Show hot and cold areas in your photos

Photos may occasionally have overly bright areas where color information is beyond the standard limits of the Aperture working color space. For example, white areas in a photo brightly lit with direct sunlight, or bright flashes off a water surface, may be so bright that their color is outside the working color space. Similarly, photos may occasionally have black areas where color information is below the standard limits of the working color space.

Aperture can display these “hot” and “cold” areas of an image with tints on the photo to help you identify where they’re located. You may be able to adjust the areas identified by the hot and cold area overlays and recover highlight and shadow detail by changing the image’s exposure, recovery, black point, or gamma setting.

Show the hot and cold areas in your photos

Choose View > Highlight Hot & Cold Areas (or press Option-Shift-H).

You can also monitor color clipping per color channel when performing specific adjustments using modifier keys. For more information, see Use modifier keys to identify color clipping.

Change the hot and cold area threshold and clipping overlay color

You can adjust the threshold, or sensitivity, of hot and cold area overlays. By default, the hot area threshold is set to 100%, and the cold area threshold is set to 0%. You can set Aperture to flag pixels that are near 100% or 0% by lowering the hot area threshold or increasing the cold area threshold.

You can also choose to view the hot and cold area overlays in color or monochrome.

Choose Aperture > Preferences, or press Command-Comma (,).
In the Preferences window, click Advanced.
Do any of the following:
- To adjust the hot area display threshold: Drag the “Hot Area threshold” slider to the left to increase the sensitivity to highlight pixels, and to the right to decrease it.
- To adjust the cold area display threshold: Drag the “Cold Area threshold” slider to the right to increase the sensitivity to shadow pixels, and to the left to decrease it.
- To change the clipping overlay color: Choose either Color or Monochrome from the “Clipping overlay” pop-up menu.