Aperture / Boosting Sunlight

Lake Zurich | Before

Lake Zurich | After

A few days ago, I posed two photos of Lake Zurich. In one of them, I used Aperture to boost the orange tones to enhance the later afternoon sunlight hitting the buildings. It is very easy to do this using a Color Adjustment in Aperture:

Aperture's Color Adjustment Brick

Aperture's Color Adjustment Brick

  • Add a Color Adjustment to your image
  • Click the yellow swatch
  • Use the eyedropper and select an orange tone from your photo
  • Boost the saturation and lower the luminance
  • Play with the range so only those tones you want enhanced are changed

You can see for this photo, my saturation is maxed out, luminance is lowered significantly, and the range is very narrow. I did not have to do any brushing of the adjustment into the photo. Modifying the range is a key component to controlling the color adjustment brick.