Aperture 3 Brushes – A Quick Demonstration

I’ve been enjoying my Aperture 3 so much that I went ahead and purchased a license even before the trial expired, despite the Aperture 3 problems that some other users might have experienced, my Aperture 3 seemed to be running acceptable. Then, Apple recently released version 3.0.1 and things got even better.

One of the very cool things in Aperture 3 is Brushes. You can basically brush changes into your photos. Sure, you can do this with Photoshop too and probably other photo editing applications by creating layers (or some other way?), I guess, but the Aperture 3 way is really easy to do – and fast. Plus it has a “detect edges” feature, so just brush away with the “smooth skin”-brush and you don’t have to worry about hitting clothes or hair.

Aperture 3 is only $179.99 from Amazon US, that’s almost $20 saved, compared to the Apple Store price of $199.

Here’s a few examples of what you can easily do with brushes in Aperture 3. First, here’s a standard picture of a church here in Malta. Well, to be honest, I’m not even sure it’s a church or if it’s a chapel or something completely else, but it’s located in Dingli Cliffs, for those of you curious.

Pretty boring, right? Well, I just so happen to shoot two other frames as well, one with -2 EV and one with +2 EV. Now that I have three frames (including 0 EV above), I can combine these three frames in an application such as Photomatix Pro, or Photoshop or another photo editing app, I assume. And here’s the result without too much effort:

It’s a bit more interesting now. Keep in mind, I’m just using this picture for demonstration purposes, not because I believe it’s a high-quality picture that is bound to move everybody who looks at it 🙂

Okay so let’s take a look at brushes. Now in the next image, I’ve added two brushes across the church: Dodge (lighter) and Burn (darker). See the difference?

In the end, I decided to brush the front of the church with a dodge brush, making it a bit lighter overall. And here’s the end result which I decided to keep, still without spending a whole lot of time on it, but it’s (to me) a better looking picture than the first one:

There are so many things you can do with brushes in Aperture 3, this is just one example. I could even add a polarizer brush to the sky if I wanted to, that might have made a completely different picture.

If you’re currently using iPhoto on your Mac, Aperture 3 will easily convert your iPhoto library into Aperture 3. It took my 8,000 pictures without any issues at all, still keeping keywords, Faces and Places intact.


Here’s Chase Jarvis’ take on brushes in Aperture 3:

4 thoughts on “Aperture 3 Brushes – A Quick Demonstration”

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  3. Aperture 3 is definitely looking very, very promising, and if the memory hunger can be be stilled I am sure that it will get adopted much wider in due course. As a regular personal computer user (I will get a Mac when I can afford one, though!) I’m just wondering when it will be available for PC? Apple people really seem to have all the fun, but price is a barrier to entry to this exclusive club for most ordinary people, and it can be very frustrating when software is not supported by other platforms.

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  4. Das Ergebnis deiner Arbeit sieht wirklich gut aus. Werde mir die Software wohl auch mal anschauen müssen.:)

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