Before I ordered Aperture I was researching about how it handled hot/dead/stuck pixels. My DSLR has developed a few nasty ones during the last year. During my research I came across this article “Apple Aperture Hot Pixel Hell” that states that Aperture will be useless to most photographers until this issue is resolved.
I agree that the best thing would be if Apple fixed this problem (i.e. acting more like Adobe Lightroom), but there is a workaround that is pretty easy to use. As the author of the article above describes, the solution is to spot and patch each spot, but it does not have to be all that time consuming. Simply take a picture with the lens cap on (use long enough shutter to expose all your dirty pixels) and keep it as a reference. Use the spot and patch tool on this image without changing anything else (this is important). Then, all you have to do for each batch is:
- go to the reference image
- use SHIFT+COMMAND+C to copy the settings (the spot and patches)
- select all images in the batch you want to have the hot pixels removed from
- press SHIFT+COMMAND+V to add the spot and patches to all images
- done!
Hot-Pixel-Free-Images
I think this is a pretty straightforward workaround that requires minimum of effort. I still strongly hope that Apple makes this transparent as it is in Adobe Lightroom (apparently it should work if “Auto Noise Correction” is enabled - but sadly not).
December 29th, 2006 - 14:22
As discussed with Daniel E (Apple Aperture Hot Pixel Hell) this is still not a generic solution, since some images appear strange after “spot-and-patched”.