A user posted a question in the forums about a technique called “double raw processing”. Admittedly I had never heard of it and first said “erm, that’s not possible”, but then on googling it I discovered what the term actually means. (It’s a method of combining two versions of an image that have been processed differently from the RAW file, almost like an HDR technique).

Anyway since you can’t do this in Aperture, but the results that I saw from my one simple test weren’t that different from the look that I normally go for in Aperture, I sought out to reproduce the look natively.

Guess what? I did it. I posted the results and even a preset of my settings (which of course are tweaked the sample image, but still could be a starting point for you) in the forum post.

Read the thread, see the samples and download the preset here.

Original vs double-raw conversion in PSD vs treated in Aperture. Full size image in the forum thread.