Affinity Photo LIVE 01: Photography Editing

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right hello everyone thank you for tuning in i am dipping my toe into the waters of live streaming i know i did it once before during the uh the lockdown sessions that we did um last year i believe in may it was um but since then i haven't really kind of wrapped my head around it and i finally just decided to go ahead and do it so without further ado uh just a quick introduction my name is james ritzen i'm the product expert for affinity photo this is not done in work time this is just my own little personal passion project as it were so essentially what i'd like to do is just have a laid-back session maybe just you know answering some questions from people watching uh that sort of thing you know there's no sales here there's no tutorials no demos nothing like that it's just literally me um going through uh i i would have preferred to do something perhaps more fancy but i decided to kind of go back to basics a little bit and just do some photographic editing because you know i i thought about it the other week and you know since launch since 1.9 came out i i don't think i've actually done any photographic editing since christmas maybe i mean i've taken photographs but i haven't actually sat down gone through some uh photos that i've taken you know over the last two years when we could all move about freely and we weren't restricted indoors you know i haven't really gone through and you know just played around didn't done some editing so that's what i want to do but i want to do it in a kind of like a live session format because i thought it would be nice for people to see how i use the software generally for photographic editing so i've pulled like a you know i've gone through i've cold um down to this set of images and there's no plan here there's no script i'm just going to pick a few and do some edits and see what comes out of it really and just explain um a bit about my editing process so uh let's see i've got the um sidecar jpegs as well as the the raw files so i'm going to be working from the raw files of course um but the jpegs just help me quickly preview what's going on and what i'm going to be editing so um this one was taken in my garden yep august last year i've i've barely looked at these so i'm going to drag this into photo start editing it um afternoon everyone um i'll get around to some questions in a minute but first i'll just uh start editing this image let's get off to a start shall we so uh let's see now here's the controversial thing so yeah we're developing a raw file this is in the develop persona but to be quite honest i do very little if anything in the actual develop persona um the reason for this is because i like to i like to process and start with as flat an image as possible so that i can then do all of my work non-destructively with layer stacks in the main photo persona so for this particular image um it already does chroma or color noise reduction for me so i don't need to bother with that it's done the lens correction automatically that's fine um i might no i won't even raise the brightness you know i'll leave everything as it is apart from just uh bringing the highlights in slightly and then click develop so that's kind of like a controversial thing but it's just what i prefer to do um yeah basically all of my editing gets done in the main photo persona now i suppose one kind of question around that might be you know i i know photo doesn't do in inverted quotes non-destructive raw okay it just doesn't you develop the raw image it gets demosaiced it gets color mapped uh tone mapped you know it gets gamma encoded if you're in 16 bit and that's basically it you know that's your pixel data that's your raster data you're working with that now um for me that's not a problem for other workflows it can be problematic but for me um developing to 16 bit per pixel precision is more than enough than i would ever need as long as i start with a flat image you know um for my live streaming purposes i'm using srgb but typically i'd use rom rgb which is pro photo for a wider color space but since this is going out to youtube live it gets converted to rec 709 anyway might as well just stick to srgb anyway enough waffle enough techy talk let's get into this so first of all um let's just do a basic curves adjustment just to push the tones around a little bit so i'll add a little bit more contrast in like so and what i like to do is on the curves dialogue on the blend mode here i change it to luminosity so then it's only affecting the luminosity rather than the color intensity so this is useful for a number of reasons but mainly you know you can separate luminosity or brightness and color information so you know you're not intensifying or saturating colors as you push the curves nodes around okay so we've got a little bit more tonal punch going on there that's fine i might just quickly do an hsl adjustment and push the color detail up as well so for the reds let's just look at the legs here i'll just kind of push that detail up slightly and the yellows looking a bit garish okay so i might just use the hue shift slider not by a huge margin but just to take those tones away from that horrible garish color a little bit yeah okay i'm just looking at this from a from a distance maybe try desaturating those greens that's really subtle that's just some green detail over here in fact i might not even bother with that to be honest okay yeah so i might come back to that later on i'm not not entirely convinced about the color intensity now that i look at it you know as an overall picture but i might come back to that and adjust that later so now my um my other little technique that i like to use is denoising and sharpening based on masking areas of the image so this one i think this photo was taken iso 800 so we got a little bit of noise which is especially prominent across the background detail because it's mostly just flat tonal areas i'm going to denoise that and get rid of that mainly not so much for aesthetic purposes actually mainly for compressibility or for compression efficiency so obviously this noise is high frequency detail um obviously i share a lot of my work on instagram twitter my website and so on and so i need images to compress as efficiently as they are able to so smoothing out noise from the background helps with that so what i will do is use w twice to get to the selection brush tool i'm going to be using a lot of keyboard shortcuts um i will try and you know let you know what i'm doing ahead of time but sometimes i just like to kind of whizz around so i'm going to make a rough selection of the insect here then i don't usually do this but for this example i'm going to jump into selection refinement okay we've got some detail here that i'm just going to drag across and mat okay now if we were doing a cutout this would be terrible but thankfully we're not we're just masking or rather we're just masking an adjustment or a filter so it doesn't really matter if the the actual matted selection is a bit poor we'd be hard-pressed to really get a decent cut out from this anyway because of the shower depth of field anyway i will apply that i've got my matted selection so if i just use q for quick mask that's um i use this all the time by the way q for quick mask when i'm making selections especially for high contrast images where it's hard to see the marching ants so um red overlay marks what's the background or what is excluded from the selection and of course anything that's included in the selection comes through so now i've got my insect i will add a live unsharp mask filter here um let's just set a radius of 2 and a factor of two just to sharpen that up a little bit there we go okay and then uh quickly i'm going to invert the selection for shortcuts to do this i'm going to use shift command i so now if i quick mask that you'll see that the background is selected and not the subject and then i can go ahead and add a live denoise filter