Paul Inskip Photography » Photos, Cameras, Apple, gadgets and more

BRUSH IN OR BRUSH AWAY
The idea of being able to apply an adjustment that you can then brush in or away is basically apples take on using masks and adjustments layers in Photoshop (the best way to get pseudo non-destructive edits)

This little brush drop down is also where you have the ability to stack adjustments, but I’ll come to that later.

Once you start using a brush a small paint brush icon appears to the right of the auto button, this allow you to quickly see where you have added brushes to an adjustment brick (don’t like the description of these being bricks but I guess it makes sense )

Clicking on this brush when you re-visit an adjustment brings up the small brush panel:

The level of fine tuning and adjustments you can make to these brushes themselves can quickly be seen. Not only do you have the 3 standard sliders controlling size, softness and strength but you also have the ‘detect edges’ tick box and an additional sub settings menu accessed via the cog in the top right.

The small pop out menu allows you to control the visibility of the overlays for the brushes so that you can see where you are painting. Including none there are 5 different options for seeing the brush strokes:

OVERLAYS

Colour overlay
This shows your brush strokes as semitransparent red:

Brush Strokes
This turns the un brushed areas black and just shows your brush strokes, I find this overlay less useful as it doesn’t show the actual image at all.

On Black
This simply turns the unbrushed areas black showing just the part of the image that you have brushed, very useful for just seeing what you are working on.

On White
Exactly the same principal as ‘on black’ but on white instead:

BRUSH RANGE
This small option that can be overlooked gives you a great level of control over exactly what your brushes do, the default is ‘All’ where the brush will obviously affect all of the image. The other three options allow you to make the brushes only affect the shadows, mid tones or the highlights, this gives your brushes a whole new level of finesse and accuracy, especially when combined with the ‘detect edges’ option, you can make very quick, very precise adjustments effortlessly

Now the level of control these brushes have doesn’t stop there, back in the main brush window you have three buttons, one to brush in, one to brush away and one to feather the brush strokes. I used this tool last night and t does a wonderful job of blending the brush strokes, particularly on tricky areas where you may have added various strokes both adding and taking away, it gives you a smooth transition between the strokes along the precise area you apply the brush.

The Aperture brushes do behave slightly differently than photoshop brushes in particular the ’strength’ slider which I mistakenly first took to be some kind of opacity slider (which would make it similar to Photoshop) works differently from opacity as you’d expect. The strength setting works well and allows you to use the brushes softly in areas and build up the effect, it just needs to be used a few times to get used to it as again it works differently from what some of us will probably be used to.

CREATIVE USES FOR BRUSHES
The mechanics of the brushes take a bit of learning and experimentation and then you understand the behaviours that they were aiming for, once you have that the options for use are huge. I’ve already mentioned a few time the idea of stacking sharpening and brushing the effect into the eyes only for added extra sharpening.

There are lots of far more interesting ways of using these brushes as they can be used on most of the adjustment bricks, another quick example would be the often over-used colour popping:

by adding the black and white adjustment and brushing it in you can quickly and easily, and MOST importantly non-destructively create a great effect. Its the point of non-destructively that needs to be re-emphasised here, all these adjustments been brushed in or away can all be tweaked and adjusted or even just turned off at any point.

One final mention of the brushes is a quick one on the skin smoothing brush and the retouch, retouch has been improved from AP2 and the skin smoothing brush work surprisingly well, here is a quick before and after picture, just a quick proof of concept really:

For me the brushes were needed specially after Lightroom 3 beta added them, I am very pleased and very surprised at just how good the brushes are and how versatile and powerful they are. they will certainly take a bit of learning, and some new workflows but they will definitely produce the results that I’d talked about and dreamt of where Aperture is able to keep me out of Photoshop for longer.

Once I’ve worked with the brushes more I’ll come back with some more advanced information workflows and no doubt some presets to.

Posted via email from Paul’s posterous

This was risky as i had back-to-back appointments and if Aperture 3 went wrong i would have been in real trouble, but I was working on the theory that this isn’t beta software so I ’should’ be able to do everything I’d done the day before in Aperture 2 – that was the theory.

