James Ritson

Hi @srg, your Pentax camera is actually exhibiting quite a few hot pixels, most of which are automatically remapped by Affinity Photo. I'm guessing it's the 30 second long exposure which is causing the sensor to heat up and exhibit these hot pixels. The offending area near the middle of the image doesn't get remapped however because it's actually two hot pixels next to each other of differing intensities: Because of this, the pixel arrangement could potentially be genuine useful information within the image, so Photo doesn't remap it. Hopefully this issue wouldn't show up with most images, just those shot with a long exposure. Some cameras will remap pixels at the bayer level as they're written to the memory card (the Sony E-series cameras do this I believe), and some don't. Sony cameras get a bit of flack for this from astrophotographers—they've been nicknamed "star eaters"! Unfortunately I think the only course of action for you is to quickly inpaint out the hot pixels once you've developed the image—alternatively, you can use the Blemish Removal Tool in the Develop Persona and just single-click over the hot pixel area. Hope that helps!

Hi @Dmi3ryd, the video Gareth posted would help with making selections from Material/Object ID render passes (or Cryptomatte in its bitmap form). However, it sounds like you just want to convert a pixel/image layer to a mask, is that correct? If so, copy/paste or place your alpha image into your document, then go to Layer>Rasterise to Mask. Alternatively, you can right click the layer thumbnail and Rasterise to Mask will be on that menu too. Once the layer is a mask, you can mask other layers with it (drag-drop over the layer thumbnail, not the label text), and you can CMD-click (Mac) / Ctrl-click (Windows) the mask layer to create a selection from it. Finally, with the mask layer selected, you can also go to the bottom of the channels panel and right click [Layer Name] Alpha then choose Create Spare Channel. This will create a channel from the mask which you can load into other masks or into your active selection. PS if you want to invert a mask, just select it and use Layer>Invert, or CMD+I (Mac) / Ctrl+I (Windows). One final note: if you need to multiply or divide alpha by the colour values, you need to flatten the mask into its parent pixel layer first. With a mask clipped to a layer, right click the parent layer and choose Rasterise. Now, on the Filters>Colours menu, you have Multiply by Alpha and Divide by Alpha. You can also do this non-destructively with a Live Procedural Texture filter, but that's for another day 😉 Hope that helps!

Hi all, I'm pleased to share with you some macros I've been working on—these are predominantly intended for users of Blender who are retouching their renders in Affinity Photo, but you can also use these macros with EXR/HDR renders from other 3D software and even merged HDR photographs from bracketed exposures. They enable you to easily achieve whichever Filmic look you require in Affinity Photo with just one click—no messing around with OpenColorIO configurations, no confusion with which colour management option to use, and certainly no flattening and converting to 16/8-bit to apply any kind of final transform! The macros and accompanying readme can be downloaded here: http://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html Here are the main talking points of this macro set: Emulates the Filmic view transform and looks (e.g. Very High Contrast, Low Contrast) that you can apply in Blender. These macros are intended for HDR documents (OpenEXR, Radiance HDR). When saving to these formats, Blender writes out linear scene-referred values, so you do not get the Filmic view transform and looks applied. Applying the Filmic view transform and looks in Affinity Photo is possible but complicated, and involves copying the Blender OpenColorIO configuration files and pointing Affinity Photo to them. Instead, these macros can be added to a fresh install of Affinity Photo—no other dependencies like OpenColorIO—and you can apply the Filmic look you want non-destructively. If you want, just apply the Filmic Log transform—no look—and shape the tones yourself using Affinity Photo's adjustment layers. For convenience, move between different colour spaces non-destructively (Rec.709, Rec.2020, ROMM RGB, ACES CG, DCI-P3). Profiles are included in the macro file so are portable—no dependencies. I've also recorded an instructional video here: And some comparison images: Thanks very much for reading, hope you find them useful!

Hi @Steven T, just so I understand—using the manual white balance feature on your Nikon won't work correctly, even if you point it at some foliage (or whatever you want to be your artificial "white point")? Bear in mind that most cameras will actually report an error—my Sony A6000 does this and I previously used an Olympus Pen that did something similar—but will apply the white balance shift nonetheless. Perhaps just double check if that's the case? If your image looks fairly grey and neutral but the sky has an orange/red tint you're in the right ballpark. What infrared pass is your Nikon, or is it full spectrum? Either way, you can shoot at 590nm and get plenty of false colour in the red spectrum—just use the White Balance picker in Develop and pick an area you want to set the white point from—regardless of how extreme the shift, it will be applied. If you don't manually white balance (and so your entire image will be mostly red), the auto exposure on your camera will avoid clipping the red channel, but this will underexpose the blue and green channels and so your overall image may be noisier when white balanced. Not the end of the world, just not ideal! Filter strength depends entirely on your artistic choice, really—if you want false colour for that "Goldie" look, 590nm is great. 720nm is a nice balance but colours aren't as rich, then 800nm upwards is more tailored towards black and white conversion. Regardless, you shouldn't have any issues within Photo, it can white balance any type of infrared image. Hope that helps!