okay so then i will deselect and i'm just going to drag luminance up until that noise disappears okay easy peasy so um i will turn these off just for the time being um just for performance reasons really when you when you use multiple live filters performance can start to slow down a little bit not terribly but you know given the choice i just prefer to turn them off and then turn them on when i i'm previewing the final image and ready for export so let's have a look selective color i love using the selective color adjustment um as you know when you say destructively do you mean when you develop the raw file the original is not saved um so basically if you're using like a dam like lightroom or capture one the you have you typically have like a sidecar file which contains metadata with all the adjustments in um so photo doesn't do that along the lines somewhere we'll probably look at developing a dam like application but no word on that yet um so basically when you when you drag a raw file into affinity photo it is converted to rasterized pixel data so if you wanted to actually go back to the original raw file and revise anything there you would have to redevelop it essentially like i say for my workflow this isn't really a problem because i start with a flat image anyway and if i need to do anything really extreme to it like significantly change the white balance what i would do is develop to 32-bit linear unbounded which is probably outside the realms of what we're getting into today but that gives you complete flexibility so no pixel values no color values are ever clipped uh they might be out of range out of displayable range but they're never clipped but yeah we don't have like a sidecar non-destructive raw capability and photo yet so uh just looking at this uh so this selective color nearly said sidecar there uh good afternoon john glad you could join thank you very much for ever anyone who's tuned in actually really appreciate this like i say i'm just kind of dipping my toe in the water because i thought it might be interesting for people to see the um the kind of the processes that i use generally when i'm image editing rather than you know some kind of pre-planned or pre-scripted demo or tutorial so i'm using selective color at the moment i use this so much this adjustment i find it really really useful just for pushing colors around especially for low light imagery if you've seen any of the low-light imagery tutorials i've done i pretty much abuse selective color i use it so much um it's so great just for getting fine control over these color ranges so for example i could really bring out the reds in the the body here now um it's looking whoa okay yeah i didn't expect that so this is why it's always a good idea to zoom out and check the whole image from time to time okay so these reds are just ridiculous at the moment that's fine um b for the paint brush tool and i'll get the black here and just paint away from the background so now we're painting off these areas on the selective color mask you can see it on the thumbnail there in fact if i isolate that uh that gives you a black and white representation of your mask or a grayscale sorry uh so that gives you a better idea of what's being masked okay and to be honest to be honest at this point i don't think i'm gonna really need a wider crop anyway i kind of want to focus on the insect so i'll get the crop tool and just crop in like so okay there's a nice sort of squarish aspect ratio to this okay let's see um maybe i might just try some structure enhancement so i can do that with the live clarity filter just drag that all the way up see what happens okay fine so i might invert that um again adjustments and filters in photo inherently have their own mask so you don't need to clip a mask to them already uh anyway so if i invert that that inverts the clarity mask i can just use b for the brush tool paintbrush tool sorry i should watch my terminology uh switch across the white and just paint that in there so that clarity is now just masked to the insect might be a little bit strong so i'll take the opacity down maybe 75 percent something like that just to take the edge off the uh the extremity of it and then i'll turn these two filter layers back on and i think i've got my final image let me just check what does that look like a small zoom level yeah yeah that will do okay i'm happy with that okay i'm going to save this as an af photo file so it retains the layer structure and it means i can just go back later and you know make some changes if i want here's an interesting little thing though so 16-bit document raster data obviously is quite large file size related anyway you know for a 24 megapixel file um you're probably looking at i don't know 120 megabytes something like that um but also what photo does is it saves a compressed snapshot in the document file so this isn't shown by default you usually have to go to view studio to get it in snapshots we've got that background snapshot and i actually just like to [Music] get rid of that uh it just shaves a few megabytes off the file size before you save so then i will save this let's see um just going to save this in a folder for now because i quite like this edit yeah i mean i don't know the tones are a little maybe too saturated but again i think what i'll do is come back to it with a fresh pair of eyes later on and see how i really feel about it okay i'm going to close that down now let's see then yeah so uh i did some training down in london i wasn't nearly going to say last year it would have been the year before now time's flown hasn't it um so i took these photographs at night let's try one of these then oh uh you're welcome for the lesson that is um ronnie technically speaking isn't it best to keep the sharp and denoised layers at the top most layers to be honest i don't think there is a right or wrong answer um i prefer to keep it just above the any kind of pixel data that you're editing because then if you're doing um say color adjustments above that then the denoising is already done it really depends i mean i suppose the reason i tend to do that is because of astrophotography so again i don't really want to get into you know too much technical detail at this point but for astrophotography you have like your linear data layers right and then you tone stretch it astrophotography needs a lot of tone stretching so you've got like a gamma adjustment uh using levels and then you've got curves and then you've got all kinds of other adjustments on top of that and i often find that denoising above all of that um isn't as effective sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't i think experimentation is just key really so it's just kind of force of habit that i keep my denoising as far down the layer stack as i can before i sort of push tones even further but that said you know there's a case to be made for putting it further up the layer stack um i would probably denoise before any sharpening though sharpening will just exacerbate high frequency artifacting and make it harder to denoise okay um oh michael um i will either publish this after or i will i'm recording it locally as well in glorious 4k um so i might just kind of chop you know there top and tail it and or maybe do a highlights reel or something afterwards so don't worry um this will be available to view one way or the other um timeline in affinity photo aegis uh no not to my knowledge um off the record i would love some kind of motion graphic animation capability but i don't think we'll be seeing that for a long time if if there's any possibility of it i mean motion graphics with affinities um rendering engine and the way that we can manipulate layers and quick shapes around would just be immense but yeah sadly not to be at least for now okay uh so let's have a look at this image uh highlight detail let's see i might just take this down a little bit not too much though because um at a certain point i yeah i'm gonna go off on a little rant here people who sorry this is very