#AUTOPANO VIDEO 3 BLACK TRIANGLES SKIN#
#AUTOPANO VIDEO 3 BLACK TRIANGLES PRO#

This is superb for subtly dodging highlights to emphasise shape – set the Dodge brush to Highlights and paint over some image highlights. Furthermore there are brushes that are the equivalent of three of Photoshop’s main blending modes Multiply, Darken and Lighten – called Polarise, Burn and Dodge respectively.īetter still, and this is something that you could normally only do in Photoshop, you can also restrict the effects of the brushes to a range – Highlights, Midtones and Shadows.

#AUTOPANO VIDEO 3 BLACK TRIANGLES SKIN#

Aperture can brush in 14 different effects including Vibrancy, Noise Reduction and Skin Smoothing. Local adjustments were introduced into Aperture 3 to bring it into line with LR3 but at the same time adding to LR3’s six control sliders. Set brushes to affect different parts of the tonal range. Using the Curves tool reduces the brightness across the whole image and the Curve may require editing to maintain contrast.Įither way, being able to see what data is in the capture but not being displayed is hugely useful and actually allows you to give some shots slightly more exposure to keep good shadow detail. Using the recovery slider achieves much the same result with the difference that only the brightest tones are affected, leaving the midtones and shadows alone. Only so much can be recovered of course, but from my tests Aperture 3 can pull back up to 1 stop of clipped highlights in this way. What it means is that if you have a mildly clipped image, like this one, you can set the Curves range to Extended and move the highlight slider to the right to include the extra, apparently lost, data. I’m pretty sure no other raw processor shows this. If the image is clipped by some slight overexposure Aperture 3 shows what information is still in the image data but is not being seen in the normal histogram at the top of the adjustments panel.

We’ll look at the Shadow option in a moment but for now let’s examine what Extended does.Ĭlick on this option and the Curves histogram shrinks down to the left revealing space to the right of the highlights. This is set to Normal by default ( no surprise there) but it has two other settings – Extended and Shadows. The Curves tool in Aperture 3 looks like any other Curves tool until you notice the Range option at the bottom of the ‘brick’. Yes, I know, LR3 and C1 both have some sort of highlight recovery tool but they work in a quite different way to that of Aperture 3, and, better still, Aperture 3 appears to be able to recover more highlights than the other two by about a ½ stop. I was surprised by what I found, and so here are a few of the Cool Tools that might not be so well known.Ĭurves Extended view with highlight point adjustment. Guy struck me as a ‘no nonsense’ kind of bloke, and I figured that if he was using Aperture 3 it was for a good reason, so I recently took the time to delve a bit deeper under the hood and see what was hidden away behind disclosure triangles and in obscure menu options. I remember being a bit underwhelmed when I first checked out Aperture 3, it seemed like more of the same, if a bit smoother and with local adjustment brushes, but after going to a recent seminar about Photoshop I was struck by the fact that the presenter (Guy Gowan) used Aperture 3 as his main raw processing tool. This is not a review or a comparison, simply a look at some of the tools that grabbed me as being very clever and maybe not so well known.

#AUTOPANO VIDEO 3 BLACK TRIANGLES PRO#

LR3 and C1 Pro 6.1 are both dual-platform, and I do try to be as OS-agnostic as possible in Better Digital Camera but, having had Aperture 3 on my MacBook Pro since the day it was released I thought it was overdue for a good close inspection.

It’s a program I am very familiar with, even ‘comfortable’ with, but I do try to keep an eye out for developments in other raw processors. Anyone who has been to one of my seminars or workshops will know that I use Lightroom 3 for much of my day to day work.

Autopano video 3 black triangles