final image will look and communicate to others.

The shadow slider is powerful (and much more processor intensive) restoring detail in the dark areas by moving it to the right. I tend to use the black point slider to “crush” the blacks when I want to and the shadow slider to restore shadow detail.

Dark shadows with no detail in your images is not a crime.
Photo Copyright Steve Simon

With some images, moving the Black Point Slider to the left can bring back detail in the shadows, but for most images you’ll find that the Shadow Slider is the one to use. The advanced control for shadows, as with highlights, allows you to fine-tune and perfect your changes in a more subtle way. Color correction and mid-tone contrast allow you to restore saturation and contrast that is sometimes lessened with these controls.

The shadow slider is a powerful tool that lets you finesse and even save underexposed areas, but along with revealing detail in shadows, it can also increase the visible noise in your image. Taking these controls too far can hurt more than help your images, so be careful.

In the Aperture 2 Pro Training Book, they even talk about using the shadow controls as fill flash, which is the effect you are getting as you increase shadow detail to the right. But in my opinion, the overuse of the shadow control to the right has produced many images that just don’t look real, so I like to apply the “less is more” mantra when post processing to avoid the tipping point into unrealistic renditions of my images.

In the end, it’s always best to properly expose your image, maximizing what you can do with Aperture in post-processing. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should, but it’s up to each photographer to figure that one out.