Since I bought a MacBook last December, I’ve been flailing around a bit in Aperture, reading the manual and watching some tutorials. It definitely has more options than Zoombrowser, the program that came with my Canon Digital Rebel. At the moment, it seems like too many options, but I’m enjoying learning my way around.

I took this picture of a blue-topped tree in the Japanese Garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens. I’m not including the “master” here; the first “version” has shadows turned all the way up. Now you can see the house in the background.In this version, I left shadows alone and increase the tint and vibrancy settings. I also played with the black point setting. As far as I can tell, upping the black point setting has the same effect as upping the contrast.And in this one, I turned hue and saturation down and luminance up.I liked turning the top of the tree white without having to do any spot editing (which I don’t know how to do yet).

None of these pictures seems really sharp, despite my use of a tripod. Right now I don’t have a way to take pictures without touching the camera, so I think I was moving it just a little.