Laura Shoe created a helpful blog post for Lightroom users in which she discussed Lightroom’s approach to sharp­ening. In many ways, Aperture handles image adjust­ments much like Lightroom, but they do differ a fair amount in how they deal with sharp­ening. This article is intended to “translate” Laura’s discussion for Aperture users. And I’ve written about sharp­ening in Aperture before, so you may want to check that out first.

Laura points out that many follow the advice of Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe in their book Real World Image Sharpening and apply sharp­ening in three stages: Capture, Creative and Output. Capture sharp­ening is used to offset the inherent blurring effects of digital capture devices such as cameras and scanners. Creative sharp­ening lets the image adjuster make overall, or more commonly localized, sharp­ening changes. The last step, output sharp­ening, is done at output and should take into account the output medium, the output device, as well as the intended viewing distance.

The RAW Fine Tuning Adjustment Brick

Capture Sharpening

These concepts apply equally to any image adjustment software. It is the execution that is different. Let’s start at the beginning of the process with capture sharp­ening. Aperture’s capture sharp­ening is done in the RAW Fine Tuning adjustment brick.

You’ll see the two control sliders. Sharpening (how much of a sharp­ening effect should be applied) and Edges (what in the image should be considered an edge and be sharpened). A setting of 0 Sharpening creates no sharp­ening while a setting of 1 provides the maximum effect. For Edges a setting of 0 means nothing should be considered an edge and 1 means almost every­thing is an edge and should be sharpened.

Something to note here is that Aperture is very gentle in its appli­cation of sharp­ening in general. And this is espe­cially true of RAW Fine Tuning sharp­ening. Its a very subtle effect. Also true is that sharp­ening effects are best viewed at 100%—so use the loupe or the Zoom To Actual Size commend in the View menu.

Because capture sharp­ening is meant to offset the soft­ening effect of the image capture device, one set of sharp­ening para­meters will be “right” for any given device. Aperture lets you set those para­meters as defaults for each device inde­pen­dently by using the Save As Camera Default command under the gear menu of the RAW Fine Tuning adjustment brick.

Creative Sharpening

The Edge Sharpen Adjustment Brick

First a comment. Aperture version 3 offers two adjustment bricks for creative sharp­ening—Edge Sharpen and Sharpen. The Sharpen brick is left over from earlier versions for compat­i­bility, but I advise against using it because the Edge Sharpen brick is so much better and more powerful. Forget there is a Sharpen brick.

The Edge Sharpen brick offers three control sliders. Again there is the Sharpening slider as well as the Edge slider. Both work the same way as the matching sliders do in the RAW Fine Tuning brick. But now there is the added slider for Falloff (the amount of sharp­ening done on the second and third of Aperture’s three pass sharp­ening tech­nique). A setting of 0 Falloff means that no sharp­ening is applied during the second and third sharp­ening passes while a setting of 1 means that 100% of the first pass sharp­ening effect is applied on the second pass and 100% of the amount of the second pass is applied in the third. This is pretty clever because a setting on 0.5 means that 50% of the first pass sharp­ening effect is applied on the second pass and 50% of the amount of the second pass is applied in the third. Said another way, the third pass would use 25% of the first pass effect.

Output Sharpening

Printers and paper will both cause a slight blurring of the image on output . Also, images are meant to be viewed a different distances; you’d rarely expect someone to look at a 30″ x 40″ print up close, but a 3″ x 4″ web image will be seen from just a foot or two. Therefore some sharp­ening is often needed at this stage.

The Image Adjustment Brick of the Print Dialog

Aperture has an Image Adjustment brick in the print dialog box to control print sharp­ening. Unfortunately it does not have sharp­ening controls in its export controls.

For printing the sliders change names to Amount (just like the Sharpening slider else­where) and Radius (the distance, in pixels, that Aperture uses to evaluate sharpness). Frankly, it makes no sense to me that the print sharp­ening controls should be named differ­ently and have different effects than in the Edge Sharpen adjustment brick.

Here a setting of 0 for Radius means there will be no sharp­ening while a setting of say, 3 would mean that sharp­ening would be applied up to 3 pixels away from an edge. If you want to judge the sharp­ening effect on screen, use the loupe tool next to the Amount and Radius sliders.

If you want to apply sharp­ening for exporting files formats such as JPEG or PNG, you’ll need to get the free export plug-in BorderFX. It, too, has Amount and Radius sliders.

In General

Sharpening is a very subjective adjustment, and double so for capture and creative sharp­ening. So you’ll have to apply the effects to your own taste an creative vision. But a good thing to remember is that less is often more for sharp­ening. Don’t over do it. And Aperture will help with that as all of its controls, but espe­cially its RAW Fine Tuning sharp­ening, are subtle.

