I came across a nice little trick while brushing in adjustments a few days ago that I thought I'd share with our Aperture holdouts (and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon).
I use a LOT of brushing in my images, and also use Aperture to create masks for isolating portions of a photo for montages and collage work in other applications. Typically, this means that I want to completely brush out unwanted areas of a photo, but it's not always easy to see where you have and have not brushed — especially where a soft brush or feathering has been used. While you can turn on Brush Strokes as an overlay to show where brushing has taken place, it is REALLY easy to miss spots where the edge of a soft brush has left just a wisp of an adjustment that is only visible by staring intently at the screen — and maybe moving the window around a little to see if a shadow is moving.
However, if you view Brush Strokes AND turn on Highlight Hot & Cold Areas... voila! Areas you may not have noticed as brushed (or not) magically appear as solid red or blue as long as the Hot/Cold Threshold preferences are set to 100 and 0% respectively. Just view as 100% (or larger) and you immediately see the areas you otherwise may have missed as black or gray.
Even after all these years, Aperture continues to amaze.
iMac and MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 20th Anniversary Mac, 128K Mac, original Apple II