Hi @norbre, try setting your output on the Selection Refinement dialog to New Layer or New Layer with Mask. The preview you are seeing includes colour decontamination—which means the background colour contribution to edge pixels is disregarded, eliminating the typical halo effect you would see. However, if you output to a selection or mask, Photo cannot perform this since it’s not manipulating the pixels of the layer—just masking them. Using New Layer or New Layer with Mask allows the edge pixels to be decontaminated—hopefully this should solve your issue. In fact, if you choose New Layer with Mask and then turn off the mask layer, you will see exactly how the edge pixels and surrounding areas have been treated!

Hi, it was a case of studying the OCIO configuration and picking it apart—that only gets you so far, unfortunately. Filmic uses a normalised log2 transform which has to be approximated at the moment in Affinity Photo, and there are transforms either side of that which are just basic maths. They're not exposed in the OCIO configuration file, however, so a bit of digging was required.. The 3D LUT is what performs the crosstalk—essentially, emulating an organic film-like response. In the digital domain, a colour becoming more intense would just become more saturated. The LUT emulates an organic response: instead, as these colours become intense, the channels "crosstalk"—so an incredibly bright red colour would gradually start to desaturate as it mixes with the blue and green channels. That's my understanding, anyway—might not be correct! The "looks" are actually just 1D LUTs that are applied once the colour values are in Filmic Log space—then there's an sRGB device transform at the end (another LUT) which completes the chain. Photo has a write-back feature for most bitmap formats (JPEG, TIFF, PNG etc) when you Ctrl+S or CMD+S to save. Seems this applies to EXR files as well. The workaround is just to use File>Save As and save as a native .afphoto document—hope that helps!

To clarify the information in this thread based off a subsequent discussion in another thread, it's most likely caused by using certain blend modes whose mathematics do not interact well with unbounded floats—typically yielding negative values. An easy way to test this is to produce a 32-bit document with two rectangles that overlap. Set both rectangles to pure red, then increase their intensity—for example, increase one by +1 and the other by +2. You could use any float values here greater than 1, e.g. 2.54 and 5.43. Scroll through the blend modes on the top-most rectangle and you will quickly see which blend modes produce negative values: Screen, Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Exclusion, Subtract, Negation, Reflect and Glow. We've discussed adding warnings to these blend modes in the dropdown when a user is in 32-bit, and potentially clamping them as well, with the understanding that this would clip the unbounded value range. @London your issue should be somewhat mitigated by using those Filmic transform macros I've provided, since all of the transforms will tone map to 0-1 range. Just place any composite layers with the problematic blend modes above the Filmic transform group and you should be good to go!

Just bumping this @London — I've revised the macros because I was working off an inconsistency. Looks like LUT transforms with GPU acceleration on Mac aren't performed correctly. I've adjusted all the macros to render correctly across Windows and Mac when in software (CPU rendering). Not sure which platform you're on? It may not be a huge deal, since the difference can be slight for most image cases, but if you're on Mac and you absolutely want a 1:1 recreation of the Filmic looks, you'll have to disable Metal compute for now. You can do that through Preferences>Performance, where you can uncheck "Enable Metal compute acceleration". If you're on Windows, no worries, continue as usual 🙂 Revised macros are available at the same download link above..

Hi @London, I'd appreciate your feedback: http://www.jamesritson.co.uk/downloads/macros/jr_macros_blender_filmic.zip I'll make this available low-key for now to see how people get on with it. There's an included PDF with installation and usage instructions. A couple of things to note: The first run of a macro whenever you start up Affinity Photo will take a couple of seconds (or possibly longer) before you see a result—this is due to a complex 3D LUT being loaded. Subsequent macro applications will be instant. Don't expect an absolute 1:1 match with blender—this is designed to allow people to bake Filmic looks into their 3D renders when using ICC Display Transform (traditional document-to-screen colour management). This colour management differs to the sRGB EOTF device transform within Blender, so I don't believe you could ever get a 1:1 match. Even TIFF files with a Filmic look baked in look different in Affinity Photo when compared to Blender. In short, you can match any exported bitmap image from Blender (e.g. a TIFF with Very Low Contrast), but you might not be able to match exactly what you see in Blender's viewport. I could have gotten a slightly closer match to Blender by using an OCIO adjustment layer, but that would be dependent on the user setting up Blender's OpenColorIO configuration within Affinity Photo—something I wanted to avoid. Instead, these macros use a bunch of maths to approximate a log transform 🙂 Let me know how you get on! Here's a comparison I'll use for forum posts etc:

