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MikaG

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Posts posted by MikaG

  1. While Fuji's RAW-files render strangely in Adobe Camera Raw, I find Affinity Photo rather poor, where RAW-conversion is concerned. Reason being, highlight recovery and lifting shadows is rather poor compared to the rest of the bunch.

     

    I read somewhere, that one could change the conversion engine in AP, but personally I have never tried, because Capture One leaves nothing to be desired, IMO.

  2. Ich habe im Rahmen des 10-tägigen Probeabos die Tutorials zu Affinity Photo angesehen und finde sie sehr hilfreich. Olaf Giermann geht im Workshop die Themen lösungsorientiert an und zeigt dann, wie es mit AP umgesetzt wird. Er featured nicht die immer wieder gleichen Themen, wie sie sonst überall angeboten werden. Dabei gibt er wertvolle Tipps, die auch auf alle anderen Pixelbearbeitungsprogramme zutreffen.

    Das Tutorial zum schnellen Einstieg ist später mit einigen Überschneidungen zum Workshop, aber gerade bei den Grundlagen (die ich eigentlich überspringen wollte) kommen praktische Tipps am laufenden Band, die den effizienten Umgang mit AP ausbauen. Das habe ich vorher so auch noch nie gesehen. Beide Tutorials sind inhaltlich sehr wertvoll und ich kann sie nur empfehlen!

    Einzig, das Tutorial zu Affinity Designer musste ich abbrechen, da Monika Gause so monoton klingt, wie Angela Merkels Neujahrsansprachen. Das ist nur etwas für ganz Hartgesottene... Schade!

  3. 3. Cmd + L adds a Levels adjustment layer. I applied roughly the same settings, as I did in my first tutorial. Now a really cool feature comes into play. In the Levels dialog box choose the Merge button in the upper right corner (actually rather centric, to be more precisely) and the Levels adjustment layer will be automatically merged/applied to the mask layer underneath. Another way to do this would be to make the Levels adjustment layer active in the layers palette and press Cmd + E, which also merges the adjustment layer down to the next pixel layer below, which happens to be the mask layer in this case. HINT: This method works with any adjustment layer.

     

    From this point on all the afore mentioned methods still apply to create the edge mask and I won”t repeat these here. Just look into my first tutorial and continue with number 6 from here on.

    post-25199-0-39742800-1453660033_thumb.jpg

  4. As I dug deeper into AP - well, the help file obviously really helps - I finally got a grip on the Channels panel. Using channels makes life a lot easier, where masking is concerned. So, I decided to give a little update on my workflow. I’m still learning how AP works, so tweaking methods here and there happens a lot to me at the moment. Let’s get started with edge masking 2.0.

     

    1. I chose the green channel, which provides the most details and right clicked on Pixel Green to choose Create Grayscale Layer which adds a new black and white layer in the layers palette.

    post-25199-0-77155300-1453659928_thumb.jpg

  5. I haven't figured this out enough yet and maybe I got you wrong. But with Difference you can only estimate the radius of pixels that are affected by the threshold settings. It can't give a reliable preview of the strengh of USM. In my 12 megapixel example I can see faint changes in the Difference "preview" when I adjust the Radius value to 1% and it becomes even more obvious at the Radius of 2. Factor and Threshold I left untouched. Just make sure to view zoomed to 100% to get a representative pixel by pixel view on your display.

     

    I agree, it would be great to have a more precise preview of each of the settings just by holding the Alt key, like Adobe Camera Raw does. But at the end of the day I'm fine with this method because I use edge masks anyway to protect from unwanted sharpening.

  6. I know, it's a crutch. But you might get that threshold preview by changing temporarily the filter's blend mode to Difference.

     

    I duplicated the layer, applied a USM live filter and set the blend mode to Difference. Difference will show you a preview of altered pixels compared to the layer below. You get an idea of how much pixels are affected by the USM filter. Of course you have to change back to Normal blend mode, to actually see the amount of sharpening you have applied. As I said, it's a crutch, but maybe worth trying...

    post-25199-0-46496500-1453347562_thumb.png

  7. You kind of get a threshold preview when using the high pass filter. It affects mostly the edges in an image and leaves gradient portions untouched. I prefer high pass sharpening with people portraits almost all the time. USM serves better with lots of tiny details in an image. I only chose USM in my example, because it saved some additional steps like selecting blend modes like Overlay or Soft Light with high pass sharpen.

  8. Voilà! Details in the image are tack sharp right now and all the skin pretty much is untouched by the sharpen filter. Check out the before and after and readjust the sharpening sliders if you wish.

     

    This procedure is applied quickly even if it has several steps. Once the function of Actions is added to Affinity Photo it will become a task even faster. To me it is absolutely worth the extra 60 seconds to get even better results with edge masking the sharpening effect. I have set custom keyboard shortcuts for most of the filters, so this speeds up its usage.

     

    This method is totally influenced by Deke McClelland, who is one of the Photoshop Gurus and all the credits belong to him. After some trial and error I was able to translate his method to Affinity Photo and I hope to help some of you to achieve better results with sharpening techniques. Same rules apply to landscape photographs, architecture, still life… you name it. Play with the radius’ values depending on your sensor size and desired ‘focus’ of the sharpening effect.

     

    Enjoy!

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