Aperture 3 – Brushed Sharpening Export

RB | 12 July 2010 | Apple Aperture, Articles | Aperture, Aperture 3, Apple, Sharpening | 5 Comments

If you visit the Apple Aperture support forum you may have noticed a couple of long running threads regarding an issue with the Aperture sharpening quick brush. The angry mob believes that there is an issue where this brushed in sharpening is not being exported. Over the last two weeks I have worked with more than a few people that thought they were experiencing this “issue”. Here are my findings.

First off – I do not want to claim that this is the end all be all answer to this but I am willing to publish it based on every single case that I have looked into turned out the same and I see the same thing on all of my own Aperture 3 installations. If you are experiencing something different than I describe please do not hesitate to contact me via email – I would love to get to the bottom of this. So far the bottom line is – Aperture is not guilty, the brushed in sharpening is being exported exactly like it appears within Aperture – with one caveat – when viewing the suspect image at reduced size within Aperture vs say Preview the effect is exaggerated. Here is what you can do to show this clearly.

Brush in your sharpening and view it at 100%
Export that image as a full size tiff (just to eliminate JPEG compression but it doesn’t really matter)
Open the exported image in preview and view at actual size (command – zero)
Look at them side by side both at 100%

In every case doing this has shown identical results The sharpening is present and identical in both images- the “issue” comes in when you view the images at a reduced size to fit on the screen. When you do this the reduced image within Aperture shows the sharpening much more clearly than Preview. Why is this? most certainly it is due to the resizing method used – what is broken? In my opinion nothing. This kind of thing has always been the case when smashing down a big image to view on screen – different software will produce different results.

Again I would love to see a case where the brushed sharpening is actually not being exported.

5 Comments

Manu says

12 July 10 at 9:39am

I’ve noticed the same behavior when looking at RAW files in Aperture and Preview. They just look better in Aperture. Preview just, well, previews. Don’t get me wrong, I love preview, but Aperture’s image decoding (or whatever’s thing that makes the image appear) is just superior and constant at all scales. That was to be expected from a $200 software VS a bundled one.
Matthew Bergsma says

12 July 10 at 2:19pm

Great find Rob -
Tim says

15 July 10 at 2:20am

Sorry maybe a bit off topic, but has somebody solved the NEFcolor shift problem (Nikon D3 presets are welcome, did I miss something)? I did some testing in LR3 and I have to say results are close to NX2. Tim
Matthew says

20 July 10 at 3:39pm

Rob.

I agree to a point. However there is an issue; either preview, or aperture is not providing an accurate account of the image when reduced in size. If Aperture is correct, not a big deal; however if it is displayed incorrectly, then any alterations to an image are rendered useless.

As I do not have a poster size monitor to view all my images at 100%, it would be nice to know WHICH accurately portrays the printed image.

-Matthew
Audi says

18 August 10 at 4:39am

Thanks for the posting Rob,

I am one of those guys who tries to find the solutions to that problem.. it really did frustrated me a lot because I did a number of ball and birthdays photo shoot, edit the photos, they look very good after sharpening in aperture, i always feel satisfied after did some editing, especially after sharpening effect.. However, after i exported them and showed the to the client, i always feel depressed on how soft the images look like..

However, this clarifies my problem well.. Thanks to you..:)

It makes me wondering why aperture did the preview so well in large size, while the others (including other PCs) can’t.. it’s pretty annoying actually..

Audi