Aperture tip - this one goes to eleven!

Sometimes you find out new things about software you've been using for years. I use Aperture for post processing my RAW images. It allows me to do almost anything I want to do to an image without having to use dedicated image editing software like Photoshop (or my personal software of choice, Pixelmator) by moving around its nifty sliders and using the brush tools.

Whenever I felt I couldn't achieve a certain look in Aperture, it was often because I wanted to do something more extreme than Aperture's sliders would allow. Let's say in the image below I want to make the sky darker for dramatic effect. In the color controls, I select the darker blue color (the one that's closest to the actual color of the sky) and drag the luminance slider all the way to the left.

The luminance value is now at -70. But what if I want to make the effect even more pronounced. As it turns out, many of the controls in Aperture go beyond the limits of their sliders. By placing the mouse on the number to the right of the slider and dragging left or right (up or down works as well) you can adjust the value over a wider range. In this case, the luminance value actually goes all the way to -100.

By the way, you can also use the little arrow key's next to the value to adjust it up or down, or just type in a number. The first option is useful for small adjustments, the latter one if you already know what the value needs to be. For a lot of the sliders in Aperture - though not all of them - the actual range is greater than what you can achieve by using the sliders alone.

Hope this was useful and inspires you to take Aperture to new extremes :-)