um blanket statement people who do this right shadows all the way up highlights all the way down oh no because you how do i explain this i mean tonally this is not what you see with your eyes anyway perceptually it's just wrong um i'm other mind that highlights should be bright they should be perceptually bright so if you go and flatten them all the way down and there's very little contrast between highlights and the rest of the scene you know and when you start with something this tonally flat i've always found it's really hard to shape your tones back into it so i avoid extremes um for example with highlights i'm actually going to bring them back slightly so that you do actually have some perceptual brightness there and then the shadows i'm going to take them right back as well i might want to lift everything away from kind of like you know the murky of pure black but not too much um you know and i also think there is a case i know people are afraid of kind of you know losing detail especially when you save your image out well you know clipping indicators here okay so these highlights clipping it's fine but there's no data there anyway so we were never going to get anything meaningful meaningful from those but there's no you know none of these dark tones are clipping and when we carry it through to 16-bit precision all that data is still there don't worry about it you don't need to kind of push it up at the raw development stage just so that you avoid losing precision or losing data don't worry it doesn't happen all that data is there it's just pixel values you want to push it higher fine okay anyway run over let's develop this and see what we can do with it okay um uh found that pulling highlights in affinity photo terms and gray as opposed to lightroom i suppose that's a fair comment really i mean um [Music] there's i think lightroom does some kind of clever highlight reconstruction based on channel data so you know if say two channels are blown out but one isn't it will interpolate from the the channel isn't blown out and and that type of thing um that's just not something that affinity photo does yet as part of its royal development i mean hands up you know it's if you want some really um kind of like next level raw development you're probably looking in the wrong place for affinity photo affinity photo's raw development is sufficient for most of the imagery i do and that type of thing but i know that some people are sticklers for really having the ultimate raw quality um but since 1.7 the mosaic algorithm was changed and overall you know in terms of noise and false color artifacting that is a heck of a lot better i mean i before 1.7 when i was doing astrophotography um like wide field stuff where you'd push the iso high i would not use photo i'd pre-process it in something else but since 1.7 i've just quite happily dragged my raw files into photo and i find the quality more than sufficient um you know and i'm quite i'm a bit way i'm a bit more way back now but you know back then i was kind of like i was a real stickler for quality um so i was really happy that 1.7 brought about that change um and yeah since then i just kind of i tend to just develop rules in photo now so i'm more than happy with the quality uh let's see oh the astro guide you're welcome no i love doing them i've probably got some more planned at a later date but you know i think the six videos for launch was probably a bit overkill but i was just really passionate about it uh okay so um let's see i'm gonna do my curves adjustment again uh let's put some contrast back into this scene yeah so this is a great case for using a luminosity blend mode rather than um just a normal blend mode so if i just undo that back to normal you'll see that we also affect the color intensity and we're really bringing out some nasty colors here i mean the horrible um yellow from the street lighting just clashes horrifically with the sort of the blue so if i redo that you'll see that the color intensity dies down a little bit and now we're just affecting the luminosity so that's definite i think this image is slightly wonky as well looking at it from an angle yeah so let's sort that out c for the crop tool command and just draw that out like so that was like the smallest change maybe maybe it's not maybe i'm just going a bit crazy okay um so i've got these uh alpha areas as a result of rotating i actually have a macro um now let me see where did i put it matting and king i think is rasterizing and paint alpha so that will rasterize the edges so that just do that again that will rasterize the edges so that um when it inpaints it doesn't accidentally sample alpha and then it will fill the edges in quite nicely so rather than having to crop and lose detail it just fills out those corners okay let's get rid of that for now okay uh yeah let's look at some color so let's try the old faithful selective color and hmm okay let's see we can tackle yellows here so i'm going to take those yellows down a bit uh maybe um i don't like i don't like i'm really struggling with this these tones here i don't think i mean i can take some of the garish yellow out that's fine um real struggle with this i think i might have to think about another adjustment let me try the old divide blend mode uh tim yeah i think it might be parallax as well to compound this i think this was oh no it was shot with the 24 to 105 but it was probably shot at the white well actually you know what rather than speculate where's my info panel gone uh sorry the metadata panel even let's see focal length 41 hmm yeah okay yeah i think i actually remember i had this um tiny little benro tripod and i think i tried to raise it as high as i could off street level to try and you know avoid parallax but yeah there's probably a bit of that going on it doesn't look too bad though it's probably just caught me off guard uh okay so selective color now what am i doing fill layer i think um i use fill layers a lot so i put them on shift f that's a shortcut let's turn that off for now and we will let's color pick off something in here maybe right there just assign that okay so we turn the fill right back on we've got this color now set this to divide let's see what's this done hmm i'm not a fan of that either to be honest oh i'm really struggling with this image uh let's take it past it down slightly maybe so we've got a you know if we take the opacity down we get slightly cooler blue which might work i think i might have to use an hsl adjustment now get those yellows there and take the saturation out maybe push the luminosity up as well so that also reduces color intensity uh yeah okay that looks better yeah there's a bit of red red in that flag as well that's annoying me so let's push those tones up to see before after um you know what this is such a cheat um when in doubt add a black and white adjustment because uh you know it's it's not uh yeah okay that looks better black and white i think i just when when you just can't get on with mixed lighting you know low light urban photography sometimes it pays just to have a look in black and white because that's quite striking i think um what i might do is create a new pixel layer b for the paintbrush tool let's not have an off yellow let's have a white uh overlay blend mode take this down uh thanks emily let's uh paint in here okay so we're kind of i do this all the time with pretty much most genres of photography so um i'm on i'm at black at the moment here i'm just kind of darkening the areas that i don't want to draw the viewer's eye to and writing the areas that i do want to draw the viewers eye to so it's kind of like non-destructive dodging and burning but the great thing about doing it with pixel layers is you can experiment with the blend mode you can use color all sorts it's you know there's loads of different um ideas that you can explore with it so here's the before and here's the after so i quite like that actually yeah now um just a little thing so um i believe uh there's an affinity revolution video