dmstraker

Yes, that's the kind of thing. Looks good! I tried with your original and got the attached. You have more white lines. Did you invert the duplicate or edges? Doesn't matter -- playing with either gives different effect. Dave

Attached examples. Pier1 is original. Pier2 is edited. Zoom in to see detail difference. It's an experiment that gave an interesting result.

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Added version two of document to original message.

Here's a way to make a kind of cartoon of an image. Layer/Duplicate layer. Filters/Detect/Detect Edges. Layer/Invert. Blend Mode: Colour Burn. Add Curves above it all and pull up midtones. Play with Opacity to vary strength of effect. Interesting effect with landscapes and architecture. Not tried it on people.

One of the banes of sharpening, especially in landscapes, is that light lines appear around horizons, trees and so on, forcing you to scale back your sharpening efforts. This can be a nuisance when everythings' great, apart from those darned halos! A very simple solution: 1. Duplicate the pixel layer. 2. Sharpen away. Use Unsharp Mask and turn up the radius as far as you like. Ignore the light halos around things. 3. Here's the magic: Blend mode: Darken. Ole! The halos disappear! So what's happening? For those who are not saying 'but that's obvious': Sharpening finds edges and makes one side lighter and the other side darker to trick the eye into taking greater notice of the edge. In Darken blend mode, Affinity compares pixels in both the duplicate and original images and shows the darker pixel (not the lighter one). Any pixels which have been darkened will be in the sharpened, duplicated layer along edges, and will be shown. Any which have been lightened (on the other side of the sharpened line) will not be shown as the darker pixels from the original layer will be used. Any pixels not affected by the sharpening will be the same, so the blend has no colour-changing effect. Just like that. If there are parts of the picture where you want to keep the light edges in the sharpening, then of course all you need to do is add a white mask to the original layer (or between the original and duplicate) and paint black over the areas to keep this light edging. Note: You can use Difference blend mode to see the sharpened area and guide any masking. Add a temporary Invert layer at the top to make this easier to see, if you like. Corollary: If you blend with Lighten mode, you can probably use this one-sided sharpening to create a glow around things.

The golden ratio is particularly significant on Ax paper sizes. Here's why. Cut a square off one end of a piece of A4 paper. You can do this by folding down one corner to the opposite edge, so one short side lies directly along a long side. Snip off the single layer at the end. Now do this again with the piece you have snipped off, removing a square from this. The piece of paper you have left will have sides in the same ratio as the original A4 page. So you can repeat this process again, and again. If you don't want to snip, you can just draw lines to show the squares, but there's something satisfying about cutting up bits of paper. Furthermore, you can approximate a golden spiral by drawing quadrants in the squares you have cut off. The psychology of 'ooh that's nice' lies in the unconscious identification of squares, which are regular shapes. The mind likes regular shapes and ratios that are associated with this, so it likes the golden thing. Ok, so this is a personal observation rather than an empirically proven fact. But I think I can claim some knowledge of psychology and anyway, it makes a great pet theory. (A bit of proof: Divide up rectangles of any other ratio into golden sections. I think you'll find they are not as nice. Conclusion: Only use golden ratios when you have an Ax-shaped photograph).

Here's my notes on blend modes. Any additions, corrections, pointers, etc. most welcome. Regards -- Dave ----------------------------------------------------- Update 10-Jun-17: Added version two of document _______________________________ Update 22-Jun-17: Added version three of document _______________________________ Updated 29-Jul-17: Added version four of document ---------------------------------------------------- Updated 16-Oct-17 in a separate post here. _______________________________ Blend modes notes V1.pdf Blend modes notes V2.pdf Blend modes notes V3.pdf Blend modes notes V4.pdf

Yes indeed. A key part of selling a product is in training users, who then like the product more and tell their friends. Skilled users also showcase the product well. James does an excellent job of producing first-rate, clear and concise videos.

The layers thing can be a bit of a hurdle for beginners, for who the 'auto fix' buttons may be all they use for a while, graduating to 'Adjustment' panel and then layers later. The official video set is brilliant for getting you going, and the help system is much better than competitors'. There may be potential for something of an Elements-style novice interface, perhaps in its own innovative persona, but this asks a question of development effort: Do you want to focus more on beginners or advanced/professional users? Selfishly, I'd prefer the latter, and it looks like Affinity is heading this way, for example with excellent improvements on PS, such as Blend Ranges, the Blend-if killer. While AP is excellent in many quarters there's still work to do (and it's great to see them working so hard on it). A Browse persona would be great (a la On1). Macros need beefing up to compete with PS Actions. And there's a host of other tweaks that will raise the overall potential.

Wouldn't it be nice if... I could see the whole histogram from my raw / stacked image. There were vertical lines to show the colour space limit. I could grab and drag any part of the histogram (sideways, and maybe up/down too). I could mark 'anchors' that would not move. I could do this for Master, RGB, CMYK, etc. Yes, I know Levels, Curves and some other sliders do some of this, but directly working on the histogram would be so nice! Thank you for watching!

