Today I want to share one of the ways you can use the new Luminosity Range mask in Affinity
Photo 2. I'll be using the new masking tool to do some Luminosity blending with this landscape
photo I shot this using a Fuji xt3 camera and a Fuji 10 to 24 lens at 10 millimeters I've
already pre-processed the raw file using dxo Photolab 6 to address some problems like lens
Distortion I then exported the image as a dng file opening it in Affinity Photo 2. because
Affinity Photo 2 treats the dng file as a raw file it automatically loads it in the Develop
Persona which we see here notice that the image is a little bit overexposed which is causing the sky
to lose some of its color what I'm going to do to fix this is process two versions of the raw
file one will be optimized for the bright areas of the scene and the other for the shadows I'll then
use the Luminosity Range mask to blend the two images together to optimize this image for the
sky also spell by reducing the exposure by minus 0.5 this improves the exposure and the color but
the clouds are no lacking contrast let's increase the contrast slider to around 20 percent and I'll
also add some clarity to the image of about 15 to give the clothes more definition notice that I
can see the color of the sky more clearly now so I can address the color balance let's start with the
temperature slider which I'll increase to around 8,200. the sky now appears to have a pink cast to it
so I'll reduce the tint slider to zero percent let's see what effect reducing the Highlight
slider has this seems to be an improvement so I'll reduce it to around minus 30 percent and
before I forget I'll set the output to be a Adobe RGB because I like to use that for my editing in
Affinity Photo the sky is now looking much better if you compare it against the starting image you
can see the Improvement these few adjustments have made I don't need to bother though checking
the sky for noise because I applied deep Prime noise reduction in DXO Photolab now don't worry
about the foreground looking Dreadful at this stage we'll be creating a second version of the
image optimized for that first though it's time to develop this image and take it into the Photo
Persona to do this make sure the output is set to a raw layer using the embedded option this will
only be visible when you're using either the view or the zoom tools if you've got one of the other
tools selected you won't see these options setting the output to the raw layer is very important in
this process after setting the output type click the develop button to switch back to the Photo
Persona the next step is to duplicate our raw layer I can do this by right-clicking on the
layer in the Layer Studio panel and selecting the duplicate option I'll also rename the first layer
to be sky and the new duplicate layer to be ground now I can open the new ground layer by double
clicking it and then back in the develop Persona where you can see the changes I made to the raw
file previously have been copied to this layer and because we've used the raw layer with the embedded
option as the output we can amend the two layers independently looking now at the foreground in
this image you can see that it's way too dark and contrasting let's start by resetting the Shadow
and highlights and then the contrast adjustment sections when I now increase the contrast slider a
setting of about 12 looks right I'll then then do the same with the clarity setting where a setting
of our own 5 looks good I'm going to leave the white balance and change for this image though
because the rocks look about the right color now I can tweak the exposure setting and I'll dial
it back to around minus 0.3 I'll also increase the brightness to five percent and the Black
Point to about one percent all I want to do with these changes is create a good exposure for the
foreground rocks so I'm ignoring the sky now because these rocks have plenty of detail I'm
going to apply some additional sharpening to this image I'll zoom in to 100 using the Navigator so
that I can see the sharpening then in the details tab we have the detail refinement section which
is where we apply the image sharpening because I pre-processed this image with DXL photo lab it
doesn't actually need much sharpening I'll just use a small radius of about 10 percent and an
amount of 25 which makes a slight Improvement I'm now happy with the old overall look of the Rocks
so I can click the develop button and return to the photo Persona if I turn off the ground image
you can see how the rocks are better than in the sky image now to blend the two images together I'm
going to use a Luminosity range mask that's new in Affinity photo too the Luminosity range mask
allows me to blend the two layers together based on how light or darker pixels are in that layer
when I click the preview option we're viewing the mask which is completely white at the moment
because a white mask doesn't hide anything we see the ground layer and not the sky layer below it
but what we want to see is the sky layer in the brightest areas now watch what happens when I
move the white end of the luminance range curve down notice the mask turns black in the light
areas of the sky but the dark areas of the ground stay white this is allowing us to see the ground
layer for the dark areas of the Rocks but hiding it to reveal the sky layer in the brightest areas
if I turn off the mask preview you can see the two images are no blending you can see the Improvement
this makes if I turn the Luminosity Range mask off and on let's go back to the mask preview to see if
we can improve it if I now move the white end of the curve left it turns more of the light areas
of the image to blacken the mask then if I do the same at the black end of the curves line it turns
more of the foreground rocks white let's turn off the mass preview again to check the Blended
image if I hide the gray layer you can see that it's mainly visible in the Rocks but not the sky
looking at the overall image the Luminosity range mask has created a great blend but it's missing
something we seem to be losing the sense that this is an evening scene because we've opened most of
the Shadows ideally we want to see some of the dark areas in the clouds the rocks and the edge in
the distance the way we can do this is by adding a second mask to the ground layer now I can paint
on the mask using the paintbrush tool I'm doing this using a low opacity brush with the hardness
set to zero percent then when I paint with black on these areas we see more of the darker layer
creating the impression of Shadows and because both layers use the embedded raw layer option
I can reopen them in the develop Persona to tweak their adjustments what's great about this is that
in the develop Persona I'm now seeing a preview of the Blended images I can see the effect of
my adjustments in the preview and I'm not trying to second guess the effect they're going to have
on the finished image if I close the developer cylinder again you can see that it's the same as
the photo Persona using the new luminance range mask you have a lot of flexibility for blending
different versions of an image but importantly it also makes the adjustments appear more natural and
it's the same with the new Hue range mask which I demonstrate in this video this is another new tool
in Infinity photo too that can help you make more natural adjustments thanks for watching today and
please don't forget to subscribe I hope to see you back again soon to watch more of my videos