I recently reread David Girard’s three-part series on ARS Technica from 2005 on photo editing. The tutorial is largely generic, but he specifically shows how to do everything with either Photoshop or GIMP.
In the tutorial Girard not so subtly advises against using contrast and brightness controls, which he call “evil,” because they degrade image quality, especially the brightness control. Instead he instructs the reader to utilize the levels and curves tools.
I have never heard such warnings regarding Aperture and I normally do my exposure corrections with curves. But I would like to know if the contrast and brightness controls in Aperture are similarly destructive? And are there other sliders or controls that we should stay away from?
Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/08/mystery.ars/3
In Joseph’s Aperture Live Training session 008: Adjustments; Exposure and Enhance he makes it clear those two controls are not great in Aperture either. It’s a great lesson if you’ve got $2 to spare.
http://www.apertureexpert.com/livetraining-catalog/
Thomas
Thanks Thomas.
Bill, Thomas is right, that’s a great video for you to check out. And David Girard is right as well, and I think I might have even called them “evil” in my video. Funny. Well there you go, that solidifies that we either all know what we’re talking about, or we’re all equally wrong hehe
The problem with them isn’t that they are destructive (assuming you’re working in Aperture which is a 100% non-destructive workflow) but that they are a cleaver of a tool where a scalpel is needed. They’re just not efficient, at all. Curves and Levels are much better tools for image adjusting.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?