on this as well about um the black and white adjustment so the black and white adjustment um and its default values is not quite the same as say converting to grayscale so when you convert to grayscale effectively it calculates what's called the intensity okay and this is actually um weighted calculated values of red green and blue so green is the color that we're most sensitive to therefore green gets a higher weight and then red's in the middle and then blue is uh kind of like the lowest weight and it calculates intensity of pixel values based off that weight okay so black and white adjustment does not do this which means the black and white result might not be exactly what you would expect you know from like a grayscale conversion process there's a really easy way to do that instead and that's to use a live procedural texture okay just create a single equation line target red green and blue and then just do rgb to i and then use rg and b as the three input values okay and that will do a weighted intensity grayscale calculation so it probably won't look that different but actually in this case trying to decide whether i like that blown out look i mean in some ways it's quite extreme but i don't know there's some something about it that kind of stands out i mean maybe just maybe if we put a shadows and highlights filtered just underneath that procedural texture and just took it down a smidge not too much just a little bit maybe that might work hmm i quite like that and i don't really even think i have to do any further tonal work that just kind of works as is um i might just go for a square crop just drag that smack bang in the middle there hmm yeah okay well some interesting ideas there delete that for now so uh here's the before and here's the after yeah okay and again i'll delete the snapshot and save that into my folder to pick up later i might post some of these on instagram okay uh dave do you have any do you have a beginner set videos of the newbie variety um not new videos uh i think in the forums is like a legacy tutorials thread and i think miguel botto's i hope i pronounced that surname right sorry miguel if you're watching um i think miguel's site still has the old tutorials listed and i did like um they're pretty kind of rough now but uh like a beginner's set and it talks about things like layers uses motion graphics to explain what layers are you know how they interact with each other how they go above and beneath um but yeah i would like to get round to the possibility of redoing like a beginner's set so thank you for the nudge um again how about saturating only yellow sorry that's too late now i've just closed it down there's a spot mask yeah that could have worked as well actually yeah um but to be honest i just wasn't feeling the colors in this at all um that's just a bit nasty really there's a limited amount i could do with them uh let's see slightly underexposed one let's give this a shot because i'm seeing potential for some interesting colors here okay so yeah this is an underexposed image i'm gonna take the highlights down slightly again not all the way because look at this that it's just it's sorry this is a real bugbear of mine i'm going to go on a rant again this is tonally flat it's just it's not what highlights are you know so we're going to bring them back a little bit so that they're slightly bright push the shadow detail up a little bit just to bring it away from black or alternatively we could just raise the black point sorry lower the black point technically yeah that will do as a starting point um could you demo how to correctly use the develop persona um i think you've probably come to the wrong place i don't do a lot of develop persona work i'm afraid i mean um basically for this type of imagery i to be honest i wouldn't try and do too much in the developed persona because again i would go for the non-destructive layer stack approach i would try and get as flat as possible as flat as possible a result using develop whether that's using shadows and highlights and using black point or even on the assistant up here uh taking the tone curve off so you don't even have like a contrast tone curve you get a really flat image to start with i don't need that for this particular image but that's something you can experiment with and then you're free to kind of push tones around all you want without committing anything using adjustment layers um trying to think there's anything else i can really show but i don't think there is to be honest um don't forget you've got white balance adjustment as well but again i'm not too fussed about that since i will be gradually manipulating the colors anyway as long as it's in the ballpark that's fine for me i will click develop okay right i'm going to go over that snapshot now just so i remember uh let's start with the curves adjustment like we always do crunch those tones push them up and again i'm going to go for a luminosity blend mode i use this oh actually you know what no no no no no no i think i will stick to normal so that i'm affecting the color intensity as well didn't like that look at all okay so um actually i'm going to go back into this and i'm going to take the highlights down a little bit so that we're not intensifying them so much the reason is i'm going to do some brush work down here i reckon so let's have a crack at this now i'm going to create a new pixel layer oh spell that correctly um sorry i'm i don't know how to pronounce your your name uh but yes some kind of live develop if maybe like the background pixel layer uh contained a link to the raw file and you could double click it to go back into develop and redevelop everything that'll be incredible um but we've heard nothing about that internally yet so you know but still i see exactly where you're coming from that would be really useful okay um brushwork overlay blend mode b for the paint brush tool x to toggle across to white so now if i hover yep down here we're going to see the effect let's take the opacity down to about 50 and just brush into these areas and just also brush up that building slightly as well okay it's looking good okay now let's do some more color work so i'll create another pixel layer call this color work b for the brush tool um and now i want to use an overlay blend mode um let's try 50 but i might be too strong then what i'm going to do is color pick so option click drag off various tones in the water here oh my apologies if anyone actually heard that hopefully you didn't that was my stomach going uh i had a light lunch so my stomach's complaining slightly okay let's see and i'm just kind of going through this is quite subtle what i'm doing but i just love experimenting with this type of approach so that water is really kind of starting to sing now um so much so that i might go into my curves adjustment and take it down a bit more because um i kind of wanted to do some more layer work so let's call this reflect set the blend mode to reflect now reflect is really sensitive so if we have something like a red up here and we paint in that's way too strong um but i am just going to keep it at a higher opacity for now just so i can see what i'm doing and then i'll take it down once i'm finished okay there we go okay take that down to maybe 12 so really it's just kind of adding a little bit of an extra glow a sort of a sheen to areas of the water down here and if we just have a look this is what all of our brush work has done to this image so that's quite dramatic um let's see sharpening yes i suppose we should really do some sharpening uh again i think what i'll do is get the selection brush tool and use q for quick mask make a really rough selection of this i think i might refine this um but photo is kind of may going to make a little bit of a butchery out of it because this is not i mean to be honest any kind of image editing app would do this it's um just not the right kind of image to be refining but it's okay because all i really want is a matted selection or a mask that's kind of roughly in