I find workflow easier if the tools I generally use are presented in the order in which I use them. So I’d love to make my default set start with crop, straighten, white balance, exposure, highlights & shadows, curves etc right down to the final touches that might or might not get used (vignetting etc). I haven’t found the trick of how to re-order the tools in the adjustments sidebar, and deleting all from the default set and then adding them doesn’t work, as sometimes the added tool goes above the existing tools, and sometimes it goes below (and not even defined by the alphabetical order they appear in the drop-down “Add Adjustment” menu either!) Is there a way of creating a default tool set with the tools in my preferred order?
Chris
Chris
I’m afraid there isn’t. The order of the bricks is the way they are applied by Aperture and that’s important to the way the program works. Yes Aperture could allow you to display them in one order but still apply them in its own order, that would probably make more people unhappy than it would make happy.
However you can achieve what you want a slightly different way. I tend to straighten using the icon and crop using Ctrl-X before going into the bricks. You could tweak the keyboard commands to put WB and Exposure on Ctrl-keys and call them up in the order you want that way.
d.
David,
Are you saying that if I apply adjustments in any order other than top to bottom there will be a problem? Because they aren’t ordered in a way that seems logical to me I often scroll down the list of tools for one adjustment then go back up for another, and I haven’t noticed any issues arising from this, other than my irritation at having to work in a clunky way. I did leave my thoughts on the matter on Apple’s Aperture feedback page today.
The order of adjustments is arranged in part to maximize the processor speed. Raw work is done first as a global process. Straighten and Cropping decrease the file size before working on the rest of the adjustments, less pixels more speed. The adjustments are then ordered to decrease override of previous settings . Example: Curves affects hues(color) and values(lightness and darkness) in an image, while levels and highlights tend to effect the relative value. When contrasting hues become similar in value an images tends to flatten out. Curves will decrease this effect more than levels and highlights. Once an images goes flat it is hard to determine the fix. If you were to apply levels before curves you may have defeated the curve adjustment before you started.
John Waugh, Photographic Images • Apple Certified Trainer• Sport Action Lifestyle Photography
Ah, that fits in with what I do anyway - crop first as there’s no point wasting effort on something that won’t be printed. Nearly all of my images are monochrome - either B&W negative scans or files from the M Monochrom, so it may be that my needs are a bit different to most.
Thank you, David and John for your helpful insights.
Thanks Chris
… and finally, as I don’t think I made it clear, you can apply the changes in any order you like, add, subtract, change; but Aperture will always render them in the preset order. If you do come up with something where you want to add an early adjustment after a late one, you’d have to export to a TIFF and then add the second set of adjustments. But I haven’t yet.
cheers
d.
d.