Aperture 3.3 Released June 11. 2012

[KirbyKrieger]

Hmmm.  No, Edge Sharpen is still there in Aperture 3.3.  It's the preferred adjustment, and what you get by default when you hit control-S to add a sharpen adjustment.

"Sharpen" is purely a legacy adjustment.  Unless you used Aperture in 1.0 and have photos you sharpened and haven't upgrade, you should never use it.

As far as can tell, the Quick Brush uses Sharpen (and has since at least v. 3.0, which is where I climbed aboard).  As such, it is not "purely a legacy adjustment".  Rather, the two sharpening adjustments exist side-by-side.  (If you sharpen using the Quick Brush, you get a "Sharpen" Brick in the Adjustment stack; if you add an "Edge Sharpen" adjustment, you get an "Edge Sharpen" Brick in the Adjustment stack; if you do both, you get both.)

I have assumed that the engineers left it this way for a reason, and have thus used the Sharpen Brick for brushing, and the Edge Sharpen Brick for whole-image sharpening.

[KirbyKrieger]

You're welcome.

FWIW, Aperture lets you personalise and add keyboard commands for virtually every part of its entire UI.  You can also have more than one 'personalised keyboard', so if you really wanted to, you could get a couple of keyboards, put stickers on them and work very fast that way.

Thanks twice  .

I have customized the entire keyboard shortcuts set.  For some reason I couldn't find my newly added Effect in the command list.  Just double-checked, and of course it's there.

[CatOne]

As far as can tell, the Quick Brush uses Sharpen (and has since at least v. 3.0, which is where I climbed aboard).  As such, it is not "purely a legacy adjustment".  Rather, the two sharpening adjustments exist side-by-side.  (If you sharpen using the Quick Brush, you get a "Sharpen" Brick in the Adjustment stack; if you add an "Edge Sharpen" adjustment, you get an "Edge Sharpen" Brick in the Adjustment stack; if you do both, you get both.)

I have assumed that the engineers left it this way for a reason, and have thus used the Sharpen Brick for brushing, and the Edge Sharpen Brick for whole-image sharpening.

Hmmm.  Interesting, that's true.  Still, trust me, sharpen is more "legacy."  It's about as good at sharpening as Aperture's noise reduction is at removing noise ;-)

[KirbyKrieger]

Hmmm.  Interesting, that's true.  Still, trust me, sharpen is more "legacy."  It's about as good at sharpening as Aperture's noise reduction is at removing noise ;-)

Can you speculate as to why Apple has, over the course of at least a couple of years and several updates, left the Sharpen Quick Brush untouched?  Not trying to be disagreeable -- just hoping to learn more in the absence (now quite common) of any information from the creators of the tools we use.

Have you done any comparison testing of the two adjustments when used for brushed-on spot sharpening?

[JWB]

Can you speculate as to why Apple has, over the course of at least a couple of years and several updates, left the Sharpen Quick Brush untouched?  Not trying to be disagreeable -- just hoping to learn more in the absence (now quite common) of any information from the creators of the tools we use.

Have you done any comparison testing of the two adjustments when used for brushed-on spot sharpening?

I'm not sure why the quick brush uses Sharpen rather than Edge Sharpen, but this paragraph from the Aperture manual is illuminating:

Which Sharpening Adjustment Should You Use?
If you’ve already applied sharpening in a previous version of Aperture using the Sharpen adjustment controls, the Sharpen adjustment controls are still there so that your adjustments remain intact and unchanged. However, to do further sharpening on other images, it is recommended that you use the Edge Sharpen adjustment controls, which generally offer more precise control over how sharpening is applied. For more information, see Working with the Edge Sharpen Controls.

I believe you can brush in Edge Sharpen.

[KirbyKrieger]

I'm not sure why the quick brush uses Sharpen rather than Edge Sharpen, but this paragraph from the Aperture manual is illuminating:

I believe you can brush in Edge Sharpen.

To me, it illuminates a contradiction.  If Apple recommends Edge Sharpen over (old) Sharpen, why hasn't the still-current Sharpen Quick Brush been supplanted by the Edge Sharpen Quick Brush?  "Repair and Clone" Quick Brush replaced the "Spot and Patch" Quick Brush when 3.0 came out -- and now with 3.4 we've seen the replacement of whole Bricks.  Seems an excellent question for Apple:  why does the sharpening Quick Brush work with the out-dated and not-recommended Sharpen Brick?

[sdwilsonsct]

Wow! Finally a version of Aperture that doesn't hang my aging Mac. Thanks for the heads-up. And the tips in this thread.
Scott