the ballpark for my sharpening that will do for me so let's sharpen that with a live unsharp mask let's try that for now okay um yeah looking okay looking good oh i've got to denoise of course um yes this is a really useful tip actually um i've already deselected so to get my selection back i can just command or control click to get that selection back then invert it so shift command i and then i can add my denoise filter we're really splitting hairs here but again it's it's for me it's not always about the fact that you would see the noise because in this image you probably wouldn't to be honest you know unless you i mean i had to zoom all that way in just to see the noise here you see but ultimately by smoothing all that detail out i'm going to make the image easier to compress you know when i it gets exported to jpeg or something like that so okay i think i'll leave it there for this image actually no i won't who am i kidding right let's uh get a selective color in there let's see what we can do with these reds so take cyan out a bit push magenta up push yellow up do the same to yellows oh look at that oh it's just i can't get enough of this adjustment for low-light imagery it's just so powerful not that you'd want to but you can completely change the color of that um [Music] that's quite nice actually okay so that wasn't initially what i was going for but that's interesting okay uh i think i will leave it there you know it's easy to kind of get carried away and think oh yeah i can do this i can do it i can do all this to it and then you end up coming away with something that's massively overcooked so let me save that and let's see what else i've got in the bag um you're welcome y um no no news about the dam yet and yeah i know finder is kind of like i'll tell you what actually while i'm here i can't remember when they brought it in was it catalina um they got rid of the um i forget what it's called now the flip book preview where you can use your mouse wheel and it's kind of like the you can flip through and it's like a bit of a picture book style i was gutted when they took that out i i don't know why maybe it just didn't seem very professional but honestly it was the easiest way of going through an entire folder full of raw files and jpegs and whatever else and just quickly going you know scrolling through and going yeah i'll have that one drop that in and they took it away and now you've got this instead and you've got to use the arrow keys and it's so much clunkier and slower i don't know if anyone else finds that um i ended up using fast raw viewer i don't have my hard drive connected at the moment so i can't give you a quick demo of it or anything but i use fastwall viewer to cull and organize and i used it to kind of uh make a short list of all these images here i just i have um hotkeys or shortcuts set up so that i can easily make a selection of files and copy them to a folder this folder in particular so i would recommend having a look at fast draw viewer uh it's by the authors of uh liberal which is the raw library engine that we use as well fun little fact for you there let's have a look at this robin so this is a kind of a twee feel good photo it's not really very professional but you know this little robin was feeding off this lady's hand and i just thought you can't ignore that you know so um what about get some perspective correction oh do you mean on the image that i've just done uh sorry too late for that or do you mean just generally um because we've got live perspective correction in photo which is quite useful um i don't know if i've got any examples to show that yes fan of fast review yeah it's brilliant yeah the only thing i have found actually is um i have to turn off uh the gpu acceleration or at least set the memory usage too low because it actually interferes too much with photo um photo you with metal compute um it really maxes out the gpu so anything else that conflicts with that are you going to have a bit of a bad time really okay um let's see what am i going to do to this raw file probably not a great deal um i will just point out actually that uh it doesn't it's probably not really really relevant for this image because i don't really think we've got many colors in this image that would be outside the range of srgb but if i'm doing sort of low light imagery like the london example i just showed you and i'm not doing this for live streaming so you know i can work in a wide gamut i will use rom rgb okay um word to the wise as well if you're going to use some a wide gamut profile like rom rgb or pro photo essentially the same thing um even p3 to some extent although apple don't seem to have followed this this tact um if you uh what am i trying to say basically 8-bit precision is possibly not enough resolution for a wider gamma profile it's fine for srgb but if you start pushing tones around in pro photo or something like that in 8-bit you might get some posterization that's not a problem in affinity photo because it develops to 16 bit by default anyway but just thought that's worth pointing out so try not to use something like rom rgb with an 8-bit document always try and use 16-bit but because this is going to youtube rec 709 there's really no point so i'm going to stick with srgb for now okay uh let's see white balance i might try the white balance picker i haven't really got anything to white balance off to be honest but let's see if that does anything that actually makes it warmer which no let's just leave it as it is okay let's carry this forward and develop that okay yeah custom built pc tons of ram yeah my my pc has 64 gigs of ram it's just like why not you know i was getting a custom build and uh i suppose i can justify that with maybe photogrammetry or really large panoramas maybe excessive really i could have just used 32 but never mind okay uh so let's see i'm just thinking about what i could do with this sorry i keep knocking the mic um if anyone is kind of wondering what what's going on here this is an absolutely huge pop shield um this is a sure mv7 anyone who's into this kind of thing live streaming or podcasting or anything probably be familiar with that mic um the pop shield that they send you with it is terrible so people are buying the pop shield for the shore sm7b i think it is instead i'm using that one but i've even found that i kind of i like to eat the mic i like to get really close so i got one for i can't remember which shore mic it is but it's absolutely ginormous and it looks comical on this microphone um but it's the only pop shield that actually stops plosives for me anyway uh this one although a lot of people have found it successful just does not work for me because i like to have the mic really close i love that uh you know that kind of presence anyway microphones aside let's get on with the editing so what am i doing for this um let's see i'll start off with a curves adjustment okay i'll go for my luminosity blend mode as usual let's push those highlights up a little bit but not too much okay um you know what this is really dodgy and i don't usually advocate this but i am going to try and enhance the depth of field on this image i have no no idea if this will work but let's give it a try so i am blocking out a rough selection of my uh proposed foreground here got the robin's teeny tiny little legs let's just grab them like so and do the same for the other leg okay and then i will jump into selection refinement oh just mark that there map that okay got a bit of fur there let's map that that was a terrible idea i don't know why that should have just mattered that instead okay this is probably about as good as we're gonna get oh we've got some frayed edges on the uh the cardigan there okay so that's my foreground i'm going to save that as a spare channel just in case i need to come back to that later so foreground let's invert that save it as the background are you ready for this this might not work at all this might be absolutely horrendous so let's roll the dice shall we i'll add a live