Lesson5.RAW Image Processing

Lesson 5. RAW Image Processing

Goals	Understand the nondestructive image management system of Aperture
	Use the adjustment controls effectively
	Adjust the white balance of your images
	Correct the exposure of your images quickly and easily
	Produce versions with and without adjustments

Aperture is an advanced nondestructive image processor that supports RAW formats from all leading Canon and Nikon digital single-lens reflex cameras. You will find that you can adjust and retouch your RAW images natively without needing to convert your files, and since Aperture takes advantage of the Power Mac and Mac OS X architecture, you will be assured of fast precision control at the highest possible image fidelity.

Although it would be fantastic if you could take a perfect picture every time, in the real world virtually every image is edited to meet the needs of a project. Fortunately, Aperture ships with professional filters and effects. These enable you to make basic adjustmentsthose for exposure, levels, white balance, cropping, straightening, highlights and shadows, red-eye, and noiseas well as more complex adjustments, such as those for color effects. In this lesson, we'll cover the basics of image editing and retouching in Aperture. In Lesson 6, we'll move on to more advanced image editing.

While you can make precise image adjustments within Aperture, you also have the option of working on your image using an external image editing application such as Adobe Photoshop, without even having to close Aperture or move the image out of your Aperture Library. We'll address this feature at the end of Lesson 6, "Advanced Image Editing."