Aperture 3 JPG Export Problem

[thighslapper]

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mitch

 

please stop referring to this as a major problem.. If it is is a problem with Aperture and not with your particular workflow then report it to Apple.

 

I csn't recall whether Edge sharpen is an adjustment that was part of the original Aperture tool set and therefore is only there for legacy purposes.

 

K

 

Edge sharpen replaced the original sharpen .... the aperture manual recommends using it instead of the old plain sharpen and I recall somewhere explaining that it does something more complex......

 

There is also the RAW fine tuning sharpening that Aperture applies by default on import before you do any tinkering at all.

 

Theres all sorts of stuff going on in the background that is a potential source of trouble. Unpicking Mitches problems is a potential nightmare....

 

For all apples advantages this is one area where there are more issues than M/Soft...... when apple stuff does go wrong it's much more difficult to unearth a cause and a solution. I still have a dodgy Time Capsule set up that has never worked properly and after a year of trying I am still none the wiser why.... despite hunting high and low on the net and trying everything...

[kevinparis]

mitch and I have had discussions offline and are pursuing the theory that his issues are not directly related to any bug in Apertures Edge Sharpen filter.. which works as advertised on a wide range of files, but rather that the problem may lie in his source files which are greyscale tiffs from a elderly Imacon scanner.

 

K

[Guest malland]

What Kevin says is correct. After I a couple of quick scanning tests lasts night I concluded that the FlexColor software (for the Imacon FlexTight Precision III scanner) was set so that it produced untagged grayscale tiff files. When I set the output profile as "Grayscale Gamma 2.2" I was able to apply Edge Sharpen in Aperture 3 and the exported JPGs now match the display within Aperture.

 

Another issue was that the USM setting in FlexColor was at the default "250" and I reset it at "–120", which is what is needed to apply no sharpening. Most people feel that it's better to sharpen in the processing software than in the scanner, since the latter cannot be undone.

 

For anyone using FlexColor, please note that the input profile for negative film (color and B&W) should be "FlexTight Input"; the "FlexTight Precision" is the input profile for transparency film — not exactly intuitive.

 

BTW, my scanner, which I haven't used for five years, has a SCSI interface, with which I have to use a SCSI-FireWire converter. The last FlexColor software that can work with a SCSI scanner is version 4.02.

 

Kevin, thanks for the help in working out this problem.

 

Note: I should add one more thing for the sake of completeness: grayscale tiff files cannot be processed using Silver Efex under Aperture, as the program crashes when trying this. If you want to use Silver Efex on scanned grayscale tiffs, you can scan to produce an RGB file, but that file will be three times as large, in my case about 270MB rather than 90MB for a 16-bit file. The only reason that I might sometimes want to use Silver Efex on B&W scans of film is that I like the Structure tool, which you can often apply more strongly than Definition in Aperture.

 

—Mitch/Pak Nam Pran

Pak Nam Pran

[andybarton]

Presumably, if the problem lies with Flexcolor, you will be apologising to Apple?

[Guest malland]

Really? Just because I found a solution doesn't mean there's no problem at all. First, other people have had problems because of Edge Sharpen, although in other circumstances. Second, I have had the same problem a couple of JPGs being exported looking too light even when I used DNG files — at that time it wasn't important and I gave up on it. People have also documented that Aperture doesn't handle TIFF files well — and I am not sure why Aperture shouldn't be able to handle untagged grayscale TIFFs, since Photoshop does, It seems at least Apple should document that untagged TIFFs can cause these problems: I did a long search and could find no such documentation, a fact about which some Aperture users stated. I certainly had to spend a lot of time to find this solution, need not have been wasted, at a time when I'm very busy, if this had been documented by Apple.

 

There are a lot of good things about Aperture and when I last compared several RAW processors some six months ago, including Lightroom, I found that Aperture did the best job in highlight recovery. I am grateful to Kevin for helping me find what the problem was, but feel that this could easily have been documented by Apple, since it's a problem that other people have had as well.

 

—Mitch/Pak Nam Pran

Early Morning Market at Pak Nam Pran