I went stumbling through my Aperture library and found a photo that I remembered having a hard time adjusting due to the poor conditions it was shot in. I found the perfect example. It was outside a motorcycle show here in Portland. It was dark, rainy, and lit only by yellow street lights. I can’t get much worse.

I remember fiddling with the white balance and the shadow slider for way too long before settling on a what I thought would be the best I could get.

So, I took that same photo, duplicated the version, and set it to “Revert to Original”. I then clicked “Auto Enhance” and Auto White Balance on the Natural Gray setting. That’s it…two clicks.

It’s came really close to what I spent at least 15 minutes doing. In fact, I think I could make the argument it’s better and more natural looking. 

I’m going to make a bold statement here, ready, here it comes: You are a fool if you don’t first try Auto Enhance and then Auto White Balance. The more difficult the photo, the more important is to try it first. It’s a simple fact that those two simple clicks of the mouse may just save you massive amounts of time. And, if you don’t abide, it’s a simple command-z undo. No harm done.

One note: When I set the auto white balance mode to Natural Gray, it switched automatically to Temperature and Tint. It’s possible to switch it back after hitting the button and you do get different results. I suspect it’s seeing the numbers and choosing what it believes to be the best option. 

No adjustments except crop

While we’re on the subject of the Curves adjustment brick, I thought I throw one more tip up.

Click on a curve point then hit your arrow keys to adjust.

Take a look at some obvious changes in the adjustment bricks:

The most obvious is the new Professional Auto Enhance button. This is the single most significant change to the way will start adjusting images. I can’t imagine very many situation where you wouldn’t want to start there, just to see what it does. If it looks good, move on! Next!

Brushable white balance opens a lot of creative possibilities.

When booting up Aperture 3.3 for the first time it prompts you to update iPhoto as well. When you do the App Store appears.

If you launch 3.2 library it will upgrade the library.

Aperture 3.3 is ready to install via the Software Update.

 Source: http://www.apple.com/aperture/whats-new.html#library

First off, this doesn’t appear to be Aperture 4, but nonetheless is a significant update.

Optimized for Retina Display

This is great for the lucky ones that are going to buy a new MacBookPro. I’m not one fo those. I have a very new MBP that will have to last me for a few more years. Having said that, I’m very curious to see how photos look. I expect it will be magnificent.

Back in November, 2011 Joseph wrote about the new feature in Aperture 3.2 that added a new Auto-Curves behavior, and how to get Curves to act like it did in the previous version. As it turns out, if you don’t want the S, just option-click.

To take this even further, it’s possible to removes individual curve points with a control-click.

If you haven’t used Color Labels in Aperture much, you may not know that the color stay with the image file even after they are imported. This can come in handy when you are looking at the images in the Finder.

Oddly, they do not show up in all other photo viewing apps, like Photo Mechanic. However, Star Ratings from Aperture will show up in Photo Mechanic.

Sometimes I like to see a good list of what’s been done to an image. Of course I can just look a the adjustment pane, but I’ve found the lift and stamp tool provides a nice history of adjustments that is easier to determine what’s happened. It’s closer to the History palette in Photoshop.

Aperture’s Search Dialog allows you to select multiple color labels at a time. In other words you can filter out not only red labeled images, but add any other colors as well. It may not be obvious, but it’s there.