Mastering Affinity Photo - 7: Curves

hey guys this is Anthony more online photography training.com welcome to my video series mastering affinity photo in this video I want to talk about the curves adjustment layer that's found in the photo persona of affinity photo I wanted to devote an entire episode to curves because I don't believe a lot of people really understand what curves is or if they do they just have the rudimentary understanding of curves enough that allows them to add some contrast to their image well there's really a lot you could do with curves and the curves adjustment layer in affinity photo is very feature intense so I wanted to do a video on it all by itself now there is a curves adjustment in the develop persona but that isn't as comprehensive as the curves adjustment layer is there's a lot more you could do with the adjustment layer so if you learn the adjustment layer you'll be able to master that curves adjustment in the developed persona as well now I have this image here it's a black and white image and I chose to work on a black and white image because I think it better illustrates what curves does to the tones of an image curves could go on a color image and as a matter of fact and most often goes on a color image but I think you'll better see what curves does on this monochrome image now I want to add the curves adjustment layer to this I could of course go to this adjustment tab but another way you could add adjustment layers to an image is you would go up to layer and then down to new adjustment layer and in this case the curves adjustment and when I do that you can see the curves panel opens up and the curves adjustment layer is on top of our layer stack now those of you not familiar with curves all curves is showing us here on this panel is a plot of all the tones in the image and you can see the histogram is here the darkest tones the blacks are in the lower left-hand corner on the histogram forget about this diagonal line for a second so we're looking at the histogram the black tones are plotted on this far left the brighter tones the whites are plotted on the far right and the more of a specific tone you have the higher the histogram will go so whatever tone is corresponding with this peak right here I have a lot of those tones in this image so as you go you go from blacks to shadows to mid-tones to highlights to whites now what the line represents is the um way you could adjust those tones either lighter or darker and the way you would do it is you would go to the corresponding part of that line that lays over the corresponding tone you want to adjust and push it up to make it brighter or down to make it darker so if I want to make this entire image brighter I would go in the middle here let's say so I grab mainly the mid-tones and if I push it up I'll start making the image brighter if I pull it down I'm making the image darker so you could see how easy that works now a lot of people use curves to add contrast to an image and all contrast really is is the darker parts of the image you're making a little darker while simultaneously making the brighter parts of the image a little brighter that's contrast by definition so if we want to add contrast to here we have to make those darker tones a little darker so I would go over here where the darker tones are in this lower left-hand part of the curve click on this diagonal line at a point then take that point and pull it down so I'm making the darker tones a little darker some then we would go up to the upper right-hand part of the curve where the highlights reside click on it and we want to make the highlights a little lighter so we push up so we pull down make the darker tones a little darker push up make the lighter tones a little lighter and you could see as I turn this off and on off on we added contrast to the image well a lot of people stop there and they don't really want to go anywhere else with curves but again there's a lot you could do with it and I'm gonna reset it now so we understand that that the darker tones are to the left the lighter tones it to the right and if you want to make a specific tone lighter you push up you want to make a specific tone darker you pull down you'll notice there's RGB here there's a number of different color spaces you could see gray RGB CMYK and lab most often your image will be an RGB image that means it's a mixture of red green and blue in the image and in case of monochrome agents monochrome I know but you'll see in a minute we'll talk about this with a color image it's a mix of red green and blue sometimes you'll want to use a different color space for your image a lot of times a printer or an illustrator will require a CMYK image maybe they'll require a lab image so you're not going to use the RGB color space you're going to want use one of the other two now if you wanted to switch or to convert your image to one of the other color spaces you would go up to where it says document then down to color format and you could see that there's RGB 16-bit and that has the check mark on it this is an RGB 16-bit image I could convert it to grayscale 16-bit by clicking right there lab 16-bit right there CMYK is only available as 8-bit click right there and you could see our GB is also available as a 32-bit HDR know that we're not gonna worry about right now but so you could convert this if you convert the image into let's say a lab color space then when you work with the curves adjustment layer you would want to move this and make sure you're using the lab color space of the adjustment layer so you're matching the color space otherwise you'll get some funky results now again this is RGB I'm going to demo that in a minute but let's go to the RGB and finish our thought on the RGB color space curves adjustment layer we talked about master already that just effects really the brightness and or darkness of the tones in the image if I click on this drop down here you see that was the master channel net master channel consists of red green blue and alpha we're not gonna really talk about alpha in this video alpha really is a channel that you would use to a work on leung mask layer masks or just masks that are layers and i'll probably cover that in a future video but right now