This post is another in what feels like an endless series of love letters to Aperture. I’ve been using Aperture exclusively for a year now. At first, I was in way over my head. A complete amateur, lost in a professional tool. Now, I’m a complete amateur, able to salvage photographs pretty effectively in a professional tool. I’ve dabbled with iPhoto recently (using it to manage the photos from my son’s Fisher Price camera, because sending a 5 year old into Aperture felt like overkill) and I’m positive I could never go back. I’ve imbibed deeply of the Aperture Kool-Aid. It’s entirely possible that other apps (Lightroom?) could do what Aperture does, but Aperture works so amazingly well that I won’t bother to check out the other apps for awhile.
To illustrate just how amazing Aperture is, here are 2 photos I took this week. When posted to Flickr, they looked decent, even passable as non-crap. But that was only after some photo rescue applied from within Aperture.
Photo #1 (12 Mile Coulee Road on Christmas Day) was taken on Christmas Day, as I went for a bike ride around my community. I was booking it down a country road (the first country road you get to in my neck of the woods, and the one that marks the NW corner of the city of Calgary). I saw a pretty breathtaking view of the foothills, including a farmer’s field with scattered hay bales, and the Rocky Mountains off in the distance. I pulled over, and took a few shots. After getting home, I opened them up, and noticed that the photos all looked flat and lifeless. Drab. Dreary. It was a pretty much overcast and flatly lit day. But 15 seconds twiddling bits in Aperture brought the photo back to what I remembered seeing.
The left half of the image was “in camera” without touchups. The right half is after (literally) 15 seconds of tweaking in Aperture. I set the white balance (eye dropper on the snow) and tweaked levels and exposure. Bumped up contrast and saturation. Done. 15 seconds from boring, flat shot to a half decent photo of the foothills.
For the second shot (Santa Ball), I’ve been dabbling with a DIY lightbox. I’m just using whatever lights I have laying around (in this case, halogen and CF lamps collecting dust in the basement), so the white balance is pretty much crap, and not bright enough to make the images pop. I took this photo today to try a new combination (having been thwarted by Boxing Day closed stores and unable to pick up a set of more consistent lights).
While the final image isn’t bad, the “in camera” version is absolute crap. The warm light makes it look orange, almost brown. And it’s not bright enough. This one took a bit longer to clean up properly. I think I spent a whopping 2 minutes. I set the white balance (eye dropper just below the bottom of the ball), bumped up exposure, saturation, contrast, and tweaked levels a bit. Hopefully after picking up some decent lights, the amount of lightbox post-processing tweakage will drop dramatically.
Although there’s no replacement for getting a photo right in camera, there’s also nothing like having the tools available to consistently rescue a photograph with pretty minimal effort.