hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to this final video in my latest
mini-series where we looked at the editing of this
image in the previous video we made the conversion from color to black and white
using NYX / effects Pro in this video I'm going to add some finishing touches
to the image to soften it and to emphasize and de-emphasize areas of the
image and I'm going to do all this in affinity photo the first thing I want to
do is look at dodging and burning and we'll use this to highlight areas of the
Millstone and also de-emphasize surrounding areas of foliage to do the
dodging and burning I'm going to start by duplicating the silver effects layer
that I created in the previous video and I'm going to rename that dodging ban
now there's lots of ways you can do dodging and burning using tools in a fen
attack in this video I'm going to look at dodging and burning with the Dodge
and burn tools that you find over on the left side of the interface and I'm going
to start with the dodging brush now when you're dodging and burning what you're
doing is you're lightening or darkening areas of the image and the thing to keep
in mind is that when you highlight an area you make it more obvious to the
viewer whereas if you darn it you tend to de-emphasize the attention from that
area now when we dodge and burn dodging willed lightening area whereas burning
will darken it if you struggle to remember the - just
think of the term burning in detail and that means darkening light areas to make
them more obvious so burning in detail tells you to darken it so burning
darkens the image whereas dodging will lighten it now I'm going to start with
dodging and up in the context-sensitive toolbar I've got the tonal range set to
mid-tones so I'm going to be targeting the mid-tone areas in this image with
the lightening effect from dodging and I'm going to start by lightening the
area of these millstones
the other thing I suppose I should say is that I've got the opacity set only at
about 14 I'll I'll push that up to 20 I wouldn't normally work at such a high
opacity but it will help you see what I'm doing and I've got the hardness set
at zero and the reason I'm setting the hardness at zero is I'm actually dodging
quite a large area at once and when you're dodging large areas it tends to
help with the blending of those areas
the foliage that surrounds the rocks
here you can see the difference that we've created now I'm going to switch to
the other tool the burn tool and again I'm going to still work on the mid-tones
and I'm just going to harden up the detail or the edges of the brush
slightly wait something to around 30% and I'm also going to use a much smaller
brush and what I'm doing this time is I'm just going to highlight around the
edge of the millstone
in a way that's not so obvious but it will help to emphasize the the
difference between the millstone and its surrounding areas by creating this
contrast the edge to it and I'll do the same around this one
and just creating this edge between the two and I'll I'm going to actually work
a little bit smaller in terms of the brush here by
sizing the edges it just makes the shapes stand out a little bit more so
you're just drawing round it and it is a little bit of a repetitive task but it's
worth the effort and I also want to just darken down the mosses that are on the
stone here so I'm working with detail Dolf don't be afraid to go to smaller
brushes tour a concert just areas of detail to make them stand out that
little bit more now I also want to darken down the millstones in the
distance here and also dark that rock there just a little bit more
I'm now going to enlarge the brush quite a bit and I'm going to go back to a zero
hardness just like and darken down that area just very slightly around the edge
of the frame and then again down into this area I'll darken it a little bit
more and into the corners here
and that creates the look we want so if you look at the original and now look at
the justed area you can see that the the millstones are more obvious and the
foliage is a little bit lighter in these areas
now I'm just going to go back to the Dodge brush and this time I'm just gonna
high go for the highlights and I'm just going to target the highlights in these
areas and you can see them immediately getting that much brighter now I've
probably overdone that so one of the things that I want to show you is this
tool here this little cogged tool so I've got the Dodge and burn layer
selected I click the blender Ange is as it's known and now I can actually
control where the blending takes place so over here I've got the adjustment
which I can actually take down here and as I do that you'll see the the
highlights that I've just created stop blending so I can actually choose
whether or not to include a lot of that dodging there that I've created and you
can add other adjustments to this so the left side of it relates to the darkest
areas whereas the light areas are over on the right and just by using those I
can actually control the adjustments that I've just created in the highlights
so I'm happy with that and you can see the difference there and
of course if I find that too strong I can reduce the opacity of the layers
very slightly and that no looks about right for the conversion I want it to
take place what I'm going to do now is create a new
stump layer so this is a layer that combines all the other layers together
into one new layer and the way I'm doing that is by holding down the shift option
command + E keys on my keyboard so if you're using a Windows PC that shift alt
can rolled a knee and now we've got our new
layer so if I just turn all the other layers off you can see that new layer
there if I turn on the two layers the silver effects and background layer and
I turn that off you can see again it shows the effects of the dodging and
burning the next thing I want to do is to create my softening effect that I
want to create for this image because the image at the moment is just a little
bit too harsh so I'll select the layer that I've just created and I'm going to
do this as I often do using frequency separation and in the frequency
separation dialog I'm just going to create a soft effect where I can hardly
see the the detail in the image but it's very very blurred so something around in
this case the 24 pixels I'll just apply that now that's created two layers from
the one layer that I heart one of them is called the low frequency if I turn
off the high frequency you'll see that's the blurring effect the high frequency
layer if I turn off the low frequency that's a contrast adjustment that
sharpens up the image if I put the two into a single folder I can turn it off
and on and you'll see there's no difference at the moment though the way
I create the blurring effect is I'll go to the high frequency layer and then
I'll reduce the opacity of that layer and it just softens up the image and
gives it that nice dreamy effect now the other thing I try to do is I'll
duplicate the low frequency layer so I'll just command + J on my keyboard and
then I'll reduce the opacity of that down to something like 25% and then
change its blending mode to soft light and that creates quite a nice effect on
that layer so there's the original which is quite harsh and there's the softened
one that's got this nice glowing effect to it now again if you wanted to hide
the effect from certain parts of the image you could apply a layer mask to
this or you could use this blending
so by doing the adjustment down to zero here for the input value I'm affecting
the blacks in the image and that allows me to control where the blending
actually takes place so what I've done here is I've created something where the
black the blurring doesn't take place in dark areas or it only takes place to a
small degree and then I increase it quite dramatically through the shadows
mid-tones and then on to the highlights where it's at the maximum level that's
created the finished image I'm Robin Whalley
you've been watching lenscraft I'll see you next time for another video