Craft & Vision has released another in their series of excellent photog­raphy related e-books. This one is entitled The Power of Black and White, by Piet Van den Eynde, and features the use of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for converting color images to black and white. And that explains the sub-title In Adobe Lightroom and Beyond.

But I use Apple’s Aperture, and I know many of you do, too. So I’d like to give you an overview of Piet’s book and ‘translate’ some of his points into tech­niques Aperture users can apply. I think this is appro­priate as a great deal of the book is about how to work with black and white conver­sions in general and only parts it rely on Lightroom. Even if you are an Aperture user, I think you will benefit from his book. And its just $5—don’t pass it up if you do any black and white work to speak of.

Chapter 1 begins by providing some good tips on capturing images intended for black and white conversion. Chapter 2 goes into a little of the theory of color and how it applies in this context. Its in Chapter 3 that we first see Lightroom and only as an intro­duction to its black and white tools. Many of these same tools appear in Aperture, but with different names or arrangement.

Aperture’s Basic Adjustments

The tools presented and their Aperture equiv­a­lents are:

• Exposure = Exposure
• Black Point = Black Point
• Fill Light = Shadows
• Highlight Recovery = Recovery
• Brightness = Brightness
• Clarity = Definition
• Contrast = Contrast
• Tone Curve =  Curves

So far, Aperture has, for all prac­tical purposes, iden­tical tools. But at this point Piet intro­duces Lightroom’s Targeted Adjustment Tool (or TAT), a concept that has no match in Aperture. Using the TAT as part of the Tone Curve adjustment, for example, lets you click on the image and drag up to lighten, or down to darken, whatever tone is found under the mouse click. This is really very clever and can also be used in color selection, as we’ll shortly see.

Lightroom’s Graduated Filter

Moving on we learn about more tools:

• Temperature = Temperature
• Tint = Tint
• Post-Crop Vignette = Vignette
• Presets = Presets

Again, near perfect  matches. And, once again, a split—Aperture has no parallel to Lightroom’s Grain and Graduated Filter tools. Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush is a combi­nation of several different brushed on adjustment bricks in Aperture. In Lightroom you can brush on Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Clarity and Sharpness (Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Definition, and Sharpen for Aperture). Of course Aperture goes Lightroom one better here with the ability to brush in, or brush out, nearly any adjustment, even Curves.

The first case study of the book is presented next. Here we learn about how changing the lumi­nance of different colors change the apparent brightness of the grays those colors are converted to in black and white. Lightroom provides sliders for eight colors (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple and Magenta). Aperture’s color brick offers sliders for six colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue and Magenta), but you can change any of the pre-determine colors to any of the colors in your image by selecting on the eyedropper and clicking on that color. Here, again, the TAT in Lightroom is available and it works by moving multiple color sliders based on where you click in the image.

Aperture’s RAW Fine Tuning

Chapter 4 provides a look at the author’s Lightroom workflow touching on many of the tools already intro­duced. A few new tools shown are the Camera Profile adjust­ments, which are much like Aperture’s RAW Fine Tuning, and Auto Lens Correction (correcting for distortion, chro­matic aber­ra­tions and vignetting). Lightroom trumps Aperture here as Aperture has no lens correction ability without resorting to plug-ins.

The second case study is a very long and detailed tutorial on how to apply the many tools available to a specific and difficult image. All of the work done here can be done with Aperture in many of the same ways. Use the trans­la­tions above and follow along.

Next up is the third case study which uses Photoshop. Since Aperture can round trip to Photoshop just as Lightroom can, there’s no trans­lation needed here. Chapter 5 discusses setting up and using presets and again the two programs are very similar in how they handle them. Aperture is a bit more flexible, as a preset doesn’t have to wipe out any existing adjust­ments as Lightroom’s do, but you can get the same work done with either.

Dodging and Burning are old darkroom tech­niques that are still important in today’s digital world and Chapter 6 shows how they can be used for black and white work. Aperture has both Dodge and Burn as Quick Brushes, but Lightroom adds the very handy Graduated Filter. Chapter 7 goes outside of Lightroom to show the use of the plug-ins Exposure (by Alien Skin Software—available for Photoshop and Lightroom) and Silver Efex Pro 2 (by Nik Software—available for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture).