Hi again, the macro pack is pretty much finished so I need to test it cross-platform and then I'll upload a test version—I would be really grateful if you could give it a try and let me know how you get on! It's quite exciting because I've implemented the log transform using existing Photo filters and functions, so you don't actually need the relevant OCIO configuration set up—anyone can use these macros and get the Filmic looks without having to extract the configuration files from blender. Straight away, I suspect Screen mode is your problem. The maths involved mean that it would be very easy to produce negative values. For example, let's say you were blending two float pixel values that were both out of range (greater than 0-1). Take 1.323 and 5.12 as an example: 1-(1-1.323)*(1-5.12) This results in a pixel value of -0.33076. If you want to blend light areas on top of your main pass (for example, I do this with the bloom pass you can now get using Eevee), just use Add. Simple addition means you won't end up with negative values. Use Opacity or an Exposure adjustment clipped into the layer to control the blending strength. By the way, regarding EDR—do you have an actual EDR/HDR capable display? If not, there's not much point to EDR, since it will simply "unclip" the pixel values from the document colour profile, which by default is sRGB. The overwhites you might be seeing will be outside the coverage of sRGB. If you are actually using an EDR display (or an HDR display with HDR compositing enabled) then ignore this 🙂 Finally, procedural textures are awesome, especially for 3D and compositing workflows! I'll post back here once I've organised those macros.

Hi @London, I've looked through your post history to get an idea of your workflow etc. I work with blender and OCIO quite frequently but I only come across strange colour artefacting when I'm using blend modes that don't work well with unbounded float values (e.g. Screen, Soft/Hard/Vivid Light). Certain tonal adjustments (e.g. Selective Colour, HSL) may also saturate colour values very quickly in linear space, which can often lead to unwanted results. Are you using any particular blend modes or adjustment layers to produce the dark blue? If you grab the colour picker and pick one of these offending colours, you will often find that one of the channels has a large negative value, or the readout may in fact say "nan" (not-a-number). This is normally a sign that you're using a blend mode which doesn't work well with unbounded values (typically >1). Just to troubleshoot, if you open up your EXR document and make no changes apart from configuring the OCIO device and view transforms, do you see any odd colour values or does everything look correct? One final thing worth mentioning: Affinity Photo's OCIO integration is mainly for pass-through editing (e.g. when you want to slot it into a post-production workflow chain with other software that uses OCIO). If your purpose is to export a retouched render from Photo to a non-linear format (e.g. 8-bit JPEG, 16-bit TIFF), you will instead want to use ICC Display Transform as this represents how your document will look with the typical document-screen profile conversion. This does of course complicate things when you want to match the Filmic transforms (or indeed any other OCIO transforms you might be using), since the transform chain for these usually involves a non-linear transform at the end—sRGB OETF, for example. Add this on top of your existing non-linear view transform (using ICC Display Transform) and everything ends up looking too bright. You can use a live Procedural Texture to perform a 2.2 power transform on the RGB channels which will counteract this. Alternatively, I'm almost finished with a small macro pack for adding Filmic transforms and will link to them here shortly...

If I've understood correctly, this is the automatic switch over to the greyscale box colour model whenever you select a mask layer? (And the subsequent annoyance it can cause when trying to perform colour manipulations on other layers) I believe it's easier to fall foul of this on Mac because there's a UI issue—whenever an enclosure layer is created (e.g. new mask layer, live filter layer) it doesn't appear to be selected on the Layers panel UI, thus you naturally click it again to ensure it's highlighted. In doing so, you "reselect" the mask layer, and this breaks the toggle back to the previous colour model you may have been using. Whenever you add a mask layer, try selecting another layer type that isn't a mask without clicking again to actively highlight that mask layer. You should hopefully find that it toggles back to the previous colour model. This tends to be less of an issue on Windows, since the Windows UI correctly highlights an enclosure layer when it's added. The layer is still technically active on Mac (so you can paint on/off the mask) but is not reflected in the UI. I've also noted an inconsistency with the lock colourspace feature and the way it interacts with the model switching. Is this the correct issue you're referring to, or is there another behaviour?

