cindyw

hi this is the image that I was working on as a sample. Hope this is what you need.

I have Affinity Photo 1.9. In some previous versions of Affinity, I was able to use the HSL adjustment, click the HSV box and, by setting the luminosity shift value to 100% (pure white in HSL mode, which still works) get rid of the luminosity information so that I could use the color values of the image only. Is there a way to get this re-instated? It was very useful. Thanks. Unfortunately, I don't know when it stopped working. When I try this now, it just seems to slightly bleach the image colors. Thanks!

I tried my best to work with a Wacom Cintiq and my two existing screens, including the new Mac Pro one that rotates but did not succeed as the brush pointer was unstable and the resolution much lower that on my Mac Pro screen. Does anyone have experience using the Wacom Intuos Pro with the new Mac Pro Catalina and its new rotating screen?

Thanks, John. I need alll the help I can get.

Hi John, I've been traveling and had not had access to Affinity until now. Let me try to explain more clearly. I have a iPad 2. Totally useless for this project. 1. When I try to create an Affinity stack on my desktop I can indeed see the component layers. However, not all the information I have provided is shown. Affinity has cropped my image so that I have lost part of the information. In this example it is the stem of the flower that is missing as you can see below. 2. If I produce a panorama, Affinity gives me access to the full range of the files that I provided including the flower stem in this example, but, because of the nature of what I am trying to do, they are stacked on top of each other so that I cannot see the underlying info unless I click through them. There is no layers panel available. 3. Trying a Focus merge, the layers panel is available but only shows one pixel layer without access to the underlying layers. Because I am shooting moving objects since I often have to photograph in windy conditions (our last location was on a mountain top at 9300 feet), the resulting image has way too many ghosts which make it impossible to work with. What I've been doing up to now is using the Photoshop Photomerge and simply unchecking the Blend Images together option. This produces individual layers which are aligned but are fully available for me to mask as needed.

Thanks for sharing your moth technique, John. It's one that I had not heard before. Very interesting. I'll certainly see what I can adapt to hummingbirds. We actually use a set-up with 14 flashes. It takes an average of 3000 shots to get one good one of these fast flying birds, so we actually feed them to persuade them to come to our set-up. We photograph the flowers separately and then work on a composite image. I tried to focus stack the flowers but because I'm forced to photograph them in the field under often windy conditions, the focus stack leaves too many ghosts. I would be ok with that if I could access the individual layers and their masks as I can in PS so I can touch up as needed. Do you know of a way to use Affinity Photo to access the layers and masks of a focus stack or a panorama like you can in a simple stack? Thanks again, Cindy

Just got a chance to see the article you refer to. Very interesting. As you might guess, we are obsessed with hummingbirds but I had not see that article before. Seeing that mimosa tree full of little jewels must have been an amazing sight indeed! Not sure you received my earlier reply since its not sowing up here. We use up to 14 strobes to freeze the action rather than the camera shutter. Here is a shot explanation of how we do it. https://focusfrogstore.com/pages/what-we-do

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, John. Using the Panorama option would indeed well work for me if I could access the individual layers and layer masks so I could make changes as needed. I can see the layer brush option, but since my layers are stacked one over the other, I find that difficult to work with. Any idea if the individual layers can me accessed like the can with a simple Stack? Unfortunately, as this an adjunct to my main project of photographing hummingbirds in flight, I'm often short on time and equipment and simply wandering in someone else's garden, so the very good suggestions about how to hold my subject still are not a good option for me. Here is a sample of my work, for reference.

Thanks maspick. Unfortunately, I am restricted to working under less than ideal conditions. Is there a way to access the layers and corresponding masks in a panorama? Or, alternatively, is there a way to get a stack of images to show the full extent of the information that I have inputted? Thanks!

I would like to stack several images together but still have complete access to the underlying layers. I'm taking close up photos of flowers in the field, using several images to produce one composite that is acceptably sharp throughout despite the handicaps of having a moving subject. I take a series of close ups of the different parts of a flower and then stitch them together. I've tried using the Stack option but the image that is produced is often missing part of my information since the images do not line up one in front of the other and the resulting image has a non-standard aspect ratio. I've also tried using the Panorama option but here, I cannot find a way to access the layers and their layer masks individually. I've seen the brushes that allow you to paint in a mask, but find them extremely difficult to use since a good part of each image is hidden behind another. Since the flowers move as I'm often having to do this outdoors in windy conditions, Focus Merge yields too many ghosts. Any ideas? I would like to have a stack or panorama of images which shows the all the image information that I have and also the underlying layers. I can do this is PS photomerge if I uncheck the option to merge the images together. How could I accomplish this in Affinity? Thanks!