High Dynamic Range imaging (perhaps better called Tone Mapping) is very popular now in digital photog­raphy and Chapter 8 discusses its use in black and white. Again, two plug-in are shown, HDR Efex Pro (by Nik Software—available for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture, and LR/Enfuse (by Photographer’s Toolbox—available only for Lightroom). The very popular stand­alone program, Photomatix Pro (byHDRsoft), is also discussed.

Chapter 9 offers some alter­native ideas for finishing your black and white conversion including Tinting (Color Monochrome in Aperture), Split Toning (no equiv­alent in Aperture), Selective Coloring, and adding borders. Chapter 10 completes the book and goes over printing, some­thing it seems that fewer and fewer photog­ra­phers are doing them­selves these days. As should be clear by now, Aperture offers essen­tially the same tools for printing as Lightroom.

So there you have it. This is a great book for those wanting to get into black and white conver­sions for some of their color work. I’d recommend it for either Lightroom or Aperture users.

Digital image sharp­ening may be the most compli­cated subject for digital photog­ra­phers; perhaps even more compli­cated than color management. Nevertheless, The Digital Photo Experience has tackled the issue in their Sharpening Saturday Lightroom tip. And so I’ll work to translate their points into Aperture here — their format is video, mine will be text and images.

Lightoom’s Sharpening Controls

Aperture’s Sharpen Controls

The sharp­ening controls are very different between the two programs even though they are attempting to do pretty much the same things.

Intensity is the same as Amount; both are sliders for “how much” sharp­ening to apply. Aperture’s Edges slider works somewhat like Lightroom’s masking in that it defines what gets sharpened; how much of the detail in an image is to be considered an “edge.”. The adjustment brick is entitled edge sharp­ening because that’s what Aperture wants to work on — edges. The Falloff slider is much like Lightroom’s Radius control as it deter­mines how far away from an edge the sharp­ening effect is applied.

The reasons to use sharp­ening and the thought process behind how to apply it is, of course, the same for both programs because what we’re trying to do in both cases is to post-process digital images. You always what to work at 100% image magni­fi­cation to best judge the effects of sharpening.

One way the two are different is in the number of places in the RAW processing pipeline at which sharp­ening is applied.

Aperture’s first sharp­ening adjustment is made right as the RAW image is first trans­lated. You can see that adjustment in the RAW Fine Tuning adjustment brick. This is where Aperture is correcting for the slight blurring created by the anti-alaising filter in front of the camera’s digital image sensor.

After that, the Edge Sharpening adjustment brick kicks in. Different adjust­ments here are appro­priate for different images. Typically “high detail” images, such as land­scapes and archi­tecture, need higher inten­sities with more of the image defined as an edge. “Low detail” images, espe­cially of people, would need lower intensity sharp­ening with less of the image defined as an edge.

Another type of sharp­ening is often called creative sharp­ening and is done to draw the viewer’s attention to certain parts of the image. Often this sharp­ening might be to the eyes of the subject. To apply this sharp­ening in Aperture, you can use the new Quick Adjustment Brush called Sharpen. What I prefer to do, however, is to add another edge sharpen adjustment brick because I have more control using the Intensity, Edges and Falloff sliders.

The final stage of sharp­ening is called output sharp­ening because it makes adjust­ments to account for the media used for output. Matte type photo papers tend to bleed ink slightly more than glossy photo papers and so need a bit more output sharp­ening to compensate. The screen is a poor image display compared to a good photo paper and has much less reso­lution, so more sharp­ening is needed. Aperture does not output sharpen except as part of the print dialog.

Here the sliders are Amount for “how much” sharp­ening you want and Radius for how far away from an edge to effect.

Thursday’s Lightroom Tip from The Digital Photo Experience is about tone curve adjust­ments. This was a feature almost completely lacking in Aperture before version 3; with version 3, Aperture has stepped in front of Lightroom (at least until Lightroom 3 is released).

The new Curves adjustment brick in Aperture 3 gives the user a lot of power over the rela­tion­ships between tonal ranges in an image. You can simply click directly on the curve to create a new point and then drag that point to change the shape of the curve.

Click For Larger Image

This example shows an ‘S-shaped” curve applied that will increase the image’s contrast.

Using the Range: drop down menu in the Curves brick, you can focus the curve more on the shadow end of the histogram or you can extend its range and look at the so-called “super whites” of the image.

The Channel: drop down menu allows you to pick either RGB, Red, Green or Blue curves to adjust. Try out the eyedropper icons to set the black, gray and white points on the RGB curve.

Use the two Auto buttons to let Aperture make a good guess on contrast and color curve adjust­ments. If you don’t like what you get, you can always make finer adjust­ments to your taste.

I think you’ll agree that the new Curves adjustment brick is a big step forward for Aperture.