In 2.1, there are many ways to adjust your image to bring out its best qualities and get it close to the way you saw it through the viewfinder.

The Auto Exposure button in Aperture (only available in 2.1) is a good start to get you close. When you click on it, you will see the histogram spread out, adjusting the highlight and shadow areas while avoiding detail loss or clipping in those areas. You’re now ready to finesse the image even more.

Your Camera’s Histogram Has A Secret

The idea of exposing to the right of the histogram or overexposing is predicated on the fact that when you shoot RAW, there is more information captured in the highlight areas than even the histogram will tell you about, and in Aperture you can get that highlight detail back. Underexposure means you will have more visible noise in shadow areas, which is something most of us want to avoid. Keep in mind however, that different sensors mean different degrees of recovery are possible, so you need to get to know what works best with your camera.

So to that end, Aperture provides a number of ways to maximize highlight detail.

In the exposure HUD there’s now the Recovery Slider, which does what it says, recover detail within the highlight areas of your image file.

Under View there’s “Highlight Hot and Cold Areas” which puts a blue mask where there’s no shadow detail and red for when highlights are blown out. This is a great way to determine where in the image you might want to bring back or salvage areas where no detail currently resides. In preferences you can even adjust the clipping threshold to work more closely with your particular workflow and output.

But though these masks do their job well, they can be distracting. Here’s a less distracting tip. After you’ve got your exposure under control either with the Auto button or by using the Exposure Slider, you can then bring back blown-out highlight areas like magic.

By holding down the Command Key and slowly dragging the Recovery Slider to the right, you will see exactly which areas are blown out and watch as the white mask fades to black as you recover digital information.

Photo Copyright: Steve Simon

If you drag the recovery slider all the way to the right, and there are still some white areas, you need to bring the exposure down some. Holding down the Command Key with the Exposure Slider works in the same way. Aperture will even tell you which color channel the clipping occurs in, with white representing all three colors and other colors identifying the channel. When there's a combination of colors in the mask, Red & Green =Yellow clipping, Red & Blue =Pink and Blue & Green represent Cyan.

The Highlights Slider can then be used for even further finessing of highlight areas, darkening all highlights areas but it won’t bring back detail like the Recovery Slider will.
The advanced controls only work if you make an adjustment in this HUD, and allow you to really squeeze out the best in your photograph by making subtle changes to the Radius (dragging to the right means changes made will be more dramatic), High Tonal Width (will only affect the highlights), Low Tonal Width (will only affect the shadows) and adjusting mid-tone contrast. I find that the more I change the shadows and highlights the more I want to dial back the color changes using the color correction slider.

Many of us digital shooters sometimes forget that it’s okay to have blown out whites or specular highlights within the scene (like in the cloudless bright sky above) , as it is okay to have shadow areas of pure black. It has always been that way in photography, and it’s an artistic choice that works well in many, many images.

The desire to squeeze as much detail as is possible with our amazing post processing tools sometimes leaves the images looking unreal and not as strong as they could be.

Next week we go to the dark side with shadows and black point.