In today’s day and age of digital technology, everything seems to be fixable. In the world of photography, fixing an image tends to mean taking it into Photoshop and manipulating it to be “picture perfect.”

However, with new tools such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture, these fixes or tweaks are no longer dependent upon Photoshop.

To begin, let’s take the image above as an example. Off the camera, it did not look like that.

Original image of the lights

To me, the framing was off and the color and contrast were low. These simple fixes were easily done in Apple Aperture by simply using the image adjustment tools and the color correction tools.

Up next, I took an image of a light, but being that I was shooting in a point and shoot nature, the image wasn’t level and still carried the color and contrast issues of the sample above.

After doing some tweaks in Apple’s Aperture, the resulting image turned out to be like this:

Now the light is more vertically aligned than before (though not perfect, I find it better). The added contrast and adjustment to saturation really brings out the details and on top of that, an added vignette effect really helped lower the brightness the white wall carried.

Taking these adjustments a step further is this sample below:

To me, the results of this one is fine, but there is definitely room for improvement. Once again, I find the contrast to be low and we could do something about making the color pop. The color temperature is also quite warm with a strong yellow tint.

Fixing things without touching Photoshop (the theme of this article), I was able to get the gold to pop out more and made a strong differentiation between the gold and the white. There’s still a yellow color cast to the whole thing, but with the changes in color balance and added contrast, it works a lot better than what it did above.

My last example involves one new feature in Apple Aperture – Brushes. This new tool allows for a greater range of flexibility in correcting image faults.

This image in person looked great, but with camera technology lacking the dynamic range a human eye sees, my camera could not capture the true “epicness” this image deserves. But with help from a computer, we can make some changes to that.

Well first off, let’s remind you that no Photoshop was used. Using the new Brushes tool in Aperture, the first correction I made was the removal of the wire coming from the mountain. The other changes I made was bringing up the exposure on the mountain and adding some saturation to the image to get the sunlight to pop out more, creating the backlight effect on the mountain. The added contrast increases the details of the mountain.

All in all, my point is that Photoshop – though a great tool in many ways – doesn’t always have to be the solution. Many photography programs offers the tools photographers need to do the simple fixes they need without leaving the program, often doing them non-destructively allowing you to keep your master file (original) while also being able to have your new modified/tweaked version.