Hello, I’m Robin Whalley. Welcome to Lenscraft. Today we’re continuing our series of Affinity Photo Tutorials
with a deep dive into the adjustment Controls of the Develop Persona.
Introduction
In today’s lesson we’re using the Affinity Photo Develop Persona to convert this Fuji RAW file. It’s the same RAW
file that we’ve used in earlier lessons. You can download this from my website if you want to follow the example on your computer.
I’ll put the details in the video description below. In the Develop Persona, most of the tools we need to use are over on the right
of the screen. The tools are grouped into a series of tabs
based on their purpose. When you click on a tool’s heading you expand and activate that tool. You can also
turn the tool off by clicking the title a second time. Before we start editing
this image I’m going to turn on the clipping warnings we talked about in the previous video.
Next I'm going to set the Profile for the image so I don’t forget to do this later.
This sets the colour space that's going to be used by Affinity when converting the RAW file to an image. For this example, I’m going to
use Adobe RGB as that’s a much larger colour space than the default sRGB.
Now we can start to adjust the image. The first thing I want to do is to balance the exposure across the scene.
For this we need the controls in the Exposure and Shadows & Highlights section of the Basic tab.
The conditions when I shot this image were bright and the camera
has underexposed the scene slightly. So I’m going to have to correct this.
I’m also going to open the Shadows further, but not so much that it makes the image appear flat.
This now shows us the clipping that we need to fix. We can see that most of the clipping is in the sky. There is clipping
on the wet sand but that's the reflection from the sun and I want to leave this. Specular highlights like this add life to the shot.
To fix the sky I’m going to use the gradient tool.
When you add a gradient, it displays a red mask to show you the selected area. If you go to the Overlays tab
you can see that we have the Master image and also the new Gradient Overlay. You can switch between these by clicking them.
Whichever of these you have selected is the one you’ll be adjusting when you
use the controls. When you have the Gradient overlay selected, only
the tools in the Basic panel are enabled.
As you begin to make your changes, the red mask will vanish, so that you can see what you’re doing. I’m going to reduce the
exposure in the sky slightly.
Now that I’ve adjusted the sky I’m going to return to fine tune the earlier adjustments I made to the Master.
This time I’m also going to use the Enhance adjustments to remove some of the contrast.
Now this can make the image appear a little flat. But you can correct this by adding in some Clarity.
Now I can use the White Balance tool to adjust the temperature and tint in the image.
I’m going to sample from the reflected highlights in the scene to ensure the white balance for the lightest area is correct.
On the lens page I can apply different corrections, but for this image I won’t apply any. Instead,
I want to apply the Post Crop Vignette effect to darken the edges of the frame.
Start by setting the hardness to 100%.
This helps you see what you’re doing. Now you can set the intensity and scale to adjust the vignette.
Finally, you can reduce the hardness to blend the vignette with the image.
Under the details tab you’ll find the sharpening and noise reduction.
I’m not going to use any noise reduction at this stage as the Fuji images are
usually very clean. I do though need to apply Capture sharpening.
To do this I’m first going to zoom to 100% magnification. Also keep your clipping warnings
on as you apply the sharpening. It can help to highlight if your sharpening halos become too large.
The Radius sets the width of the sharpening halo.
And the Amount sets the strength of the sharpening applied.
Finally, I’m going to use the Tone Curve to lift the midtones and the highlights slightly.
First though I’m going to pin the shadows by adding a point to the curve.
This prevents the next adjustment from affecting the shadow tones in the image.
I can now check my result against the original image.
I’m happy this gives me a well exposed image ready for further enhancements.
I can now click the Develop button to convert the adjusted
RAW file into a pixel layer in Affinity Photo. Next time we'll look at adding what I call special effects to the image
in Affinity Photo. Be sure to click the subscribe button so you don’t miss it.
If you found this video helpful, please like and share it with others. I’m Robin Whalley.
You’ve been watching Lenscraft. I’ll see you next week for another Affinity Photo Tutorial.
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