lens blur blur that out like so and then load the background mask or channel to the alpha oh wow that looks terrible already okay let's take the radius down slightly so it's just starting to oh i don't know i don't know does it work not really oh it's so subtle never mind it was worth a try we'd probably need a z depth mask or something or you know from a portrait mode on a phone to do that successfully okay what else um i'm going to hide that for now because the effect is just barely pronounced selective color again i really like this selective color don't i uh let's see let's get some nice rich red tones on that robin's breast there okay um so what i will now do is invert the selective color mask paint brush tool paint back in over that area like so there we go so that's a nice red breast in fact i'll tell you what it was a good idea that we made those masks or rather those channels i will let's see take the saturation out but just mask it to the background okay ooh we're veering dangerously towards colourpop territory which uh i have a few words to say about so let's not go overkill reducing the background intensity because yeah um i don't know i just i know i know colour pops are kind of eye-catching but they're a bit overdone by now aren't they let's see um let's see any of the questions i can answer in the developer system if i choose to use 16-bit precision what's the difference between uh apply tone curve or not so basically um i'm just going to digress temporarily and find a nice nighttime raw image so take no action okay so basically um again i'll try not to get too bogged down in this but it goes through so the raw file initially it's grayscale bayer sensor data right gets the mosaic um it's in linear color space at this point and of course to be more palatable and you know for our perceptual purposes it goes through gamma conversion or gamma encoding right and that's what this is so this is the gamma encoded result and then we apply a tone curve on top of that for a more contrasty result which is more palatable as like a starting point but of course you can choose to take that off if you want to use your own turn curve or if you just want a really flat almost log like image that you want to shape the tones with now here's the thing when you set raw output to 32-bit it takes the tone curve off automatically for you now i know some people go and apply it again which kind of not entirely defeats the point of 32-bit but mostly so when you apply this tone curve that's a bounded tone curve right so when you when you're talking 32-bit values you're talking floating point that's zero to one and then anything above one is considered hdr and it's not displayable unless you have an hdr display right that's that's um hdr merging you know you have all those tones above one that need mapping to within that range of zero to one if you go and apply a tone curve to that 32-bit precision output it clamps the values so you kind of negate one of the main benefits of being in 32-bit anyway um that's why it deliberately takes a tone curve off for you so that there are no values being clamped anyway i'm getting light-headed just talking about that so i might have to come back to that okay uh so where were we um oh uh affinity photo works in 2013 bits out tone curves overdone we're right yeah so sorry um i might just have explained that so when photo develops a raw file and you when you're in a developed persona and you're moving all your sliders around everything else that is all being done internally in 32-bit floating point unbounded precision so even if you've got blown out highlights you can drag the highlight slider back recover them etc that's fine when you develop your raw image and you move back to the photo persona that's when it by default gets converted to 16 bit and then it gets um that's becomes the gamma encoded version and also the values outside of the range of zero to one equipped okay of course you can negate that by taking your document through with 32-bit using that assistant option but by default yes that's what happens um uh yes so applying a tone curve on a 32-bit document will ruin the linear scene referred data in the sense that yes it will clamp the values um so anything outside that zero to one range gets clamped and then is unrecoverable which obviously you don't want um duplicate the layer and then paint the legs and details so the large blur setting works you know what i will indulge you on that suggestion let's give this a try so what do we hang on what do we need to do we need to cut the robin out first don't we so again i'm not entirely convinced this is going to work but let's give it a shot let's see if we can actually make it work actually you know what i could just load the foreground couldn't i there we go loads of pixel selection okay um let's make that little section there oh and we got a bit of the robin's breast there so i will refine that let's see i honestly don't think this is going to work particularly well create a new layer okay undo that duplicate the background layer get the in painting brush i cannot wait to see what it comes up with as the end painting result for this this is going to be interesting okay hopefully it will just be the sensible thing which is some kind of tiled repetition of the background detail oh great you found it dave awesome good stuff okay let's turn that layer back on and then we will add let's get rid of that lens blur now we will add a lens blur underneath the cut out layer oh i don't know do i like that maybe at an instagram resolution maybe well you know what we'll go with that for now okay not not really what i choose to do but fair play yeah all right okay yeah okay uh let's see unsharp mask um you know what i'm getting a bit lazy now so i am going to add my sharpening effect then i'm going to invert that and just paint it into my robin like so and maybe a bit the hand but nothing else then i'm going to reset that crop crop this in like so so i kind of um don't want to crop it too tight i still want a bit of context there you know let's see do i dare to make a selection of or rather get a curves and mask it to the background just to take the background down slightly okay that's not actually as bad as i thought it would be yeah just takes the edge off the background helps a bit more of the subject separation um that red breast needs to pop a bit more doesn't it so let's use hsl for that bring that out invert that paint brush tool paint back in like so cool okay that'll do for now yeah um i might come back to that maybe um in fact maybe just crop the bottom a little bit like so there we go okay yeah i'm gonna save that now oh that is a lot of effort for uh what is essentially just like a whimsical feel-good picture isn't it okay um i might call it a day soon so i'll tell you what um let's just do this quickly because um i am taking that tone curve off yes i have ah okay let's not have that catch me out so i'm going to reopen that boom in 16 bit okay um again raw or raw development wise not a lot to do here um i will just reiterate something i said earlier because i think this really needs to be stressed because i actually before i really studied um signal data bit depth precision all that i was of the mind that you had to kind of make the most of the histogram here like you had to have the most sensible distribution of tones okay really don't so you know uh for example let's say all your history you know all your data here is bunched in the middle right you might think oh no to make the most of this precision and you know everything i've got to make sure that i have pixels in here black and then um excuse me pixel's near pure white you don't need it maybe if you were working purely in 8-bit you might be able to make a case of that um i mean that's why we do that's why we do gamma encoded images to make the most of that limited resolution you know like 8-bit precision but we're working internally in 32-bit it's getting converted to 16-bit which gives you 65 536 possible color values