Tate Britain #3, originally uploaded by LondonBrad.

I quite like the light coming into the main atrium at Tate Britain. I was more interested in the building this time.

I took the plunge and coughed up £200 for Apple’s Aperture application because the combination of iPhoto and Photoshop really just isn’t a useable option for a keen amateur photographer like myself who shoots more than a handful of images at a time.

Initially have to admit that Aperture seems to be really complicated and not as intuitive as iPhoto for very basic tasks – some are even downright impossible; removing keywords from multiple images for example. The UI is very nice and it’s the first time I’ve experienced this high-res pro-app style from Apple. I quickly understood what was going on and the various functions of panels and layouts which had previously annoyed the hell out of me in Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom Beta.

The non-destructive editing and file management make you start thinking more about the pictures themselves and not files, giving you much more freedom to play around with adjustments without any worry about doing something you can’t undo or tweak at a later date.

Using Aperture so far has made me look more carefully at keywords, description and other meta data. I feel like this application is giving me the tools and freedom to concentrate more on photography and less on methods of post-production.

Shooting and dealing with Raw files is a breeze – I don’t see myself shooting JPEGs on my Canon EOS 20D much in future. The colour range and adjustments available from Raw is definitely worth the extra storage required for each shot.

I really like that Adobe have tried to address the issue of working on sets of Raw camera files — which is something that is quite painful and time consuming in Photoshop™, but even though the software is currently in beta 3 (I presume this means it won’t differ much to the finally release) and currently free to use, I just can’t put up with how annoying it is. Having to constantly click between it’s three modes to do simple operations repeatedly, it’s lack of photoshop-style levels control – in favour of something it refers to as ‘Black’, makes it frustrating to use even after plenty of practice. Adobe® Lightroom™ also seems to use up more screen real estate with it’s pointless banner and annoying side-panel menus which even when hidden have a habit of springing back to life as you work through careless mouse gestures.

Until I can justify buying Apple’s Aperture, I’m going to have to stick to using iPhoto and shooting Raw more conservatively.

1. Take a look at the red green and blue channels to work out which holds the most and nicest information.
2. Create a channel mixer adjustment layer and mix the channels into monochrome remembering which channel had the most information from step 1.
3. Add a curves layer and make the curve into an ‘S’ shape so that there is plenty of contrast in the midtones.
4. The image will be looking pretty stark at this point, so fade the Curves layer until the image looks good and you are getting the most detail.
5. Apply an unsharp mask to the image layer, I find that setting the threshold to 0 or 1, and the radius to between 0.8 and 1 works well. Adjust the percentage until the image is as sharp as you can make it before it starts to look too rugged.