I am a novice with Aperture and I need some help with exporting some images for a club competition. My problem is that I shoot in RAW and need to submit JPEG images of a size not greater than 1024 px x 1024 px. Usually I prepare the image, including any sharpening (edge) and then export at 1024x768 px (landscape). Clearly there will be a large number of pixels lost during the export, leading to a loss of sharpness.
Am I missing something? What, if anything, can be done about this other than import it into another program such as Photoshop Elements?
Howard
Your photos will be projected on a device with a max resolution of 1024 I take it. So submitting the best image you can for 1024 will mean that you control the image, it isn’t the projection system that decides how to downsample it. So take it as an opportunity. Stunning images still look stunning at 1024.
And by the way, take the judges’ comments with a pinch of salt. If they help good, if they don’t, don’t let it get you down.
David
d.
Howard,
Lots of good advice here. I’d add that you can add sharpening to the file before exporting, so if the output isn’t as sharp as you’d like, make a new version of it in Aperture, add sharpening, and try the export again. Keep on tweaking; add/reduce sharpening, export, check it in Preview, until you are happy with the result.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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Thanks for the comments. I will add “tweaking” into my workflow and judge the output accordingly. Thanks again.
Try putting the dpi up to about 300 on the exported jpeg?
Howard,
Are you seeing this loss of sharpness in your output or is this theoretical? In my experience sizing down hides image defects vs. sizing up which will accentuate them.
Chris,
Changing the DPI setting in the export preset won’t change the quality of the output. This is just metadata that tells the output device how to process the image (i.e. what size to make it when printed). If you set it to 1024 x 1024 then that is the pixel size no matter what the DPI setting is.
Thomas
Thomas, Chris,
Thanks for the prompt replies.
The issue is theoretical at this point in time. I have introduced sharpening as part of my workflow based on a tutorial from Beckhamdigital, albeit he is using Photoshop/Elements. The principle seems sound that if you are dumping a load of pixels there will some loss of sharpness. The thing to remember is that these images will be projected at 1024x768x72dpi and the judges have a keen eye for most defects. My aim is to avoid the defects wherever possible and I continue to learn - not winning much at the moment but trying!