Hi @kyle-io, a screenshot of your layer stack and also your 32-bit preview panel might be useful here, but generally speaking the steps outlined in my video you posted should work as long as you're using ICC Display Transform and not OCIO. The OCIO transform in Photo is non-destructive and does not affect the colour values in your exported document, so if your goal is to convert/export to a non-linear format (8/16-bit) then you need to be using ICC Display Transform. I've got a slightly different approach that you can try which allows you to apply the Filmic looks: Configure OCIO with the blender configuration (e.g. extract it from the application folder) 32-bit Preview Panel, Display Transform to ICC Display Transform Add an OCIO adjustment, go from Linear (scene linear) to Filmic sRGB Add a LUT adjustment and browse to where you put the blender OCIO configuration files. Look in the filmic folder and you'll have several spi1d LUTs that correspond to the looks, e.g. Medium contrast, Very High contrast etc. The values go from lower to higher contrast, so filmic_to_0-35_1-30.spi1d is very low contrast, filmic_to_1.20_1-00.spi1d is very high contrast. For Medium contrast which is the default in blender, pick filmic_to_0-70_1-03.spi1d That should hopefully get you much closer to the Filmic view transform and whichever look you're using. One way to check everything before exporting is to quickly flatten (Document>Flatten) and then convert to 16-bit or 8-bit (Document>Convert Format/ICC Profile). This will switch from linear to non-linear compositing, and will show you what your document will look like when exported to a non-linear format like PNG or JPEG. There shouldn't be any tonal changes when doing this—if there are, you may need to check your 32-bit preview settings and make sure you're not using OCIO Display Transform. Hope that helps!

Hi @Fritz_H, the issue is not related to a 10-bit panel, wide gamut display, anything like that. I simply think it's your colour preferences and how your workspace colour settings are configured. I appreciate you want to work in ROMM RGB for more intense colours, but because you have changed the default colour profile (rather than changing it on a per-image basis whenever you develop a RAW file), you must take into consideration how this affects all imagery you bring into Affinity Photo. Normally, with panorama stitching, the colour profile will be inferred from the images you provide during the stitching process. For example, if you are stitching JPEGs tagged with Adobe RGB, the final panorama document will be in Adobe RGB. This is true, even if your default RGB Colour Profile in Preferences>Colour is different. However, there are circumstances when your RGB Colour Profile choice will be used: if the images do not contain any colour profile tagging (you will typically receive a message in the top right explaining your image has been assigned a colour space), or if you have explicitly enabled Convert opened files to working space in Preferences>Colour. The only way I could reproduce your issue with panorama stitching is by going to Preferences>Colour and enabling the Convert opened files to working space option—could you check your own preferences? If that option is enabled, disable it, then see if your colours are correct. Note that it is disabled by default, so at some point I suspect you may have manually enabled it? Hopefully that will solve your issue. However, do be aware that I'm unsure as to whether your Xiaomi smartphone JPEGs are intended to be in sRGB or a wider colour space—similar to iPhones and how their images are tagged with Display P3. If you open a single JPEG image, what does the colour profile entry read in the top left?

Hi @desdemoli, from reading various discussions and threads about it, ridged multifractal noise appears to be perlin noise modified by an absolute function and inverted. I make no guarantee as to whether this works, but I believe you can do both using a live Procedural Texture filter. Add a new equation field and enable the RGB channels for it, then try: 1-abs(perlinsc(rx/200,ry/200,7,0.6))*0.5 Here's a screenshot of what it looks like: However, there's this quote from a StackOverflow thread: For perlin noise with values in the range of -1 to 1, you would want to use a harmonic perlin noise function, so the equation would need to be adapted like so: 1-abs(perlinhsc(rx/200,ry/200,7,0.6))*0.4 And another screenshot: You will want to experiment with the multiplication value at the end—I lowered it to 0.4 for the harmonic perlin noise example. It's also possible to adapt the comprehensive Perlin Noise preset that ships with the app (not Simple Noise, but the Perlin Noise preset) like so: var v=vec2(rx,ry)*cells/w; tocui(1-abs(perlinhsc(v,oct,pers))*cont)+br You can then use the parameters such as Octaves, Persistence, Cell count etc whilst having the ridged multi fractal perlin noise—at least that's what I think would happen. Hope that helps!