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Aperture Screencast 3: Working with the Basic Levels Adjustments
The Levels adjustment is a comfortable tool for many photographers. In part, because it allows you to individually adjust the shadows, midtones, and highlights with the assistance of a histogram. In this screencast, Derrick Story walks you through the basic levels adjustments in Aperture. Read Aperture Screencast 3: Working with the Basic Levels Adjustments.
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You've probably heard it before: Aperture is a completely nondestructive editor. In fact, maintaining the integrity of your master image is one of the core precepts of Apple's professional photo management application. All the adjustment layers that you apply can be turned on and off without affecting your master image. Any renaming of files that you do in Aperture is handled by a version name. At no point is Aperture modifying or manipulating your original digital master. All changes are handled with little metadata files in the Finder.
The way that Aperture handles versions is nothing short of revolutionary. If you don't know any better, then be thankful for your ignorance. We should pause, however, and look at a 20th Century workflow for a moment to help position our brains. Much like our eyes and color temperature, sometimes our brains adjust so rapidly that we don't notice the change in front of us.
Let's roll the clock back to October 2005 before Aperture's release. We have a RAW file poised to open in our image-editing application. First of all, our image- editing application probably can't read the RAW file, so we'll have to convert it. We want the quality to be high, so let's choose TIFF. Now let's assume we're shooting with a modest 8 megapixel Digital SLR. Our RAW file is in the neighborhood of 8MB. The TIFF we made from that RAW is about 24MB. After figuring out where we'll save our new file and what we'll name it, we're ready to work on it. We make a few changes, maybe black and white, play with the channels. Great, we like what we have, but let's say we want to play a little bit more. Let's make a backup of this image and continue to work. Do a Save As and continue.
To compare our two versions, we would have to open that previous version which entails remembering where we saved it, what it was called and locating it. Now that both versions are open, we have two 25MB files open in RAM, and... you get the picture. What we're talking about is a very time-consuming, RAM and space-intensive process to have the freedom to play with your photos.
I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but many Aperture users don't realize exactly what's happening behind the scenes with versions or how many options there are. Let's look at the Finder level and see what's happening. For those of you who haven't broken into the Aperture Library, all you have to do is control-click it in the Finder and select Show Package Contents. The Aperture Library is, after all, just a package containing folders and files.
Aperture at the Finder level.
Once inside, you'll see all of your Aperture Projects just like they're organized inside the application. Each project is a package that can be opened in the same way as the Library. Notice that Aperture creates a folder for each photo as it is imported. Inside that folder is the master file, if you're using Aperture to manage your images, several Unix Executable Files, folders for housing Previews and Thumbnails and a version file called "Version-1.apversion". That version is the one that you're looking at in Aperture. This is the same for all your images in Aperture whether you're using referenced or managed images.
A view of a picture's folder at the Finder level.
Let me use an example from a recent backpacking trip. The original photo of the sinister snag is fine; it just needs a little help to come back to life. The first thing that has to go is the blue sky. No true gothic, horror photo ever had a blue sky. I'll apply the Monochrome Mixer. That's better but still not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm not getting the separation of the branches from the sky that I want. I need a new version so I can compare before and after and gauge my improvement.
The original shot, a gothic opportunity.
In Aperture, there are two primary options for creating versions: Duplicate Version, and New Version from Master. New Version from Master would revert to my master image and bring back my blue sky. That's not what I want. Duplicate Version would give me a version identical to the black and white image that I have. That's more or less what I want but we can take it a step further.
