During our class with Jan a few weeks ago she showed us bit of her process and the tool (i.e. Adobe Lightroom) she uses for processing her photos once shooting is done. Adobe recently ran a special so I picked it up. Then the old man stepped in and said something about Apple's Aperture. I find Adobe products to be cumbersome and they lack the intuitiveness I so appreciate from Apple products, so I thought it prudent to check out Aperture - what luck, they have a 30-day free trial that is fully functional - to see if I like it enough to ship Lightroom back and buy it instead. Since I haven't yet opened the Lightroom box I have the ability to do this, thank goodness. Because Darr's right. I go bananas when things don't work the way I expect them to. Bananas. And then he, poor guy, has to deal with a raving lunatic who comes to him, laptop in hand, and requests explanations. (He's usually pretty good at explaining to lunatics why a company chose one route over another. And it usually has something to do with the way programmers think, not us regular peoples.)
Jan happened to have just shot one of the local rollerblade teams at a park, and she was taking it dark, real dark, because lighting wasn't spectacular the day of the shoot. I was intrigued by this because I tend to overexpose everything. When I got home from a walk with Hen, Darr, Beauty the wonder dog, and Cosette (the camera, just trying this name out - what say you, gentle reader?) yesterday and saw the pics I thought I'd give it a try and go dark.
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| Shutter 1/800 Aperture f/1.4 ISO 200 - original |
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| Edited - applied vignetting, dodged face and hands |
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| Shutter 1/320 Aperture f/1.4 ISO 200 - original |
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| Edited - burned background, dodged face |
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| Shutter 1/320 Aperture f/1.4 ISO 200 - original |
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| Edited - applied vignetting, increased sharpness |
I am getting used to the layout of the program and am working to learn how to maneuver efficiently while editing. This will take time but I imagine the same holds true for working in Lightroom. There are two big drawbacks to using Aperture - a. every professional I have ever heard discuss Apple's iPhoto does so with disdain. They hate iPhoto. I'm not sure I entirely understand why and I do not know if their negative feedback applies to Apple's Aperture but I fear it might; 2) Jan uses Lightroom and has already agreed to teach more classes if we want her to. I know of no such person for Aperture.
2 comments:
From Aperture, can you open a file into Elements, if you want? (Do you want?)
I love the name Cosette.
On my screen, with my amateur eye, it is difficult to see the differences in the first two pictures. In the last picture, I can see the differences and I like the edits you applied. I found with my own practice, if I uploaded the pictures to flickr and then flipped through consecutive pictures with "newer" and "older", then it was easier to see the subtle differences in a photo. I think that basically means I don't have a good eye for subtle differences -- it has to smack me over the head. :)
You can open a photo stored in Aperture in PSE. (From PSE - File > Open > Photos > Aperture - easy!) Aperture (and Lightroom) are probably used for housing and quick bundled editing fixes, because you can edit many photos at once, while PSE is for more fine-tuning. I haven't yet found anything like cloning in Aperture but I've had a day, and much of it has been spent trying to learn while simultaneously entertaining a three and a half year old (who's currently building slides out of blankets and listening to Tesla. Tesla!)
The differences are slight, excepting the last one. I'm curious to see what they look like on other people's monitors.
I'm leaning towards Cosette, and have been since the day of purchase.
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