Day 19
I’ve been quite busy over the last 5 days and today I finally had the chance to sit in front of the computer and use Aperture 2.
I was originally confused with the 3 sharpening options available in Aperture 2. The very first one is under the RAW fine tuning heading in the adjustments tab. This one is what Aperture thinks should be applied to all images being converted from RAW files for your particular camera… OK That gets turned off right away! I prefer to make my own decisions regarding my images.
The second one is under the Sharpen heading. This one is a remnant of Aperture 1. Edge sharpening was introduced in Aperture 1.5 and is supposed to be the way to go. Lets see.
I found this article on Apple’s website that explains edge sharpening. The image below was converted into B&W and edge sharpening was applied (settings = Intensity - .76, Edges - .31, Falloff - .77). The sharpening was enough for me to actually see, but seems to keep any sharpening artifacts to a minimum.
2 comments ↓
I think you’re making a mistake with turning off the RAW fine tuning sharpening. This is part of the demosaicing process, very early stage sharpening. Few, if any, other RAW converters even expose this adjustment.
The software or camera have no clue as to what I want the final image to look like. That’s why I prefer to turn to such things as sharpening off.
However, there are times when Aperture sharpening is helpful. I’ll do some more experimenting with the sharpening settings when my new camera arrives in the next week or so.
Leave a Comment