Aperture has been one of my favorite image handling software since my switch to Mac OS. I have been using Aperture since its very first release, and now its third iteration.
I went through some old sets of images in my hard drive, trying to clear of some junks/old archives. And, I stumbled upon a couple of images taken in quite bad lighting condition. I thought it might be a good chance to test out the presets. I never really make use of the Presets in Aperture 3.0, so I asked myself if I could do anything to improve the output for these two images.
I shot this without flash, only with the stage lighting. The lighting seems rather flat here, which is not to my liking.
Here's another shot which I took from the same stage, this photo was straight from Adobe's RAW processing, without much adjustment, if none at all. Not very nice.
I must say, the output is quite impressive. I applied the presets intuitively. I made use of the preview function before applying the presets. I’m sharing both the two images here for comparison.
Comparison between the two images: There wasn't much adjustment or tweaking done on Aperture. I only stacked up a few sets of the Preset. I quite like the outcome.
Comparison: Again, here's the before and after comparison. I think the image stands out more after applying the simple presets on Aperture.
These presets could be life savers, if not saves a large amount of time on post processing. Manual adjustment on post processing can be quite tedious and time consuming.
Final Result: The final outcome is rather pleasing, surprisingly. (scroll up to compare to original image) NOTE: The original image is not quite in focus, despite so, after the post processing, the final outcome is somewhat acceptable.
Final outcome: It's rather pleasing to see how the image turned out after a few clicks on the Aperture. I think it's rather amazing tool to use.