At one time or another, digital photographers will have to deal with image noise. This is particularly true when photos have been shot in dim lighting conditions and at a high ISO. Many digital cameras produce visible noise above 400...

Last week Nik Software announced a new Edit plugin for Aperture called Sharpener Pro. I have spent the past week testing this plugin and I have one thing to say--get it! This plugin is by far one of the most...

One of my favorite things about this new adjustment is that it works only on luminance, not in the RGB space. Long ago I'd learned the trick of converting images in Photoshop to LAB space so I could sharpen without creating color artifacts. Now I don't have to do anything. Aperture does it for me.

In my post entitled "Digital Workflow of a Semi-Pro Part 2" I stated that after I get all my images into Aperture, that I "...select all the remaining images and apply the Edge Sharpen (CTL-S) command with the default...

Aperture's RAW preference pane in the Inspector allows you to adjust the amount of auto sharpen applied on import. I suggest that you keep this number as low as possible since Aperture doesn't allow selective sharpening. If your image contains large areas of sky or water or other subjects that are in the background, you probably don't want them sharpened. So use Aperture's new Edge Sharpen to avoid creating digital noise or save the sharpening for your roundtrip to Photoshop or some other third-party sharpening application for best results.