per channel yeah you don't need it don't worry so this is fine okay i'm going to click develop that was an easy raw develop process wasn't it literally do nothing uh okay let's add a curves adjustment now i'm a bit of a i'm a bit of a weird one i love doing i guess you could call them cloud studies luminosity blend mode again for that i just love taking especially like telephoto pictures of clouds and really looking at the sort of the structure and the detailing um and i think that's that's what fascinates me with astrophotography that's why i'm so keen on that because i love doing image processing to kind of bring out structure and detail in you know scientifically and mathematically the process behind astrophotography you know and the you know the reasoning behind why we stack the data to average it and produce a better signal-to-noise ratio it's all fascinating to me and i think it comes from you know this kind of this interest in looking at structure and detail so for this for example you know what i might do is get rid of that background snapshot uh add a live clarity filter look at that okay so that's obviously overkill um but i'm going to invert that b for the paintbrush tool just paint back in over the areas where i want that to apply like so okay then i can take the strength down so i can just kind of bring it up a little bit like that something like that although is that too strong if you have to ask the question you probably already know the answer so yes let's back that off a little bit dave can i dance fast enough i hope so i'm not a very good dancer um so oh oh oh okay right so that was that was definitely positive if you're telling people to hit that like button okay i'm glad we cleared that up um yeah the lens um the depth pass so interesting thing um when photo first came out in beta so that was version 1.4 there was actually a zed blur filter and you could load a grayscale depth mask that disappeared i think before public release and has not been seen since just mysteriously vanished possibly because it didn't work very well i don't know um but yeah we did actually have that so i might it might be interesting to chase that up and see whether that can be reinstated at some point okay um yeah uh no no worries um i appreciate everyone tuning in to watch and chatting with me yeah i've wanted to do this for the longest time i did it for the um the walk down session last year but i i just always thought that i you know i don't know i um always tired to be honest by four o'clock after a full day of work and also i kind of felt that i had i needed content to kind of justify it but then i thought you know what just just dip your toe in the water just do a session where you literally just sit down and edit some images and give people an idea of the process and you know if somebody chucks me some hard ball affinity photo questions while i'm at it fair enough you know uh let's see so hsl adjustment let's now see there's some red color hiding in here that's fascinating to me it doesn't i mean i don't whoa yeah let's not do that so i might just kind of maybe just bring out a hint of that that is fascinating to me there's red in there and we got some yellow as well yep we've got yellow okay yep and then maybe just to separate the cloud and the background i'll go for blue and take luminosity shift down not too much because then we start to get it's not quite posterization but it it just i think it you know our eyes can tell this this does not look right it's not natural so maybe about there just reduce that a tad yeah something like that okay i think a crop might help tighten this composition up as well something but i don't want to crop that off over there i really like that tail to the cloud let's try that almost looks like a hammer or an axe or something in the sky okay uh let's see what we're doing on the wave scope oh yeah um by the way i am thanks dave very enthusiastic um yeah i don't use the histogram an awful lot the reasoning behind this is because i don't find it particularly useful um i mean yeah it tells you uh maybe a particular color channel is clipping it don't tell you where though so i prefer to use the scope panel which isn't shown by default you can get it off view and studio here um because you get things like intensity waveforms so now you know i get a rough representation of the tones um across kind of like the spatial frequency of my image so you know i can see uh these tones here are quite bright in the middle um and also if i'm doing portrait retouching i use the vectorscope for the eye line as well which is quite useful getting skin tones right and then you've got things like rgb parade as well um so it's a little bit more useful because it tells you it gives you like a spatial representation of where tones are bright and dark as opposed to the histogram it's just a bit just not my thing really um i'm waffling on let's round off this image i'm starting to not like the color now uh i might go in and take that back a little bit i think i kind of like the almost sort of quasi-de-saturated look so i might use a black and white adjustment take the opacity down slightly 20 yeah i think i like that yeah okay that one is getting saved let's put that in the bank why did that not work okay just click save rather than hit return on the keyboard fine okay oh wow look at the time okay i'm gonna do one more for you um it's gonna be an hdr merge so uh i occasionally you know especially over the summer last year you know i'd get woken up by the light just streaming in through my window so i've got uh my bedroom is north facing so um i basically just get blasted by the sun you know when the sun rises now at six in the morning and occasionally it does inspire me to get to go up and go and capture a sunset uh sunrise sorry so that's what i've got here uh get my raw files chuck them in now i turn off noise reduction and tone map hdr image i don't like default tone mapping being done for me i also don't like noise reduction being done for me because by principle what it's doing anyway is it's equalizing the exposures you know all five of them in this case and then it's merging together the most detailed uh pixels from each image by the way that was ridiculously fast um i i can't believe this comes across as a bit of a sales pitch but i am using a mac mini m1 granted it's a 16 gigabyte model i got it about three weeks ago and i am absolutely chuffed to bits with it i was really skeptical the reason i got it was because i always wanted a home mac i wanted something that was reasonably powerful but you know not fully specced out or whatever so i thought well these new m1 mac minis look quite good you know um didn't have a portability requirement so i didn't go for a macbook or anything and because they're expen they're more expensive anyway but oh wow this is blowing me away i mean it's replaced my work machine which is a fully specced out macbook pro you know i9 processor 64 gigs of ram 5500m amd gpu um yeah it's just ridiculous i mean the affinity apps granted uh you know they are optimized for it other software might not be still at this point but even with you know going through the translation layer this thing is fast it's really snappy so um yeah if anyone's after like a cheap desktop machine don't overlook the mac mini because the the m1 chip is really impressive i can't wait to see what apple come out with it's the first time i'd actually recommend buying an apple product to be honest you know i mean we get them through work which is fine but for my own personal hobbyist used i would always go for a windows pc because comparatively everything's cheaper but yeah mac mini all the way anyway moving on um i'm going to bring up my macro library panel because in fact you know what i'll hide that and show you why i'm doing this so at this point right we would go for tone mapping so that's the tone mapping persona up there just give that a couple of seconds to do its magic and that basically finds you know ways of mapping values out of the range