TESTING
So first thing was to test whether the MBP would open the demo AP3 library over the wireless network, it was a little buggy at times and there were problems that seemed to be caused by it being the demo release but It worked fine and meant I could carry on as planned.

One thing I noticed straight away was that now I was actually ‘working’ rather than playing like the night before Aperture 3 feels even more slick than I first though, I’m not talking processing but general moving about creating new albums, rating etc, so much smoother to use, it feels more solid and responsive, this gave me a great confidence boost at this stage that my viewings were going to be fun

LET THE FUN BEGIN
So I came to the first shoot and started downloading the files, as I said yesterday the downloading process starts by seeming quicker as the fils pop up in the project instantly rather than appearing in small batches. I had set-up an import preset (I used to have to lift and stamp it from a mater project in Aperture 2 so this is a real bonus) this made the initial processing time a lot quicker as it wasn’t processing the files twice which I’d seen it do on tuesday night.

This initial processing and thumbnail creation seems a vastly different process from Aperture as there seems to be a bit more time spent carrying out these tasks, HOWEVER what they seem to have managed in Aperture 3 is the ability to start working with the files while it is doing all of this, in Aperture 2 I always left the machine alone during this initial phase as everything was very slow and unresponsive, but in Aperture 3 I can actually start working almost as soon as the files have been imported even while its still processing, this has the effect of speeding up processing and sorting/initial culling.

Now this bit has proved a bit of a double edged sword, All of this initial testing today was done on my 2006 MacPro still running Leopard and the thumbnails and processing did bog down at times, which made the processing time longer than Aperture 2 because it seemed to want to keep re-creating thumbnails. Having done some testing on my MBP running Snow Leopard the combination of a fresh library running in 64bit made a BIG difference, it felt very odd to feel my MBP out gunning my MP. What this does do is make me very excited about upgrading to SL as there really does seem to be a big jump in performance.

So Aperture 3 was costing me a bit of extra time in the first session due to the it being 32bit L rather than 62bit SL and because i think the library needs a rebuild. Tomorrow I have another 7 back to back shoots and will be starting with a fresh library and doing some side by side tests with the MP vs. MBP.
The only recurring issue i had today was an incompatibility warning that came up a few times when opening the library across the network, it seemed sporadic and was generally fixed by opening the library on the local machine and then re-opening across the network. I can’t help wondering if this is due to the OS differences, especially as when I installed the demo the instillation was larger under SL than L.

Tomorrow night i will be moving on to stage 2 and actually processing up files ready for print aiming to do everything in Aperture 3 without round tripping to PS, the new brushes really does allow me to avoid using layers and masks in PS, it will take a bit of getting used to but it certainly has the capacity.

DAY ONE IMPRESSIONS

1) New import options need to be learnt and are an integral part of the workflow now, getting all the import options set-up will make a big difference

2) Aperture 3 really does feel nicer to use and all the small ui tweaks really do add up.

3) There does seem to be a big jump in performance on SL
4) The new colour labels and flags offer tons more scope for organising, i haven’t even got my head round how to best utilise them, this combined wit import presets and brushes allows me to develop a new and improved workflow. huge step forward from Aperture 2 which was already the one to beat.

5) The overall responsiveness of the tools has been improved as well I have never had a problem with sticky sliders etc but now everything feels even zippier especially when you can start combining multiple versions of sharpening, curves etc with the brushes, it all happens instantly, smoothly and precisely.

So Aperture 3 and I survived the first day of stress testing and I head in to tomorrow knowing it will cope and that buy the end of tomorrow I will have mastered some of Aperture 3’s new tweaks and features and will be well on the way to creating a new workflow. The feeling that i expressed yesterday about Aperture feeling truly NEW is growing still as I’m looking forward to developing and adapting my workflow to harness Apertures new tools.

By this time tomorrow night I will know whether Aperture 3 can be the PS replacement i’d dreamt of fun times ahead!

Posted via email from Paul’s posterous