For Christmas gifts this year, I took photo’s of Temple Square, framed them, and gave them as gifts. I was in such a rush and with few days to get this done that I edited my photo’s at 11 pm one night.
Don’t do that.
Don’t edit your photo’s at night. When you’re tired. When you’ve just finished your second job. And on the night you took the pictures.
I definitely think you need to pick your favorite pictures, but then let them marinate a few days after you do some initial editing. Then print. But wait. You might have missed something. I know I sure did.
Check out this photo I took.
Do you see it? Do you see what is wrong?
I didn’t. Here is how I edited it.
I boosted the color – made it more vibrant and all that. I must say I was quite happy with myself. I printed a bunch and started giving them away.
But then, as I was framing one, I noticed my problem. Did you see it?
Here is an up-close shot of the problem.
Yeah, heads. Lots of heads. Heads of hair. Bald heads. Brown heads. Blond heads.
Temple Square was crowded that night.
I was so upset. I had already printed my pictures. I had already given some out. Who wants a picture of other people’s heads? Not me!
Today, I finally went back and cropped out the heads. So here is how to crop in Aperture 2.
Click on the crop tool. It pops up this box.
You can click the drop down box and change it to a certain size – if you know what size you are printing – or you can choose custom. This is nice because then you know exactly what will or won’t show up on the edges of the photo when you go to print.
Then you highlight the area you want in your picture. You can also hand type in the height and width if you need it to be exact.
Here is the final product.
Thank you crop tool. What would I do without you? Oh, yeah. Pass out Christmas photo’s that are embarrassingly ill-edited.
So, lessons learned.
- Don’t edit at night. My tired eyes don’t see anything apparently.
- Don’t forget to look at the edges of my photo.
- Zoom in and go to full screen. It is amazing how much more I can see when I do that. I must be getting old.
