Sometimes you can come back from a photo shoot with a whole bunch of pictures taken at the wrong settings – or at least pictures which are all going to need the same adjustments. Fixing each one individually will prove extremely time-consuming, especially when it’s the same set of tweaks every time. After all, you’ll almost certainly want all the photos in the batch to retain a consistent look. At the same time, it’s hardly worth setting up a custom preset effect for a set of adjustments you may only want once.
The solution is Aperture’s Lift and Stamp tools. The principle is really simple – you fix one image, ‘Lift’ the adjustments you’ve made, select the rest of the images and ‘Stamp’ them with these adjustments. You’re essentially copying and pasting your settings, and other programs like Lightroom and Capture One can do exactly the same thing.
Here’s an instance where the Lift and Stamp tools have proved really useful. I took a series of shots of this wooden lighthouse at an incorrect white balance setting – I didn’t realise my mistake until much later. This has left them with a strong red/magenta colour cast, but I shot them in RAW so it’s perfectly straightforward to fix them later. They’re also rather underexposed, largely because the lighthouse is such a brilliant white, so I might as well fix that at the same time.
01 What’s the problem?
Here’s the album containing all my pictures. You can see they all suffer from the same white balance and exposure issues, so I can probably fix them all with one set of adjustments. And if any don’t look quite right afterwards, it’s a simple matter to apply individual tweaks here and there.
02 White balance
I’ll start with the white balance, because until this is fixed it’s difficult to gauge exposure problems properly. The white balance panel shows the problem – the colour temperatue value looks all right, but camera’s applied a strong magenta tint value.