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Treemeat is no more. Look to blog.peterbaker.net now...

Aperture Oversharpening

Posted in Text

on Jun 14, 2006

One of the biggest headaches and consistent issues I’ve had with Aperture, and one of the only things keeping me from having to open up Photoshop on a regular basis, is file exporting. Aperture insists on sharpening the hell out of it’s exported files, with no way to dial it down or just shut it off. It seems to be a blanket sharpening too, as exporting at large pixel sizes has a much less noticable sharpness than when you export at small sizes (like the size I use on Treemeat). At small sizes it’s pretty much unusable.

On the left, resized in Photoshop, no sharpening
On the right, exported from Aperture at this size

The only way around this that I’ve found is to export the image as a TIFF at full size, open it in Photoshop to resize and do a normal, modest amount of sharpening. This overzealousness also happens with Aperture’s web gallery export, where the TIFF export workaround is not an option, so every web gallery I’ve exported from Aperture has unusable images. Obviously this depends on your perspective, and some images end up looking fine with this sharpening (as I probably would’ve sharpened them to some extent anyways), but I’d at least like the option to turn it off, or at least down.

A few other people seem to have noticed this as well. Anyone else know a way around it?