When making multiple slider percentage changes it would be nice to have the total percentage shown. In Black and White adjustment. Also in Colour Mixer. PS does something like this. Thanks you!

Attached is an AP file containing just a group of adjustments. Copy and paste the group as a child of an image (or above if you like). Then open the Curves, HSL or Vibrance sub-groups and double-click on any of the adjustments to tweak blacks, shadows, mid-tones, highlights or whites. It's quite simple - just a curve in Blend Ranges for each. You can constrain changes further with masking. You can also use it in conjunction with macros from a previous post (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/38379-luminosity-mask-selection-macros/), for example to preview area of the image that will be affected. 5-Stage_Adjustments.afphoto

Indeed. In developing http://changingminds.org I've learned a lot about the complexities of people (and I'm still trying to figure out my how my own brain works). We often see ourselves quite differently to how others see us.

Eh oh. Portrait Pro. I find portraiture gets me into trouble too easily. I take what I think is a great photo that really shows the person's character. Then they get unhappy because it is not flattering enough. At least landscapes don't answer back.

Ctrl-Alt Paintbrush does nothing until I start to drag it, then it becomes a colour picker. Left mouse button-Right mouse button-drag allows changes to brush size (horizontal movement) and feather (vertical movement). Other feathering is good. A practical problem with selection brush feathering seems how to show it. But then Quick Mask solves this. It's not a hill I'm going to die on, but I still think allowing feathering when painting with the selection brush would be helpful. Even when snapping to edge, it would be nice to say 'add a couple of pixels feather' rather than having to accept the hard edge and post-feather it. A related puzzle: Select something. You can Select/Feather.. (and any of that menu group). But with the Quick Mask on, you cannot. I can't see the logic of this restriction.

Here's an image taken this morning up our local mountain (the Skirrid). Simple adjustment: A tad vibrance in the mid tones (using Blend Ranges). Curves for a little green boost. Levels in LAB Lightness down a bit. Affinity Photo is such a joy to use.

Of course. My brain is addled today. Rewind (whirr). Here's what happened: I did a selection. Then Quick Mask (so I can see selected area). Then painted with the Selection Brush (snap to edges: off). The Quick Mask is, guess what, a Mask. I should have used the Paint Brush and painted feathered with white. Despite my idiocy, a question remains: would it be useful to allow feathering (and even hardness/opacity) on the Selection Brush?

It would be great if I could add feathering to the quick mask brush. Thank you!

That's most excellent news, v_kyr. Thanks! (Google seems to be lagging on this) ...though looking at the Sony Compact entry for the RX100V it only indicates the crop factor (no <calibration> entry). ...but looking further, it seems to reference via <mount> a table lower down. Even better news.

I have a similar issue with my Sony RX100V and a bunch of other lenses for my A7R2. I believe Affinity uses lensfun, whose list of supported lenses/fixed-lens cameras is here : http://lensfun.sourceforge.net/lenslist/. It generally has poor Sony coverage. I'd dearly love to see Affinity support my kit, but until then I'm using Lightroom as a front-end and then doing a pass-through to Affinity for the serious stuff. Searching the forum for lensfun gives a number of other posts on this topic, for example https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/37319-automatic-lens-correction-in-affinity-photo-15/?p=184852

Attached is a simple tones bar that can be used in AP for: Assessing luminosity of parts of an image. Constraining curves adjustments to specific tones. Variable luminosity-based selection and edit. Details on origin and use are included in a pdf. mono-tones.zip

X is calculated, Y is eyeballed for half curve, then kept vertically symmetrical. To input them into the graph, just fill out the text fields below (and uncheck Linear).

These macros use Blend Ranges, which work only on RGB+Master in normal RGB mode, which I'm assuming most people will be editing in. You can't switch within Blend Ranges to LAB in the way you can in Curves. But yes, if you switch the document to LAB mode you could recreate the macros to apply to the Lightness channel in Blend Ranges. I've included a pdf in the document set explaining how I created the macros, including the X-Y coordinates of all the Blend Ranges points. (I did an experiment just now, switching to Document/Colour Format/LAB, tweaking Blend Ranges Lightness, then switching back to RGB -- the Blend Ranges graph was still there, but it was now in Red. Hmm. Looks like a bug?) You might also be able to do something in Channels, which is the classic PS way to do luminosity masking.

Simplest way to remove a guide line (as toupee says): Switch to Move tool (V) and drag the offending line out.Another way without selecting it directly: Add a short-cut key (Edit/Preferences, Shortcut Keys) to show the Guides Manager. Toggling guide lines is Ctrl-;, so Ctrl-Alt-; seems reasonable (this is handy anyway if you use guides a lot). Then when you want to remove a guide lines, just hit Ctrl-Alt-;, click on the offending line and click the garbage bin icon. A note about this: if you hit the delete key when selecting the line in the Guides Manager, it deletes the image. It should really delete the guide line. The Guides Manager is also a good place in which locks on lines may be added as a new feature. Alternatively hover over the line until the cursor changes, then right click for pop-up menu.