Operation Manual

Working with the Retouch Controls
You use the Retouch brushes to touch up imperfections in the image caused by sensor
dust, image artifacts, and other environmental conditions. You can also copy an element
of an image and paste it in another area for purely aesthetic reasons. Aperture provides
two methods for retouching your images. The method you use depends on whether you
are trying to copy texture from the source while preserving hard edges at the destination
(where the blemish is) or simply copy pixels from one area of the image and replace them
over another.
If the area you need to repair has a hard edge near the problem area, you use the “repair”
method. You also use the repair method when you want to copy high-frequency texture
from one area of the image (the source) and brush the texture over the destination area
while maintaining the underlying color and shading of the destination area.
The second method, “cloning,” is used when you simply want to copy pixels from one
area and paste them on another area. Cloning is useful when you want to copy an element
of an image as is (a cloud, for example) and paste it in another area.
Which Retouching Adjustment Should You Use?
Aperture provides two sets of controls that you can use to retouch your image: Retouch
and Spot & Patch.
In the vast majority of cases, Retouch provides the controls that will best serve your
image-repair needs. The Spot & Patch controls have been included in Aperture 3 in
order to retain the integrity of images that were adjusted with earlier versions of Aperture.
In many cases, image repairs might even be improved by removing an existing Spot &
Patch repair and replacing it with a Repair or Clone adjustment performed with the
Retouch tool.
There are certain situations in which Spot & Patch is the adjustment of choice. For
example, an artifact on or very near a curved edge in an image may be more effectively
removed using the Angle parameter. For more information about the Spot & Patch
adjustment controls, see Working with the Spot & Patch Controls.
474 Chapter 17 Making Image Adjustments