hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to lenscraft today I'm
returning to affinity photo to look more closely at blending ranges I did cover
them briefly in an earlier video when I also looked at the blended feature in
Photoshop what you can see at the moment is a tone strip that I've created and
it's going to help to explain blending ranges it runs from black on the Left to
white on the right and has four black and white rectangles in affinity photo
the image tones have a value of between 0% and 100% the percentage is the amount
of white that appears in that tone when you have a tone that's pure black it has
a value of zero percent because there's no white and the opposite end of the
scale white has a tonal value of a hundred percent in the middle of the
strip there's an equal level of black and white so the tone is 50% I'll now
use a copy of this tone strip to demonstrate the blending range feature
in affinity photo if you want to try this with your own image I'll put a copy
of this strip on my website and a link to it in the video information below
here you can see one of my landscape photos with the tone strip appearing as
a second layer in the image I'll select the tone strip layer and then click the
gear icon in the layers studio panel this opens the blending options dialog
the first thing to notice is that we have two sets of similar controls the
grid on the Left controls the blending of the tone strip layer whilst the
second grid controls the layers below it you can think of the grid as being a
graph the horizontal axis represent the tonal values of pixels in the layer this
goes from 0 percent are black on the left to 100% or white on the right the
vertical axis represents the opacity of the layer from 0% at the bottom to 100%
opacity at the top currently you can see a line running along the top of the grid
with a point at either end the left point tells us that the black
pixels on the layer have an opacity of 100% the other point on the right shows
the white tones also have an opacity of 100% in fact the entire line runs along
the top of the grid this tells us that every tongue from black through to white
has an opacity of 100% which is why we can see the entire strip no much drag
the black point down and set the opacity to zero notice how all the black tones
in the layer become transparent but you can still see the whites because the
line runs diagonal the opacity in the tones gradually increases as the tones
get lighter if you look at the mid-tone gray the opacity is 50% let's reset the
adjustments and this time move to the white point
the white tones that no transparent but the black tones are visible let's add a
point to the mid tone as set its opacity to 0%
as you can see the middle of the strip now becomes transparent but the whites
and blacks are still fully visible what's happening is we're controlling
the areas of the layer that's a visible based on the tones in that layer I also
want to mention this linear option at the moment it's selected and the line
between the points is straight watch what happens to the line when I unselect
it and keep watching the center of the strip as well the line now becomes
curved rather than straight this is creating a more gradual transition in
the blending I'll reset the control again and we can look at the other grid
the other grid works much like the first grid we have the tonal range from black
on the left to white on the right the vertical axis also controls the opacity
but the results with this grid are slightly different when I move the black
point in the other grid it made the dark parts of the tone strip transparent in
this grid it makes the strip partly transparent
but across the entire time strip the opacity of the strip is being determined
by the tones in the image below it where you see dark tones in the underlying
image the strip becomes transparent I'll reverse the settings now so the areas of
white in the image made the strip transparent you may be able to see it
better if I move the strip around
one final point to mention is that each layer in the image has a separate set of
blending range controls when I click on the background layer I can change its
transparency or its opacity using the source layer ranges
but notice the other controls have no effect because there's nothing below the
background layer to control the blending hopefully this has given you a helpful
introduction into affinity photo blending ranges in a future video I'll
demonstrate how you might use this to simulate luminosity masking I'm Robin
Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft I'll
see you next week for another video