hello i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft today we're looking at the undo brushing affinity photo
this can be an incredibly useful tool but it's often overlooked it's also not that intuitive to
use if you don't understand it and even then you can sometimes get into a mess to demonstrate the
undo brush i'll first apply some adjustments to this foggy landscape image i shot recently first
i'll add a levels adjustment layer and use this to set the black and white points in the image
whilst i'm doing this i'll also set the gamma slider
next i'll merge the layers to a new layer and apply nick color effects pro to that
in nik color efex pro i'll start by neutralising
the color cast in the image using the pro contrast filter
after that i'll add a brilliance and warmth filter
and use this to increase the warm light on the trees and the fields
i'll also add a small amount of perceptual saturation
after that i'll save my changes back to the layer now i'm going to duplicate the
layer i just adjusted i'll then adjust the duplicate layer with nik viveza
in the vaser i'll select the trees which are being caught by the morning light
to emphasize the light i'll increase the warmth contrast structure and saturation
then i'll apply my changes to the layer and return to affinity photo now let's look at the
history studio panel here i can use the position slider to scroll back through my editing history
this allows me to see the build up of adjustments i made to the image as i'm doing this i can see
that i like the effect of the warm light but the morning mist looks better before i made any
changes to it in fact i like the mist best in the initial image ideally i want to combine the mist
from the starting image with my adjusted image one way i can do this is to use a series of masks on
each of the images to hide the adjustments i made the alternative to this and probably much easier
solution is to use the undo brush tool you'll find the undo brush tool over in the affinity tools
palette when you're using the photo photopersona the icon is a paintbrush with an arrow through
it select this and you'll see the standard brush controls appear in the context sensitive toolbar
you can use these to configure the undo brush tool just as you would any other brush tool
these can make painting with the undo brush tool and blending changes much easier to explain how
we will use the undo brush i'm first going to set the hardness and opacity to 100 this will make it
easier to see the adjustments rather than if we try to blend them in before i can use the undo
brush i need to set a point in my editing history to use with it i can do this in the history panel
by clicking the small camera icon to the left of the editing point that i want to use by the way
you can also change the history panel to show an advanced view which moves the camera icon
back to the undo brush tool and you can see what effect it will
have if i paint as i move it over the image
but before i use the undo brush i'm going to set the hardness to zero
and reduce the opacity to 20 this will help me blend my brush strokes into the image
now i can paint over the image where i want to return the mist to its original unedited state
as i paint the undo brush is replacing my editing with the history point i selected in the history
panel now as good as this is it's still taking me a lot of time to paint out the adjustments in the
mist it may be easier if i paint in my adjustments to the trees and leave the rest of the image
unadjusted to do this let's delete all the layers we created so that we're back to the unedited
image i can then set the undo brush tool to the point in history before i deleted the layers
this allows me to paint the adjustments i created onto the trees and the
foreground
although we've been using the history panel to make these changes we can do something similar
using the snapshots panel if your snapshots panel isn't visible you can open it in the view menu
i'm now going to use the history panel to select the point before i deleted the layers
so i can show you the editing again now in the snapshots panel i'll click the camera icon
at the top to create a new snapshot and call that colour when you create a snapshot you're saving a
point in your editing history so you can use it again notice this snapshot entry has the same
camera icon as we saw in the history panel if i click this it also sets the undo brush point
just as it did in the history panel i'll then delete the layers again as i did before
now i can paint in the colour from the snapshot to the trees using the undo brush it really is that
simple and you may find this is a possible alternative to much more complex masking
one final tip that i want to leave you with is to make sure you save your document history
with your image file you can do this by turning on the feature in the file menu
then when you save a file in the affinity photo format it also saves your editing
history if you don't save it the history is lost when you close the file and this could
prevent you from using the undo brush tool in the future i hope you found today's video
useful i'm robin whalley you've been watching lenscraft i'll see you soon for another
video