we're more concerned with the more typical application red green and blue those are the individual color channels that make up the master channel if i click on red you may think it won't do anything because there's no red in this image it's a monochrome image well that isn't true what it's going to do is it's going to take those tones and it's either going to tint them red or it's going to take whatever tones I click on corresponding tones I click on on the curve and tint them the subtractive complementary color of red which is cyan so let's for example go right in the middle here and I want to tent this whole thing red what you would do is you want to go up towards this upper left hand corner of the box so go there go that way and I'm tinting everything red now I talked about the subtractive complementary color of red is cyan if I want to tint everything cyan just pull it down towards the diagonal corner which is the lower right-hand corner cyan red cyan red so kind of cool right now we have two other channels we have this green channel again if you want to tint everything green you would go up to this upper left hand corner in the box there's green what's the subtractive complementary color of green it's magenta we'll go down to lower right there's magenta green magenta green magenta now the blue the blue channel you want to tint everything blue go right in the middle and go that way blue you want to tint it the subtractive complementary color a blue which is yellow go this way yellow blue yellow blue so that's how you could affect the individual channels now why would you want to do that well a lot of people like to do this toning too especially a black and white or amount of Chrome image you Tony you see a lot of street fashion and it's got like the yellow tone to it even portraiture sometimes I've seen modern portraiture with like this really to me ugly yellow tone well what they would do assuming they have an RGB image they would go to curves in the RGB color space go to the blue channel and they usually would take the highlights down so they're starting to give yellow into those highlights so the person's skin tone is getting a little bit of a yellow tone to it now it's a monochrome image usually and a lot of times people like to me give it an old-time film look and a lot of times with old film the paper yellowed and when the paper yellowed the highlights become yellow but the dark tones kind of become blue so they'll go over here where the darker tones are and push up so you're getting blue in the shadows and yellow in the highlights and that gives you that kind of blue yellow look that's common in old photographs old black-and-white photographs now I mentioned that curves works on color images well I mean it does it just so you go to a color and it's just the same exact image in color and this time we'll go here and I'll add the curves adjustment layer and I just want to show you this real quick we're in the RGB color space master so if I go over here and I go up I'm making it lighter down I'm making a darker lighter darker so when I'm in the master Channel which is all three colors our red green and blue were really affecting the brightness part of the image or the lightness of the image with that individual channels again read it works the exact same way you want to make red goes to left and cyan to the lower right so it's the exact same thing you're just like tinting those color pixels now these colors so green upper left green lower right magenta green magenta reset go to blue upper left blue lower right yellow blue yellow so you get that subtractive complementary color again so again it doesn't matter you could be on a black-white image color image it doesn't matter if you have an RGB image you're gonna work with the RGB color space curves adjustment layer now unites unnoticed there's gray here this generally will work with a black and white image but if you do have a color image like I do and you use this gray curves channel or adjustment layer and I click anywhere right away it turns black point and it stays black away you can see that reset that now you can see that consists of two individual channels intensity which is really much the intensity is the same thing that's what it's doing we have that alpha channel again and if you do an alpha channel and anything it's not going to do anything because again that works on mainly on masks in this case it will give you a monochrome image but if we do let's say go to the black and white image and I go to the grey Channel and I do you can see it's lighter darker lighter darker that's all that's going to do similar the intensity will do the exact same thing lighter darker and then the Alpha channel won't do anything because it needs to be done on a mask layer so we'll reset that and some other things too and will again talk about that now we go to our GB and remember we have that alpha channel there too and similarly that you won't see anything happen there not at all okay when you're on a pixel layer so that is this RGB channel RGB color space I'm sorry now we have those other two CMYK and lab we talked about great also so let's convert this image this is our RGB image I'm going to convert it to CMYK so I'm gonna go up to document down to color format and CMYK member is only an 8-bit and again your printer may require a CMYK jpg for them to print because they're printing press needs it so you would convert the image to CMYK and you can see it looks identical right looks exactly the same now if I delete my curves now this is a CMYK image right now okay and I add this curves you could see then it will open up in the CMYK color space automatically so it knows this is a CMYK image and similarly we could add contrast to this but it's going to work backwards meaning if we're over here in the lower left you would think typically that that is the shadows and we would pull down to make the shadows darker we're actually not doing that are we so it's kind of opposite down to make the highlights brighter and then go up here and push up to make the shadows darker so the shadows are in the top right hand corner and or the blacks and the top right hand corner and the whites and the lower left so it's backwards from RGB so keep that in mind