Vale22 Posted April 4, 2021 Share Posted April 4, 2021 Hi, I have around 20 panoramic photos that I need to increase the colours and brightness (read about denoise, clarity, vibrance and saturation, curves and contrasts but could not find the right way), and the bright light from the windows makes my eyes heart. Any suggestion on how to remove the bright light coming from the windows (even the ceiling lights have a powerful glow) and separately increase colours and quality in the rest of the photos? I tried to select the windows and apply a separate brightness and contrast but it still didn't look good. Any suggestion of correct workflow to remove the bright light in Affinity Photo? Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Bruce Posted April 4, 2021 Share Posted April 4, 2021 The problem is that you have too much light coming in from the windows. You'll need to mask those and apply an exposure adjustment layer to it. I hav done a quick and nasty example, using the pen tool to make the selections and far too much of a reduction in the exposure. Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 Affinity Designer 2.4.1 | Affinity Photo 2.4.1 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.1 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smadell Posted April 4, 2021 Share Posted April 4, 2021 The windows are so close to being blown out that I fear you will never get a result you’re happy with. If ever there was a case for bracketed photos, this might be it. Read about “real estate photogtaphy,” HDR, and (even better) Exposure Fusion techniques. firstdefence 1 Quote Affinity Photo 2, Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2 (latest retail versions) - desktop & iPad Culling - FastRawViewer; Raw Developer - Capture One Pro; Asset Management - Photo Supreme Mac Studio with M2 Max (2023}; 64 GB RAM; macOS 13 (Ventura); Mac Studio Display - iPad Air 4th Gen; iPadOS 17 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmwellborn Posted April 4, 2021 Share Posted April 4, 2021 Welcome to the Forums @Vale22 and Happy Easter! I am absolutely unqualified to give you a professional answer, such as @smadell, or @Old Bruce but if you are using Photo v. 1.9.2 (Mac) or the equivalent in Windows, you might try using the new Divide Blend Mode to take some of the sharpness out of those windows. I fiddled with it until I discovered that you need to choose one of the grays in your image to dull the brightness of the windows. At that point, I used a Sharpening Filter to make things a little more crisp. The attached image shows the initial result. The attached file (including the history) was done in v. 1.9.2, so you wouldn't be able to open it on an earlier version of Photo. I exported my result as a JPG and then on my 21" Mac (skinny 13" laptop was a bit squinty) I tried some Levels Adjustments and Curves Adjustments to work on the various colors. One thing I discovered was that reducing the Output White Level to about 83% in the Levels Adjustment helped take more of the glare out of the ceiling lights. I didn't work on the floor to ceiling windows. But I have subsequently followed @Old Bruce's suggestion and used the Freehand Selection Tool to outline those windows and then applied the Exposure Adjustment with a reduced opacity. This might give you some more ideas. Using Divide Blend Mode.afphoto JPT0908 1 Quote 24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6. Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3. MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6. Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1. iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil. Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmwellborn Posted April 5, 2021 Share Posted April 5, 2021 @Vale22 Thought of something else you might be able to try. I used the Selection Brush Tool to isolate the parts of the image that I wanted to keep as they are, using the Quick Mask to work around the tiny bright bits near the doors, then inverted the selection and used FILTERS>BLUR>Depth of Field Blur and dragged the radius until I had muted the overhead lights. I found a few remaining bits that were still too bright, so I just repeated the process, this time using the Selection Brush Tool at a very small setting with the Quick Mask to go over those bits again (In the second image I had still missed two. SubsequentlyI repeated the Blur>Depth of Field two more times on those two.) I then inverted the selection a second time so that I was back to the central part of the image and chose FILTERS>SHARPEN>Unsharp Mask. I stopped there, but could have made any other adjustments I wanted. This process has the advantage of not being restricted to v. 1.9.2 and the Divide Blend mode, and would be a relatively quick fix for many images, although not a one-stop shopping trip. Quote 24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6. Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3. MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6. Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1. iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil. Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted April 5, 2021 Share Posted April 5, 2021 On 4/4/2021 at 3:17 PM, smadell said: The windows are so close to being blown out that I fear you will never get a result you’re happy with. If ever there was a case for bracketed photos, this might be it. Read about “real estate photogtaphy,” HDR, and (even better) Exposure Fusion techniques. There is also weird stuff going on with the strip lights making it very difficult to get a reasonable recovery. I thought haze removal would help here but unless you mask the ceiling lights it just exaggerates the ceiling light streak effect. As Smadell says bracketing would have helped a lot here. jmwellborn and JPT0908 2 Quote iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smadell Posted April 5, 2021 Share Posted April 5, 2021 After having said that you'll never get a result you'd be happy with, I guess I couldn't resist the urge to try. I still think that bracketing would be a far better solution, but (lacking a time machine) that's not an option. I created a mask of the windows and the lights, applied it to a group, and added adjustments to Brightness and Contrast and then HSL. Here's a composite of my effort: jmwellborn and Old Bruce 2 Quote Affinity Photo 2, Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2 (latest retail versions) - desktop & iPad Culling - FastRawViewer; Raw Developer - Capture One Pro; Asset Management - Photo Supreme Mac Studio with M2 Max (2023}; 64 GB RAM; macOS 13 (Ventura); Mac Studio Display - iPad Air 4th Gen; iPadOS 17 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmwellborn Posted April 6, 2021 Share Posted April 6, 2021 Here's another effort. I was trying to avoid the pixellation in @smadell's image. I tried various and sundry things with spectacularly howling lack of success, so the history is going to look like something out of a "how not to. . . manual" but I have included it in the attached file all the same. Since @Vale22 wanted to brighten the colors and contrast, I also used "Dave's 6-Layer High Pass Sharpening.afmacro" (you can find this in Resources: Multi-layer high-pass sharpening (with macro) to give the image some instant sharpening. The attached file was done in v. 1.8.4 so it can be imported into v. 1.9.2. Using_6-layer_high_pass_sharpening.afphoto Quote 24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6. Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3. MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6. Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1. iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil. Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vale22 Posted April 17, 2021 Author Share Posted April 17, 2021 wow, guys, thank you so much for this support. I will start the editing in a few days, taking into consideration your advices. @jmwellborn I really appreciate you taking the time for this. I will also try masking and exposure adjustments as @Old Bruce suggested, hopefully I will get an acceptable quality for these images. I will post the results here, after I find the right solution from your suggestions. jmwellborn 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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