Correcting Exposure in Aperture 2.0

Orange Avenue

Coronado, CA, United States

Canon 5D Mark II

Focal Legnth 47

Aperture 18

Shutter 20 sec.

ISO 400

A picture of my cab.  For this photo it was impossible to get the scene evenly exposed so some post production was needed to be done.  For my post production (which is typically minimal) I use Aperture 2.0, which is much more user friendly, but a little less comprehensive than Adobe Photoshop (whatever version).

In this case i found that it was best to meter the scene for the road and the street lights/lighting and use the shadows function of Aperture to evenly expose the side of the cab.  Care is needed when doing this as noise/grain is added when the Shadows function is used.  Aperture uses an algorithm to determine the darkest parts of the scene and isolates them, letting you manually adjust the brightness in certain sections of the picture.

Conversely there is a highlights function that isolates the brightest parts of the scene and allows the user to manually dim/darken those spots.  The downside of this is that if used in excess halation (a halo effect around the edges, which is more noticeable in highly contrasted subjects) often occurs.  Also, when used excessively there is a dulling/flattening effect on colors in the section of the scent that is being altered, resulting in an artificial look.  Both these adjustments are best used sparingly.