App: Apple Aperture

Many users have noticed that Aperture 3.2 added a new behavior to Auto Curves [Luma], especially since I’d just done a Live Training video on Curves (#011) and what they were seeing on their systems was a little different than what’s on the video.

Auto S-Curves

The engineers did a lovely thing in Aperture 3.2 — now when you hit the Auto Curves [Luma] button (this doesn’t apply to Auto Curves [RGB]), instead of just resetting the black and white points, it now adds an S-curve to the curve. Which is great, since that’s probably what you were going to do with Curves, anyway. The shape of the S is not a constant, either. It’s calculated by some mathemagical formula and applied just-so.

Auto-Curves applied. Notice the points automatically added to make an S-curve.

But I don’t want that!

Of course, progress is sometimes just “progress”, and if all you really wanted was to have a basic black- and white-point set, then you might be pretty upset by this change. I had a user ask in the forum if there was any way to remove this functionality, and I replied that there wasn’t one that I knew of, however, I hadn’t tried any key combinations yet. Some functions in Aperture behave differently if you hold down a key while pressing the button — for example, the Option key.

Hi all,

A reader started a conversation on the use and features of Photo Stream in the Forum, and it contains a lot of great questions and answers on the subject. I could put a big post on it here, but I think this topic is best left in the forum. Check it out if you have any outstanding questions about Photo Stream, and feel free to add your voice to the discussion.

Read the thread here.

Reader Mr. Kgoo figured out the fix for the other cropping bug, where the top 1/4 of the screen goes blank while cropping, like this:

This is just wicked cool, and precisely the kind of reason that using Apple’s entire ecosystem works so well.

By now we all know that you can shoot a photo on your iPhone and, with iOS 5 and iCloud, have that photo show up in your Photo Stream in Aperture or iPhoto.

We know that you can edit your photos in the new (minimal) photo editing feature in the iPhone’s built-in Photos app.

But did you know that the edits you make aren’t only not-permanent, but are actually translated to Aperture (and presumably iPhoto) as actual Adjustments?? (obviously I didn’t either until just a few minutes ago, or I wouldn’t be so excited!)