1. Pull back on Boost to 75%.

2. Apply moderate Sharpen and Edge Sharpen.

3. If necessary adjust the Exposure.

4. Use Highlight Hot & Cold Areas to identify where highlights are blown out (shown in red) and shadows go to black (shown in blue).

5. Use the Recovery slider until the red showing blown out highlight disappears.

6. Use the Black Point slider until the blue showing shadows that go to blackj disappears.

7. Occasionally, if the focus is a bit soft, apply the Definition slider, but most of the time I just use the Structure slider in Silver Efex, which increases mid-tone contrast.

8. Start Silver Efex, which converts the image to B&W. In Silver Efex I adjust the overall contrast and brightness and also do selective burning and dodging. Often, I use of the presets that reduces exposure and then do strong a Structure move that brightens the image and then select on of the film presets, often Tri-X, which increase contrast by compressing the shadows and highlights somewhat and adds grain.

Silver Efex has various film presets but these should not really be thought of that particular film, Tmax 400, for example, but shield be looked at as different tonal and contrast, as well as color sensitivity components. That means that I select the film presets that looks best for a particular picture, and don’t use batch approach.

I then do burning in and dodging of parts of the picture using the Silver Efex Control Points. I like these Control Points a lot better than using Photoshop selections because the way of doing is more like dodging and burning in the darkroom. One thing one finds when starting to use Control Points is that a particular CP may affect some tones or areas that one didn’t want to change. While the size of the CP circles can be reduced, sometimes they still affect other areas. The way to avoid this is to put down a new CP in that area, without adjusting any of the sliders: this will keep the tone or area under the new CP from changing, from being affected by the other CP on which one has moved the Brightness or Contrast sliders.

9. Finally, for some pictures I apply some vignetting or some burning in of some on or more of the sides of the rectangle of the image.

10. Once I finish with Silver Efex and the processed image shows up in Aperture I usually increase contrast a bit by pulling in Levels the black and white points.

Here is my short and simple workflow. This is not a workflow for a professional or someone taking tens of thousands of images in a year. But could be good enough for many hobbyist photographers who travel occasionally and take  few thousands images in a year

• Let Aperture manage your master files on local drive.
• Create a project for each year or a major event.
• Create an Album under the project for an event.
• Import your images into appropriate project/album
• Rename images while importing.
• Map location of your photos by pinning it on Places.
• Rate your photos. At minimum mark images that you think are junk as “Rejected”
• Use Aperture Vault and back it up on at least two external drives.

Aperture does have more advanced features like referencing master images, Smart Albums and so on which could be very useful if you managing tens of thousands of images.

Interestingly small camera decision was more difficult than I thought. I wanted a camera that is small enough to forget that I am carrying it, but at the same time offer some key SLR type features viz. full control over shooting, RAW and best possible lens. Contenders were Canon S90, Ricoh GRD III and m4/3 EP1 and GF1.

I was seriously drawn towards m4/3 thinking if I get an m4/3 I don’t need to buy two cameras. It could be carry everywhere with pancakes and special with other lenses when need be. But though I liked the concept, size and image quality, I found some draw backs (with reference my photographic needs)

1. Not that small (much smaller than a DSLR but still fatty)
2. Lack of native lenses/primes.
3. Very Costly (compared to equivalent DSLR and lenses)

But I am very positive about m4/3 system and speed with which Olympus and Panasonic are developing it. I hope there will soon be a m4/3 camera that will fulfill my DLSR needs.

Back to small camera search, the decision between S90 and Ricoh GRD III was relatively easy. I chose Ricoh GRD III.