reset that and we could go to those individual color channels cyan if you go to this left you're gonna add cyan to the image if you go to left this way what's the subtractive complementary color a cyan green and if you forget if you look here look at our GB that's red green blue see my that's cyan magenta yellow and those are the complementary colors of each so our is in the first position C is in the first position red and cyan or complementary of each other green and magenta blue and yellow so that helps you remember though so if we go to like yellow and we go there we're going yellow blue yellow blue that's on this again CMYK image so you know remember that then black is what the K stands for and that's just going to make the image kind of add contrast to it making the darks darker this Way's making the the blacks brighter so that's affecting the blacks in the image with that channel again alpha won't do anything on this so let's for the sake of completeness let's go to document go to color format and we're gonna go to lab so we're converting this to lab now all right now we're still in the CMYK color space but again if I delete this oops if I delete it and then I go to the adjustment I add it now it will automatically open in the lab color space and you can see with the master Channel similarly if we go up oh no not similarly I'm sorry I shoulda known this we're colorizing it as you could see with the lab color space even though this has been converted to lab in the master now if we go to the extreme shadows and we go up you can see it's kind of given that old film look similarly here so labs a little bit lab is supposed to be what our eyesight equivalent our eyesight really don't I really never really understood lab totally but the master Channel as you could see it's colorizing your image lightness is really the brightness so we're gonna make it lighter or darker with that channel alright its lightness that's easy to remember a opponent this is green and red now if I remember right if you click here and go this way you're gonna make things red if we go this way we're gonna make things green you can see red green reset the B opponent is blue yellow so if we click on this and we go this way we're going yellow if we go that way we're adding blue and you can see it just kind of overlays blue or yellow on every single pixel on this black-and-white image now if I go to this color image and I go to document color format I convert convert this to lab see it looks identical nothing's changed but I go to the lab color space and I click in the middle here you could see how it's just color toning it on the master Channel if I go to lightness it again it'll just make it lighter or darker if I go to the a opponent again a opponent is green red this Way's red ways green see how it's tinting it green and then the be a component is blue yellow so yellow this way blue that way so you can see how that kind of works kind of weird you know you can't really add contrast to this as much it kind of colorized is it a little bit too so it affects colors when you're in the little lab color space a little more directly so you know those are the color spaces just remember you want to use the color space that is matching the color space of your image in most cases it's going to be RGB all right so let's go here and go and change this back to RGB 16-bit so it just did we're in the RGB color space master now one other thing I want to talk about a couple other things the picker if you're want to just target a specific tone in the image you could try to guess where that tone is on the diagonal line or you could just click on the picker and when you do your cursor turns into this little crosshair and then you could go over the tone let's say I want to make the blue sky darker so I would then go over the blue sky click with the left mouse button and drag down and you could see a point is now on that curve over there on the right and I'm making that tone that was underneath that cursor darker now it's not just relegated to the blue it's gonna meet whatever was that same luminance level is going down now I added a second point let's reset so if you want to make a specific tone darker let's say the blue sky darker click on this and go down but just remember it's going to affect all tones so anything that's the same luminance level blue the blue sky will get darker as well you can see the trees got darker and everything else now you can use it to add contrast to your image I'll just make sure you have that picker active you could go on a shadow let's say right here click pull down a little bit then go on a highlight like here click push up a little bit you can see how we added the s-curve to the image and go over the layers and I turn this off you can see it added contrast to the image so that's how you could use the picker you do have an opacity slider so you could just lower the opacity so more the lower layer lower original layer comes through and you have blend modes we're gonna talk about blend modes in future episodes you could hover over them to see what they do it's just the way now this adjustment layer blends with the layer below it or the layers below it usually with adjustment layers you're just gonna keep them in normal you usually keep adjustment layers normal there's times you may want to use a specific blend mode to get to work on a certain type of technique but in this case normally you keep it normal so I think that's pretty much everything you need to know about the curves adjustment layer that's in the photo persona of affinity photo now again there's a curves adjustment in the develop persona it's not as comprehensive of this it doesn't have as many features but it doesn't have anything that this doesn't have so you pretty much learned everything you need to know about curves and I'm kind of tired of talking about I'll tell you the truth so that's a lot about curves I like to thank everyone that watches my videos I really do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 21,762

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, layers, affinity, affinity photo, blend ranges, blend modes, adjustment layers, curves

Id: xrp902JJRzs

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 02 2018