Beginner's Aperture Editing Help...

[kdum8]

Hi,

I am new to Aperture so am not familiar with most of it's capabilities yet.

I want to edit two photos below but am not sure how to do it in Aperture.

The first photo of the palms looking out to sea with the vines hanging down has a huge smear at the top of the photo where my lens had water on it. How can I remove this?

Secondly the jetty shot. Does Aperture give me the ability to remove the concrete stand that the jetty protrudes out from at the bottom of the photo and if so how? Any help would be greatly appreciated to this editing novice.

If Aperture is not the software for this kind of work what would some of you recommend?

 

[Doylem]

Aperture is great, IMO, for routine adjustments (ie making good pix even better). But it hasn't got the range of tools required to fix your two pix. You need Photoshop... and more skill with the software than I've got.

But I can offer you one piece of advice, which you may (or may not...) find useful. That is: the problems with these pix (and similar problems) can be solved in-camera, before you press the shutter. 1: by making sure your front element is clean. 2: By walking further along the pier to get the composition you want.

The more you can get right in-camera, the less need you will have of complex software solutions. So you'll be ouside taking more pix instead of staring at an instruction manual. Just my two-pennorth...

 

[kdum8]

thank you for your input, so photoshop it is... Seems that Aperture is really only a slightly improved version of iPhoto which makes me wonder why it sells as much as it does....

in fact isn't that what iPhoto is for, routine adjustments, so why have Aperture at all?

 

[ChrisA]

Hi,

If Aperture is not the software for this kind of work what would some of you recommend?

Adobe Photoshop is what you want. For the kinds of things you want to do Photoshop Elements is good enough. Priced just under $90

Aperture is designed for making overall adjustments and crops and has very strong organization and fileing features. It is great if you want to manage a large colection of photos or quickly sort through the 1,000 images you just shot.

Aperture can be integrated nearly seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop Elements (or the full up PS CS3) so that the image files are passed between the two programs in an automated way.

in fact isn't that what iPhoto is for, routine adjustments, so why have Aperture at all

Aperture is much better at handling metadata. iPhoto does not even know what IPTC is. Aperture is faster and has more sophisticatd adjustments available. Think of iPhoto as a grossly simplified Aperture, made simpler so as to reduce the learning curve. Aperture is for people who don't mind spending a few weeks comming up to speed. Aperture also allows you to move projects between computers and keep all your albums, slide shows and the like with the project, With iPhoto you can't move subsets of the library. This is a big feature. It makes it so you can keep the big library at home on the big desktop computer and your current work on the notebook and when you move project ALL of your work moves

Aperture lets you sync to multiple backup disks and keeps track of what's been backed up to each drive, lots of little features like this that are usfull to people who have tens or hundreds of thousand of images.

 

[wgilles]

thank you for your input, so photoshop it is... Seems that Aperture is really only a slightly improved version of iPhoto which makes me wonder why it sells as much as it does....

in fact isn't that what iPhoto is for, routine adjustments, so why have Aperture at all?

No way is Aperture a "slightly" improved version of iPhoto. Aperture makes excellent RAW conversions, adjustments, as well as processing images. It does have the actual editing capabilities of Photoshop, but that's not what Aperture is meant for. Read professional reviews of Aperture and you will see that they prefer it over many other programs of a similar nature such as Lightroom.

 

[termina3]

Aperture, iPhoto, and Lightroom are organizational apps, not to be mistaken with the editing capabilities of Photoshop (CS3 or Elements), Gimp, etc.

Aperture is much easier to work with than iPhoto, because iPhoto becomes a hassle with large libraries. I can't speak for Lightroom, but many have liked it. If you already have Aperture, you're set––learn the UI and be happy.

 

[kdum8]

Aperture, iPhoto, and Lightroom are organizational apps, not to be mistaken with the editing capabilities of Photoshop (CS3 or Elements), Gimp, etc.

Aperture is much easier to work with than iPhoto, because iPhoto becomes a hassle with large libraries. I can't speak for Lightroom, but many have liked it. If you already have Aperture, you're set––learn the UI and be happy.

Yes you are very right. Since playing around with Aperture 2 for a few hours I can see that there is much more to it than iPhoto once you get used to it. I think I will just transfer all my photos there and work with Aperture instead. Aperture does have some basic editing capabilities though, I managed to perform both of the photo edits shown earlier in the thread using the clone and retouch brush quite effectively.

 

[Mantat]

I agree with most of the stuff that is said above except one point: you can do a lot of editing in Aperture. Sure, some tasks require PS, but now that I know Aperture inside out, I only edit about 10% of my picks in PS and that number is going to go down as soon as there is an high pass sharpener in Aperture. With Pixelmator releasing their software as a plugin for Aperture (soon?), I can clearly see PS moving out of my workflow.

Go visit my blog at megapixelicio.us and check the posts with the Aperture label. There is one screencast about vignetting and a few more on the way about general editing.

 

[kdum8]

I agree with most of the stuff that is said above except one point: you can do a lot of editing in Aperture. Sure, some tasks require PS, but now that I know Aperture inside out, I only edit about 10% of my picks in PS and that number is going to go down as soon as there is an high pass sharpener in Aperture. With Pixelmator releasing their software as a plugin for Aperture (soon?), I can clearly see PS moving out of my workflow.

Go visit my blog at megapixelicio.us and check the posts with the Aperture label. There is one screencast about vignetting and a few more on the way about general editing.

Great blog, thanks! There is lots of useful info there, much appreciated.

 

[MacInTO]

Hi, yes, you can do what you want in Aperture. Use the Retouch Tool - icon looks like a pen.

Set it to Repair, Automatically choose source and Detect edges.

The blur in the trees will disappear with ease.

You might have to play around with the settings to make the concrete disappear.

good luck!

 

[kdum8]

Hi, yes, you can do what you want in Aperture. Use the Retouch Tool - icon looks like a pen.

Set it to Repair, Automatically choose source and Detect edges.

The blur in the trees will disappear with ease.

You might have to play around with the settings to make the concrete disappear.

good luck!

Yes thanks, indeed one does have to play around but it is possible.. Aperture takes some getting into to fully appreciate it but it's not half bad..

 

[Mantat]

Aperture used to have a bad name because the 1.0 release was wayyyy too slow, it was fixed in 1.5 but it is really getting its stars in 2.0.