(Mouse over photo to the left to see original unedited photo)

My last blog post highlighted photo enhancement, now we’ll look more at alterations. When a photo has unwanted clutter or defects it is necessary to alter it with photo editing software in order to direct the viewer’s attention to the subject of the photo. To the left you’ll see a photo that I have altered from its original version. Along with altering to remove clutter I have also enhanced the photo. This is not as hard to do as you might think. For this I used Aperture for Mac which has a variety of built in features to let you manipulate your images. The original picture here is actually a low quality image that was loaded on Facebook, imagine what you could do with a higher quality image!

I’ve also done a video tutorial so you can see the process in which I used to create the final image to the left. Check it out and see what you can do with your own photos. Don’t have a Mac? Try GIMP, Photoshop or Paintshop Pro on your Windows computer.

Want to see in high definition? Click the video to go directly to YouTube and view it there.

Here is a quick video tutorial on how to use Aperture 3 to do some photo editing. Aperture 3 is software designed for Mac computers and does a beautiful job editing photos. In this tutorial I go through some of the basic steps to edit a photograph to make it look more clean and professional. Don’t have Aperture or would like me to do your photo editing? Use my contact page to request a quote for my services.

Want to see this video in High Definition? Go to YouTube directly for more Web Savvy Mama tutorial videos featured in HD.

See the finished photo and others at Nate Paul Images, my husband’s online photo gallery where he and I display some of our favorites!

If you like Photography or graphic editing and use a Mac computer (like me) you may have heard of Apple’s program called Aperture. This program is based on iPhoto that is included on all newer Apple computers. My husband and I both enjoy photography and have been exploring more into the post production editing of the photos we take. This led us to try out Aperture.

Aperture is a nice program and highly revered in the photography world. It makes editing easy and is especially helpful if you enjoy editing RAW photo formats. The photo editing options are endless and too many for me to get into. Taking a simple self photo with my photo booth on my iMac I played around with some of the presets and got a feel for how this would work for amateur person jumping in. Having used Photoshop and Pixelmator the Aperture layout is very different, as well as the workflow. You shouldn’t let this detour you though, it is very easy to navigate. I did have some confusion on how to actually save a project once I was done with my edits, I did manage to discover the export feature which is not very straight forward. I have to say that I find this a great tool for photo editing and does a lot, but I would not say it is a standalone program. I think you’d still want another heftier program like Photoshop to really polish your work.

My husband and I both discovered one major flaw, freezing. We’ve been testing this software on 21.5″ iMac computers that are pretty new (new in Feb 2010). We found that Aperture will spontaneously freeze during a workflow and require a system reboot to allow the computer to work again. I’m a huge Mac fan and have NEVER had any issues with freezing, even when running Parallels and dual operating systems with a gazillion programs. This is my third Mac computer and I can attest to the reliability of the system. So these sudden freezes in Aperture are highly frustrating. We’d expect this from a Microsoft product, not an Apple product. Tsk tsk. A quick search on Google confirms that this is not a issue that only we are having.

So overall, this program has the potential for greatness, but falls short on reliability. We’ll try it again once Apple takes care of the stability issues. Want to try it out for yourself? Check out the 30 day trial at Apple.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Check out this PCWorld review that addresses the Aperture freezing issues.