Understanding Aperture's adjustment tree

If you want to gain complete mastery over processing images in Aperture, you need to have an understanding of Aperture's adjustment tree. If you know how the software thinks about an image and how it works internally, you will be empowered to make better decisions and work more efficiently within the software. You may be concerned that some of this information is too technical, or that not that important to know, but a little knowledge of the foundation of digital imaging will make you a much better Aperture user. Before we look at Aperture's way of thinking, we first need to look at some RAW basics.

Note

Much of this chapter deals primarily with RAW images. It assumes that you are working with RAW. If you are shooting JPEG, some of the information here may still be of use, but to get the most out of it you really need to be shooting in RAW.

RAW versus RGB

The first thing that you need to grasp is that, as with any RAW processing software, there are two...