White Balance on Selected Part of an Image

[David Cheshire]

I am new to Affinity and this is my first question,  I apologise that it is so simple. I have created this image and removed the background, in a jpeg it is rendered white. I would like to make the watch dial whiter but without changing the colour of the strap, so I don't want to change the colour balance of the whole image. Ideally I want to only change the white of the dial.

Thanks for any instructions or helpful suggestions!

[DWright]

Hi @David Cheshire,

Welcome to the forum

To do this use the Brush Selection Tool (keyboard shortcut W) to select the watch face then from the Adjustment studio or from the Layer menu>New Adjustment Layer select White balance and the changes that you make will only be applied to the selected area 

[David Cheshire]

9 minutes ago, DWright said:

Hi @David Cheshire,

Welcome to the forum

To do this use the Brush Selection Tool (keyboard shortcut W) to select the watch face then from the Adjustment studio or from the Layer menu>New Adjustment Layer select White balance and the changes that you make will only be applied to the selected area 

Hi, thanks, and thanks for your quick reply. I have tried to do as you suggest but I am finding it difficult to get the selection to follow the edge of the dial smoothly, see the selection line in the image, is there an easy way to smooth the selection curve?

I did originally try to select the dial area using the elliptical marquee tool. If I did this in Gimp I would make a rough selection and then zoom in top, bottom, left and right and tweak the selection to be more accurate, but I couldn't find a way to drag the size / shape of an elliptical marquee with the mouse; is it possible?

[dutchshader]

You can use the ellips smart shape for this, adjust size, select>selection from layer.

[GarryP]

For something like this I would be tempted to start by using an Ellipse as a Clipping Mask for the Brightness Adjustment.
See my attached video where you can see that the ellipse is adjustable after it has been applied to the Adjustment.
If you want to further adjust the ellipse you can Convert To Curves and use the Node Tool to make changes where necessary.

 

[David Cheshire]

30 minutes ago, GarryP said:

For something like this I would be tempted to start by using an Ellipse as a Clipping Mask for the Brightness Adjustment.
See my attached video where you can see that the ellipse is adjustable after it has been applied to the Adjustment.
If you want to further adjust the ellipse you can Convert To Curves and use the Node Tool to make changes where necessary.

Thanks for your answer, and for taking the time to make the awesome video - it's fantastic! Thank you so much.

The only question I have now is, is it possible to feather the edges so that the transition is not so sharp?

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.
You can give the Ellipse a bit of fuzziness by adding small a Gaussian Blur Effect to it (<1px?).
The Adjustment will then be automatically fuzzy.

Edited February 17, 2020 by GarryP
Added examples.

[David Cheshire]

14 minutes ago, GarryP said:

You’re welcome.
You can give the Ellipse a bit of fuzziness by adding small a Gaussian Blur Effect to it (<1px?).
The Adjustment will then be automatically fuzzy.

That's perfect, thanks, I really appreciate your help.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome again.
One nice thing about doing it this way is that everything is adjustable and removable so you can quickly experiment without having to keep various test versions of your image, or using Undo a lot.

[David Cheshire]

18 hours ago, GarryP said:

You’re welcome again.
One nice thing about doing it this way is that everything is adjustable and removable so you can quickly experiment without having to keep various test versions of your image, or using Undo a lot.

That's a good point too, thanks again. 

Although I was working with a trial version that I downloaded recently, in a couple of days I am already so impressed by Affinity that I have now paid for a licence.