Anyone user RAW Fine Tuning in Aperture?

I was playing around with the RAW Fine Tuning adjustments in Aperture... (see attached - left) and I'm curious if anyone else has played around with these controls?

In particular, I noticed the Moire settings to be useful up to a point (0.5) and the noise reduction to be a benefit even at ISO100.

I compared sharpening with this panel vs. the other sharpening and edge sharpening adjustments, and I concluded I prefer to have more control over this so I'm not using it as part of the RAW Fine Tuning.

My settings attached - right

The Hue control looks like it may be a HUGE bonus for blown highlights, perhaps offering much better recovery than any other control in Aperture, but I haven't had time to really explore that.

The Hue Boost control (as noted in the Aperture documentation) seems to have an impact on skin tones. With HB at 1.0 you get more yellow skin tones. You can of course compensate for this with WB as shown. The attached is a matrix of different settings for an auto WB shot from the mall using either no adjustments, full HB, WB (skin tone), or Both. I need to spend more time to figure out what HB and WB combo works best.

There seems to be a bit of a gold mine here in settings. I'm curious what others are doing with these, if anything?

TheReef said:

I assume you have a fast Mac ...for the other sliders I can't really tell as the lag between updates is far too great.

Click to expand...

No, the lag is significant for me as well. I had to capture the screen after each adjustment and compare the results in Preview to see any differences (as with my attached collection of skin tone variances above).

Another thing I noticed is that the sliders changed when Apple released v4 of their RAW engine. They must have done this at some point last year as some older photos I looked at from early last year had different RAW fine tuning adjustments for sharpness than recent photos.

I'm currently working on adjusting some high ISO shots from last night.

I've found the RAW Fine Tuning "De-Noise" adjustment to be rather amazing. All this time, I thought Aperture's noise reduction sucked... and I've been using NIK dFine to reduce noise in high ISO shots. Interestingly, this appears to be unnecessary. Setting the "De-Noise" slider somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7 seems to offer similar noise reduction as dFine without much loss in detail.

Here's the same 8000 ISO image with different treatments... you can see what noise reduction was applied in the title bar of the window where 50 and 70 represent 0.5 and 0.7 respectively for De-Noise settings in RAW Fine Tuning.

I'm honestly a bit shocked and embarrassed that I'm just discovering this now I don't think Apple has done a good job in making it clear how important these settings are OR how to use them. The fact they are not part of the default adjustment pallet is probably one of the main issues here.

EDIT: As a follow-up on this after doing some more work... I'm finding that RAW Fine Tuning De-Noise at 0.6 or 0.7 is just as effective as NIK Dfine up to around 10000 ISO after which Dfine's algorithm can provide a visible difference in both NR and detail retention.