Paul Inskip Photography

I’m so impressed with the brushes and all the little hidden settings and options that I wanted to share this excitement. The new Aperture 3 brushes are so flexible and powerful that I can’t quite believe what I can achieve, and do it all non-destructively as well! BRUSH IN OR BRUSH AWAY
The idea of being able to apply an adjustment that you can then brush in or away is basically apples take on using masks and adjustments layers in Photoshop (the best way to get pseudo non-destructive edits)

This little brush drop down is also where you have the ability to stack adjustments, but I’ll come to that later.

Once you start using a brush a small paint brush icon appears to the right of the auto button, this allow you to quickly see where you have added brushes to an adjustment brick (don’t like the description of these being bricks but I guess it makes sense :) )

Clicking on this brush when you re-visit an adjustment brings up the small brush panel:

The level of fine tuning and adjustments you can make to these brushes themselves can quickly be seen. Not only do you have the 3 standard sliders controlling size, softness and strength but you also have the ‘detect edges’ tick box and an additional sub settings menu accessed via the cog in the top right.

The small pop out menu allows you to control the visibility of the overlays for the brushes so that you can see where you are painting. Including none there are 5 different options for seeing the brush strokes:

OVERLAYS Colour overlay
This shows your brush strokes as semitransparent red:

Brush Strokes
This turns the un brushed areas black and just shows your brush strokes, I find this overlay less useful as it doesn’t show the actual image at all.

On Black
This simply turns the unbrushed areas black showing just the part of the image that you have brushed, very useful for just seeing what you are working on.

On White
Exactly the same principal as ‘on black’ but on white instead:

BRUSH RANGE
This small option that can be overlooked gives you a great level of control over exactly what your brushes do, the default is ‘All’ where the brush will obviously affect all of the image. The other three options allow you to make the brushes only affect the shadows, mid tones or the highlights, this gives your brushes a whole new level of finesse and accuracy, especially when combined with the ‘detect edges’ option, you can make very quick, very precise adjustments effortlessly

Now the level of control these brushes have doesn’t stop there, back in the main brush window you have three buttons, one to brush in, one to brush away and one to feather the brush strokes. I used this tool last night and t does a wonderful job of blending the brush strokes, particularly on tricky areas where you may have added various strokes both adding and taking away, it gives you a smooth transition between the strokes along the precise area you apply the brush.

The Aperture brushes do behave slightly differently than photoshop brushes in particular the ‘strength’ slider which I mistakenly first took to be some kind of opacity slider (which would make it similar to Photoshop) works differently from opacity as you’d expect. The strength setting works well and allows you to use the brushes softly in areas and build up the effect, it just needs to be used a few times to get used to it as again it works differently from what some of us will probably be used to. CREATIVE USES FOR BRUSHES
The mechanics of the brushes take a bit of learning and experimentation and then you understand the behaviours that they were aiming for, once you have that the options for use are huge. I’ve already mentioned a few time the idea of stacking sharpening and brushing the effect into the eyes only for added extra sharpening.

There are lots of far more interesting ways of using these brushes as they can be used on most of the adjustment bricks, another quick example would be the often over-used colour popping:

by adding the black and white adjustment and brushing it in you can quickly and easily, and MOST importantly non-destructively create a great effect. Its the point of non-destructively that needs to be re-emphasised here, all these adjustments been brushed in or away can all be tweaked and adjusted or even just turned off at any point.

One final mention of the brushes is a quick one on the skin smoothing brush and the retouch, retouch has been improved from AP2 and the skin smoothing brush work surprisingly well, here is a quick before and after picture, just a quick proof of concept really:

For me the brushes were needed specially after Lightroom 3 beta added them, I am very pleased and very surprised at just how good the brushes are and how versatile and powerful they are. they will certainly take a bit of learning, and some new workflows but they will definitely produce the results that I’d talked about and dreamt of where Aperture is able to keep me out of Photoshop for longer.

Once I’ve worked with the brushes more I’ll come back with some more advanced information workflows and no doubt some presets to.

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