I received an email a few days ago from a photographer in San Francisco. He wrote:

Great food coverage. Always fun to read. Just some feedback. I think the images would have more punch with some white balancing. Both Lightroom and Aperture have amazing RAW WB control. Just a thought.

I have generally avoided tweaking photos as I figured I could spend endless time doing so, and it often takes a long time to write a blog entry anyway. Do I really want to spend three times longer just so the pictures on a “music blog” can look a little better? I mean, how much difference could it make?

So I got Aperture 2 and played around a little with it. Below are some examples of the differences a little post-processing can make, and with less than a minute per image.  The images are quite small, but you can see larger versions by clicking on an image.

Before:

And after processing in Aperture. Compare the whiteness of the foam on top of the liquid, and the greater detail of the bubbles in the green.

Before:

And after Aperture processing:

The above shots didn’t originate as RAW images. (RAW is a minimally-processed image file format. The files are several times larger than a standard JPEG, but they allow for more post-processing in software, as that processing hasn’t already been applied to the image by the camera. Whereas a JPEG from my camera is around 4 MB, a RAW file is around 13 MB.) If an image is shot RAW, you can correct a lot more errors that may have been set-in-stone during JPEG creation — things like overexposure, underexposure, etc.

Here’s one last comparison. First, an image shot RAW.

It’s a cute shot (how could it not be? It’s Loki!), and it looks okay. But with just a little automatic level adjustment in Aperture, you get this:

I always thought Photoshop was a little intimidating, but Aperture 2 is great, powerful enough for what I want to do, it’s a lot cheaper than Photoshop, and it’s pretty easy to use. Me likey.