Combining Edits

You'll often find that you need to combine adjustments to achieve your desired final edit. However, each adjustment that you apply to an image means an additional processing step that Aperture must perform whenever it displays or outputs your picture, so ideally you want to use as few separate adjustments as possible. Consequently, you should give some thought to your adjustment strategy before you start editing.

Consider Figure 5.54, which we edited previously. This image still needs a contrast boost, and its color is a little dull. The histogram shows a textbook low-contrast imagethe white point is somewhere around 85 percent, and the black point is far from black.

Figure 5.54. Though we performed some edits on this image earlier, it needs some contrast adjustment.

Using the Exposure slider, we could brighten the image to correct its white point, but the Exposure adjustment provides no facility for changing the black point. We could, of course, use the Contrast slider, which lets us adjust the white point and black point at the same time.

But we want some finer control over some of the subtle shadows among the dunes, so we'll use Levels to correct the white and black points and perform some quarter-tone adjustments to bring out more contrast in the dunes (Figure 5.55). If this image didn't need a black point adjustment, then we might be able to get away with using the Exposure adjustment instead of Levels. But because we want control of white, black, and midtones, we can't use Exposure.

Figure 5.55. While we could use the Exposure adjustment to work on this image's contrast, we're using Levels because we want the extra control provided by the Quarter-Tone sliders.

However, we were also hoping that our contrast adjustment would boost the saturation in the image, and though it did add a little, the color in the image could still use a little more punch. So now we'll activate the Exposure adjustment and add a Saturation boost (Figure 5.56).

Figure 5.56. A final saturation boost completes the image.

Though you should try to accomplish as much as you can with a single adjustment, don't hesitate to combine adjustments to create your final edit.

Maximizing Performance

As you add adjustments to an image, you may see Aperture's performance slow. Highlights and Shadows is probably the biggest drag on performance, though Spot and Patch can also cause a big slowdown if you've added a large number of patches.

Fortunately, if you uncheck an adjustment, Aperture does not alter, reset, or forget that adjustment's parameters. So if you find Aperture beginning to slow when editing a particular image, try deactivating some adjustments while you work. You can always reactivate them when you're done.

Tip

If you want to see what your original master image looks like with no adjustments applied, press M to toggle between your master image and your current set of adjustments.