Adjustments behave differently than in Aperture

[David]

Hi all,

I tried Raw Power as an Aperture replacement but found that the adjustment controls, in particular Highlights and Shadows, seem to work differently than in Aperture.

I had a hard time getting a comparable good result in Raw Power (probably due to my lacking experience with Raw Power). In Aperture, the effect of the Highlight and Shadow sliders was pleasant across their whole range. Of course leading to too bright or too dark pictures but generally preserving color and saturation. In Raw Power, pushing Shadows all up led to washed out colors in faces and pushing Highlights way down for overexposed parts led to less natural skin tones.

My editing style is to overexposure images a bit (using the exposure slider) and pushdown Highlights to get over exposed faces back to a more natural color. This works fine with Aperture but I didn’t manage to get the same result in Raw Power.

Generally, should I expect that setting the same values for the same adjustments in Aperture and Raw Power lead to the same result? To me it felt that I will need significant time to adapt my editing practices to how Raw Power works.

Cheers,
David

[Erik Brammer]

Hi David,

have you tried Deepen and Lighten in the Enhance section of adjustments?

Cheers,
Erik

[David]

Hi Erik,

thank you very much! Indeed, these controls lead to better results.

Just out of curiosity: Are they the same like the Aperture Highlights/Shadows controls? Or did Aperture use a combination of the different controls in Raw Power?

Cheers,
David

[Nik Bhatt]

Erik – thank you for jumping in. I was going to suggest the same thing.

David – Though the names are the same, the underlying RAW Power H&S algorithm is different than the one in Aperture’s H&S. Most of the filters in Aperture are private to that application, so there are not available for me to use.

Deepen and Lighten are different from either. One of the key differences between those and either of the H&S filters is that Deepen and Lighten maintain contrast (among other benefits) which keeps images from becoming washed out.

–Nik

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