Apple Aperture

I have been looking at Apple Aperture to process my photos, well what passes as photos.

To this date I have just put them up, doing no processing on them. My underwater shots were initially done with the white balance set to cloudy giving all the photos a blue hue, and then someone pointed out that I could set the white balance using a white slate as reference at which point the photos started to get better colors. I also got good at setting the white balance upside down while descending on a dive.

While the colors got better, I still had “snow” on the pictures and sometimes the white balance was off, but overall the results were good.

Recently a friend suggested I take a look at Aperture to do some post processing on my photos, and I started to experiment with it a few days ago.

Overall I am very impressed, it will take me a few more days to get comfortable with the interface and all the settings you can apply to a picture, as well as all the things I still don’t understand. The tutorials have been invaluable in speeding up that learning curve.

One thing I noticed is that there is a lot more control available over images in RAW format compared to JPEG. Unfortunately Aperture does not support the RAW format for my camera (it is a dinosaur), but I found that I could convert the image format from RAW to DNG using Adobe’s free conversion tool and regain more control over the image. This is of course a stop-gap measure until I get a new camera.