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Portrait Editing Brushes & Macros


A. Loewen

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Hello, I'm a photography and editing enthusiast. I've been learning this craft for a while and I'm a firm believer in sharing information so others can learn, and adapt it to their own needs. Many of the techniques I used to create these brushes and macros were not pioneered by myself, but I did create the brushes and macros contained within here myself.

 

Installation

Brushes

Enable the Brushes studio panel if it is not already, click View > Studio > Brushes.

Click on the Brushes studio panel, then click the Waffle icon. Click Import Brushes, and find the downloaded brush file on your system.

A new brush category called "Retouching" will appear in the Brushes studio panel.

Macros

Enable the Library studio panel if it is not already, click View > Studio > Library.

Click the Library studio panel then click the Waffle icon. Click Import Macros, and find the downloaded brush file on your system.

A new macro category called "Retouching" will appear in the Library studio panel.

Modifying

Brushes

Right click a brush and click Edit

Macros

Enable the Macro studio panel if it is not already, click View > Studio > Macro. Right click one of the macros and choose Edit Macro. Some steps allow you to click a gear and alter values. If you need to modify more in depth, unfortunately you will need to re-record the entire macro. I highly recommend opening a text editing program, and writing down each step in a macro before beginning to re-record. When done, you will need to click the button to Add to Library, or Export as an individual macro.

 


What's Included

Brushes

Markup Pencil Brush

  • Useful for making "notes" to yourself.

3x High Flow Brushes

  • Hard, Satin, and Soft brushes.

3x Medium Flow Brushes

  • Hard, Satin, and Soft brushes.

3x Low Flow Brushes

  • Hard, Satin, and Soft brushes.

This brush collection is sorted into each flow group by brush size (64, 32, 16) for easy identification when choosing a new brush. Choose a brush and resize it to the size that you need. Each brush has Pressure dynamics enabled for use with Art Tablets so that they offer a higher flow with more pen pressure, although they can also be used by mouse users.

 

Macros

Any Macro appearing with a *** warning text will run slowly and be very intense on your computer's system resources. I highly recommend letting these macros run, and just waiting for them to complete without attempting to do more work, or alt-tabbing to other programs.


Luminosity Masks ***

  • This macro manipulates channels to generate MASK LAYERS (not pixel layers), and deletes all created spare channels afterwards to avoid bloated files. To use one of the mask layers, drag the mask out of the folder and over another layer's picture icon so that it creates a vertical blue bar. Alternatively, drag the mask layer so that it appears normally in the layer stack (as if it were not clipped), right click the mask, then click Mask to Below. If you need more than one copy of a particular mask, right click the mask and click Duplicate. If you are interested in modifying the macro, I highly recommend watching Robin Whalley's video which is where I learned how to do this process within Affinity Photo.

Black & White

Solarize

  • Generates a curve meant to be used to check color consistency across gradients, as well as useful for finding tricky dust spots / blemishes. This is not meant to be a creative effect, only useful for editing purposes.

Dodge & Burn

  • Generates curve layers with masks for dodging and burning. Use a white brush on the mask to reveal the effect. I've tweaked the blend ranges so that each effect rolls off, i.e. dodge will not effect the bright tones as much as it does the dark tones, burn will not effect the dark tones as much as it does the bright tones.

Color Correction

  • Generates a curve in both RGB and CMYK color space for basic color correction. Open the curve layer, use the picker tool inside the adjustment properties and click on the area of the image you wish to correct. Some knowledge of color theory is useful here.

Contrast

  • Simple curve layer with an S-Curve to boost image contrast.

Local Contrast & Sharpening ***

  • Do you enjoy the Clarity filter, but hate how little control it gives you? Give your image some punch while being able to dial in the amount of local contrast boost and sharpening independantly. For more effect, feel free to duplicate either layer. Use a mask on an individual effect, or the whole group.

Frequency Separation - Bilateral ***

  • Some editing workflows prefer using a different blur to the gaussian method of the built-in filter. Because of limitations of how Macros work, the blur will not generate an actual preview. If you need to preview what you are doing, please create a merged visible layer (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E), then run the Bilateral Blur filter. Record the values you find to be useful, then delete the merged layer and run the macro.