of zero to one to within the range of zero to one right so we we have these values these high dynamic range values can't be displayed and we map them within range okay but i don't find i mean it's serviceable don't get me wrong um and you know if you want that horrific overcooked local contrast look you can do that as well using local contrast that's fine um but i i don't prefer to do any of that so i come out there instead and i actually use um i did these for um editing blender renders open exr blender renders because if anyone uses blender for 3d work um choice of did these filmic view transforms right um so gamma corrected view transforms that uh basically map the dynamic range from linear to gamma encoded in a really nice way um gives you a lovely kind of um photo realistic look and uh you can use these in affinity photo by setting up the open color i o configuration from blender but that is a bit of a faff so what i did instead was i kind of deconstructed the um sort of profiled what was going on on the gpu um got the values the transform values that were being used and stuck them in a procedural texture live filter um used deluxe around that as well and built it all into some macros here so although these are actually intended for 3d renders they actually work really well for tone mapping hdr photography as well it's the same principle you're taking these linear unbounded values and mapping them to a gamma encoded range so what we end up with is a very flat logarithmic look but then everything's in range and you'll notice actually on the histogram here even those really bright areas look they're squeezed in here but not in a way that looks horrible and unnatural so now i can bring this down push these tones up slightly like that and still you know i i really like this kind of naturalistic result that i'm getting here um let me think let's do an hsl adjustment pump the reds up slightly and the yellows ooh maybe not too much trying to keep this natural you know i'm trying not to overcook it okay um let me see what else can i do for this here's an interesting thing as well if i do something like a clarity filter okay enhance that invert that mask just paint it back into a bit of the foreground detail here if you put clarity just above the pixel layer so it's affecting the linear encoded data it will look slightly different to above the filmic group which is uh performing the gamma encoded look so you'll see here if it goes directly above the linear encoded value directly above the linear encoded values it's more aggressive or rather is it more aggressive actually no it's less aggressive that's interesting i would have expected it to be the other way around but okay i'm not going to argue so it's actually less aggressive which is interesting to me but i will take it okay so i'm not sure if i like that so i'll turn it off for now um new pixel layer let's create a blend mode pixel layer something like 25 and just paint into the foreground ever so slightly just to raise those tones not a little bit but yeah oh well thank you aegis uh sorry if i'm pronouncing your name wrong um yeah um apple silicon better gpu capability yeah um i mean to be honest the the gpu and the m1 um the i'm using the photo beta now the 192 one yes one nine two two two nine um the lead photo developer uh made a few optimizations there um in terms of queuing buffer commands so actually the the gpu score goes up by about a thousand raster points i think roughly and the score now sort of sits at around the 8 000 mark which is actually what i'm getting for my 5500 m macbook um gpu and it's on par with i think like a gtx 1080 um something like that maybe um maybe like a 2060 something like that so to be honest that's not it's not it's not terrible um and i'm really i am i'm i'm right with you there i'm excited to see what the next level is going to be because inevitably they're going to put this silicon in there you know like imac replacements um macbook pro uh like 16-inch or whatever replacements i'm really excited to see what kind of gpu capabilities they come up with there because i can imagine you know if it's this good for like a a first public iteration it's going to be pretty mind-blowing what they come up with next that's the hope anyway so a new pixel layer overlay blend mode let's try 50 maybe color pick off a nice warm tone here maybe make that a bit brighter actually and i'm just going to stamp into this area here so i've just got a bit of glow coming out of this area that's when you see i always recommend you know it's easy to get carried away when you're working in detail in a zoomed in portion of your image but sometimes you just need to take a step back and zoom out because that is that's just it's too strong so 20 maybe can we get away with that that's nice yeah that's a nice little bit of glow that will do okay um to be honest there's not a lot more to do with this i'm i'm deliberately trying not to over edit it or overcook it i just i want i want to portray that that kind of warmth that sort of the mist rising off the floor there just just this kind of lovely glows you know sunrise glow so i'm not going to go too extreme with this image i'm going to leave it there before i do anything else to it that i might regret but of course you won't regret it for long because it's all non-destructive anyway so you know oh yeah okay no i don't like that clarity now uh 50 opacity maybe 25 yeah okay yeah i'll take that all right let's save this then okay so those were uh a few images that i've just spent some time editing and uh look at just looking at the clock now i'm gonna draw a line under this because i could get carried away and just go on for absolutely ages um and also i don't want to burn through any more material i might have for future live sessions so um i will just see if there's anything else i can address no mind-blowing creative usage of that ocio yeah it's um yeah i i started using open color i o transforms uh specifically the the blender ones uh like a couple of years ago for hdr photography and um yeah i just thought wouldn't it be nice to package this up in a way that had no dependency on open color i o that you could just literally run a macro and and it's there so i spent a while just kind of decoding all this and if i just show you actually um we don't have a normalized log transform function in procedural texture at least not yet so this is the approximation which is a bit crazy um yeah that's the sort of the minimum unbounded value as well but yeah that's my equation for the uh that's the normalized log transform um and then on top of that we've got some other transforms going on uh kind of like from picking apart the uh the open color i o transforms and implementation but anyway i'm waffling on no one no one wants to know about all that techy nonsense anyway so thank you very much everyone for tuning in it's been a pleasure really um i'm glad that you know i actually got some viewers worst case scenario i would just be talking to myself and it would be be a bit demoralizing so i really do appreciate everyone jumping on and you know having a bit of a conversation with you all um it's been lovely thank you very much for engaging and i think it's given me a bit of confidence to go on and do another one at some point so do keep your eye on twitter i'll post there ahead of time um maybe not instagram but i'll i'll try and post on reddit as well i'm not sure if there are any viewers from reddit but i'll post on the affinity photo subreddit there but yeah thank you very much um i'm just going to show you the lovely intermission motion graphic thing that i put together as an ending uh just so that i can also spend a bit of time just chatting with you as well but anyway thank you very much for watching take care everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: James Ritson

Views: 13,297

Keywords: Affinity Photo, Live, Photoshop, James Ritson, Editing

Id: Oyv0Kp2zZqM

Length: 93min 6sec (5586 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021