Using The Adjustment Window & Edits in Aperture

Video Transcript

"BRANDON SARKIS: My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'll be showing you how to use Apple's Aperture program for the Mac. Okay, next thing we're going to show you is edits. Aperture isn't designed as a replacement for Photoshop or for any of the other photo software that you're going to find out there. It's designed as an intermediary, where you take your raw photos or JPEGs, if you want to, it's really designed to use raw photos, and then fine-tune them and then export them out into something like Photoshop to edit them. So, I'm going to show you some of the basic editing you can do, which is mainly--it's going to be exposure and color correction, as far as Aperture goes. So you'll see here's a photo I've got open. I go over here to the right hand side under adjustments, and you'll see that I've got a couple here open. I've got: raw fine tuning; exposure; levels; highlights and shadows; white balance; and color; so I'm just gonna--oops, let me close that one. I'm going to open up exposure. So you'll have your exposure settings here, so I can, for example I can supersaturate the color in that one and I can, you know, make the exposure a lot darker, if I saw fit, and you'll see I can go over here and really crank the contrast up on it. And there you go, and so that would be a good example of, you know, working with the raw image and you can just undo this little checkbox to see your original image. So, you can see what I really did was brought some shadow and contrast to the picture. A little more rich, just not quite as flat. Over here under levels, you can actually change your red, green and blue levels, as well as your luminence levels. I'm happy with the way this one looks, I'm not going to mess with that. Next one down is your highlights and shadows. You get some really interesting effects with this. You can, you know, I'll crank the highlights all the way up, which really brings the detail out in the clouds. And you can see that these adjustments are being made in real time, so I'll crank the shadows up. We'll get this really weird, kinda synthetic, almost heavily over-processed look to the shrub here in front and the car's in the background. You can also--get under your white balance and adjust the temperature of the photo. I can make it a lot warmer by adding more yellow to it. I can make it a lot cooler by adding more blue to it, actually it's gone too far there, although I like it right here in the middle. And if, say I decide I don't like this, all I have to do is I can either hit undo, which is that button, or I can just turn off the white balance completely. And then lastly, down here is probably the neatest part, for our color, you can adjust each individual color independently of each other. You have red, yellow, green, aqua, blue, and [INDISCERNABLE] see the saturation and illuminence range for each individual color. So I can go into red, I could really crank my reds up or I could go into blue, I can really make those really strong too. So that's a really neat feature. You can really adjust a lot of color of a photo with that one. And so, when you're done with this, you'll export the photo, which I'm going to show you next."