Tips

This question came up in the forum today, and I think it’s a great question that can cause a lot of confusion for people. So, I’m addressing it here as a “Tips” post.

“Why do my photos look different in Aperture than they did on the camera LCD?”, and the equally pertinent and confusing “Why do my photos look like they did in the camera for just a few seconds, then change before my eyes in Aperture?”

What you see on the back of the camera is not the RAW file, but is in fact a small JPG file that the camera produces and embeds into the RAW file for this precise viewing purpose. The camera isn’t capable of decoding the RAW file to preview on the back of the LCD (if you think about how quickly you can scroll through hundreds of photos on the LCD, versus how long it takes to do the same thing in Aperture or in the Finder, that will make sense), so instead it shows you the small JPEG photo.

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.