change exposure in only a selected area

The exposure adjustment brick will lighten the whole image, so this does not help in your situation.

Try to use the brushes (e.g. the Dodge brush), or use selective adjustments.

For example with the "Color" brick you could sample the hue of the skin tone (with the eye dropper) and use the luminance slider to lighten all pixels with the same hue as the skin tone.

If all the faces are too dark, because they are in the shadow, the "Highlights and Shadows" brick might work as well. Try to increase the value of the "shadows" slider. If you are lucky, this will mainly lighten the faces.

It is hard to make this adjustment in Apertrue. However, the NIK colllection provides easy to use plugins for Apertrue. Viveza is one of the packages that will allow you to accomplish the goal of working on faces and not changing the rest of the picture. It uses control points that select only those parts of the picture you want to work on. In addition, Silve effects pro is an excellent Black and White conversaion package that also uses control points.

Good luck.

Robert H. Weber wrote:

It is hard to make this adjustment in Aperture.

Hi Robert,

It is NOT hard to make this adjustment in Aperture. It does require, however, knowing _at the pixel level_ what you want to do. Each pixel has, in effect, only three parameters: Luminance, Hue, and Saturation. Aperture provides deft tools for changing these parameters locally.

That said, whether or not you know _at the pixel level_ what you want to do, Google's NIK Suite (which I use and recommend), and particularly its "U-Point" implementation, are useful.

IME, even a clumsy application of the Dodge adjustment via the Brush suffices for the need specified by the OP.

(The following graph was edited for clarity.)

It should be noted that the U-Point technology works because of its intellegently graduated selection, which is quite different from the "hard-edge" selection that is, for example, the PhotoShop default. IOW, it does NOT "select only those parts of the picture you want to work on". The utility of "U-Point" is shared by Aperture's Brushes: it applies the adjustment to the _area_ selected, not to the "objects" selected. The genuis of U-point is that the gradation between "selected" and "not selected" is intellegently calculated. Aperture's Brushes, OTOH, require (or, as the case may be, allow) the user to apply his/her own intellegence to create the gradated brush mask. IME, a feathered brush mask is surprising effective (I was surprised).

Kirby.

Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger - overstated the case; corrected.

leonieDF wrote:

The exposure adjustment brick will lighten the whole image, so this does not help in your situation.

Try to use the brushes (e.g. the Dodge brush), or use selective adjustments.

For example with the "Color" brick you could sample the hue of the skin tone (with the eye dropper) and use the luminance slider to lighten all pixels with the same hue as the skin tone.

If all the faces are too dark, because they are in the shadow, the "Highlights and Shadows" brick might work as well. Try to increase the value of the "shadows" slider. If you are lucky, this will mainly lighten the faces.

All excellent suggestions. Note (OP 😉 ) that you can brush on each of the Adjustments Léonie suggests, and that you can have multiple instances of each of them. You could, for example, brush Highlights and Shadows onto on face, create a new Brick, brush a different parameter of adjustment onto the next face, and repeat for each face.

I frequently "wish" I could brush in the exposure brick. Maybe Aperture will add it in some future wishful update. I recently discovered that brushing in exposure can be done in that other DAM that's part of Photoshop CC for Photographers.

You may also use the Curve. Set it to Luminance to adjust your exposure on a selected area. When in Curve brick, it has this pick button to select which area you want to apply the effect.

From the selected area, a point appeared on the curve line corresponding on the area on the image you pick. Then adjust accordingly the curve line upward to increase the highlights, downward to apply more shadows.

From this action, a global adjustment will occur, it's normal.

Now, select the Gear symbol button and select " brush your adjustment in ". Apply your brush to the selected part of the image.

Hope it helps.