 

FAQ

  • Reserved for future questions that may come up

Retouching Dynamic.afbrushes Retouching.afmacros

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  • 4 weeks later...

Apologies if I'm doing this wrong, most other forums I am active on have an Edit button to modify posts, I seem to be completely unable to find it here.

 

I've updated both the Brush and Macro pack and both can be found attached to this post. Installation instructions are still the same as the original post.

 

  • Clarification: I've realized in the original post, I did not mention that the macros were created in Affinity Photo and are intended to be used there. They have not been tested on iPad.
     
  • Brushes pack now include a 100% flow brush for convenience when filling in large areas when masking.
     
  • Fixed an error with the Soft Round Low-Flow brush
     
  • Macros have been rearranged
     
  • Macros pack now include a Mask Helper macro. This generates a red fill layer with a black mask. Use a white brush to fill in your mask, and it the red will reveal where your mask is active. When done, drag your mask above the desired layer, right click and select Mask to Below, or drag and offer the mask to the text label of the desired layer to be masked, creating a blue horizontal bar underneath. Delete the fill layer after the mask has been moved.
     
  • Local Contrast & Sharpening has been renamed Clarity.
     
  • Clarity has been completely rebuilt to use Live Filter blur layers. The macro executes significantly faster, but may perform slow on systems unable to use the new Hardware Acceleration in Photo 1.9.
    • For stronger effect of Local Contrast, adjust the opacity or blending mode of the Local Contrast group folder, or alter the strength of the Live High Pass filter contained inside.
    • For stronger effect of Sharpening, adjust the blend mode of the Sharpening group folder, or alter the strength of the Live Bilateral Blur filter contained inside.
    • Both the Local Contrast and Sharpening group are created with mask layers which can be altered by painting with a black brush to hide each effect.
       
  • Frequency Separation has been completely rebuilt to use Live Filter blur layers. The macro executes significantly faster, but may perform slow on systems unable to use the new Hardware Acceleration in Photo 1.9.
    • Alt click the High Frequency group folder, or the Low Frequency layer to see the current strength of the blur applied.
    • To Increase or decrease the strength of the blur, locate both Live Bilateral Blur filters for both the High Frequency group and Low Frequency layer. Change the value of the blur to your desired strength. Both blur layers MUST use the same value to create an image identical to the original image stack before Frequency Separation was performed.

 

Edit: I am inclined to believe Live blur layers have a bug currently associated with them causing them to not correctly render along the borders of images. Using the macro as-is will result in imperfect image separations. A possible workaround until the bug is resolved would be to use the live layers to "test pilot" the radius strength desired, deleting the live layers, then running a destructive bilateral blur on the Low Frequency layer, as well as the High Frequency Inverted layer.

Retouching Dynamic.afbrushes Retouching.afmacros

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38 minutes ago, A. Loewen said:

Apologies if I'm doing this wrong, most other forums I am active on have an Edit button to modify posts, I seem to be completely unable to find it here.

This one does, too (I'll show you in a moment by editing this post).

However, editing can be restricted based on how new the user is (you're quite new, having registered less than a month ago and only having 2 posts) and how old the post is, or some combination. So perhaps you don't have that option for that post.

Look at the bottom of the post you just made, for this, and compare with what you see for your first post in this topic:

image.png.5c079a091e7183d3cb66cf41c30a04a1.png

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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50 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

This one does, too (I'll show you in a moment by editing this post).

However, editing can be restricted based on how new the user is (you're quite new, having registered less than a month ago and only having 2 posts) and how old the post is, or some combination. So perhaps you don't have that option for that post.

Look at the bottom of the post you just made, for this, and compare with what you see for your first post in this topic:

image.png.5c079a091e7183d3cb66cf41c30a04a1.png

Ah, I see now. I have it on my followup post, but not the original. Thanks for the info.

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You're welcome. Also, for your interest, check out the Options if you have them. They would allow you to hide a post that you decide is unnecessary, or (if available on the first post in a topic) you could hide a complete topic that you started.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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