Making Automatic Adjustments


Aperture offers a number of automatic adjustment tools that make it easy to perform routine editing tasks, such as adjusting an image's exposure or levels. Located in the Adjustments Inspector, these tools analyze the data of the image in the Viewer and make the selected adjustment accordingly. Automatic adjustments are designed to let you make quick changes to individual images and are not meant for mission-critical image editing. Since our Five Star Location images are simply for judging possible locations, they are excellent candidates for a few automatic adjustments.

1.

Press Command-Option-V to switch to the Maximize Viewer layout. Aperture closes the Projects panel and control bar. Press Control-A to display the Adjustments Inspector.

2.

Select the Jackson Hole 17 of 23 image in the Browser. This image is overexposed and rather washed out. It would benefit from an Exposure adjustment.

3.

Click the Auto Exposure button below the histogram in the Adjustments Inspector.

Aperture adjusts the image's exposure. A checkmark appears in the Exposure checkbox in the Adjustments Inspector, the value changes in the Exposure slider (click the Exposure disclosure triangle to see the slider), and the image darkens in the Viewer.

You can also tell that an adjustment has been applied from the badge that appears on the image's thumbnail in the Browser.

Now let's automatically adjust the levels of a different Jackson Hole image.

4.

Select Jackson Hole 9 of 23 in the Browser. The image is a bit dark and could use a bit more punch to make it more dramatic.

5.

Click the Auto Levels Combined button.

Big change. The Auto Levels Combined button applies a luminance adjustment to the black and white points of the combined RGB channels of the image in the Viewer. It is a good adjustment if you want to maintain the color balance of your image while adjusting its overall exposure and contrast.

If you don't like the result of the Auto Levels Combined adjustment, you can undo it easily. Let's see how the Auto Levels Separate adjustment works instead.

6.

Click the Reset button to the right of the two Auto Levels buttons, or press Command-Z to undo the adjustment.

Tip

You can undo an Auto Exposure adjustment by clicking the Reset button next to the Auto Exposure button, as well.

7.

Click the Auto Levels Separate button.

This time, Aperture applies different adjustments to the black and white points of each individual color channel in the image instead of adjusting the average of the three channels. This method may alter the color balance of the image, but in our case, the adjustment is a good one. The contrast of the foreground imagery and colors is much more pronounced using this adjustment.

As you can see, Aperture's automatic adjustments are a convenient way to make quick corrections to an image's exposure or color balance. For those times when you want to study or understand the content of your image data more closely, you can use the histogram in the Adjustments Inspector.




Apple Pro Training Series(c) Aperture 1.5
Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5
ISBN: 0321496620
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 190

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net