Blend Source/Destination not working as expected with Curves

[3DJ]

Hi, I am trying to replicate my zone system from photoshop. I use curves with blend if to control how much tonal range a curve can adjust. I have tried several ways within photo and it doesn’t work. I have tried with fill layers, and it works as expected there, but even if I copy and paste the style to a curve adjustment layer I can still tweak the curve to adjust any tone within the image. 

 

Maybe I’ll bring in a layered set up from PS to try… but I am thinking it still will provide the same issues I am seeing.

 

Anyone else experienced this?

Thanks,

Jim

[DM1]

6 hours ago, 3DJ said:

I have tried several ways within photo and it doesn’t work

I may be well off the mark here as I'm not familiar with Photoshop zone system but for blending tonal ranges with curves have you used the layer blend ranges tool? The Source/Destination curves allow you to specify how the tonal values of a layer blend with the layers below. You can group adjustments and use the group folder to adjust the blend range if desired. 

[3DJ]

Hi DM1,

 

Yes, that is what I was working with, it just wasn’t working as expected. While I know these are more powerful than PS version, this is also proving to be harder to adjust. I did bring in a PSD with the curves already set with their blend if modes adjusted and it seems to be working well now. I peaked at the adjustments and some of them translated over very extreme and I think it would be hard to replicate easily in photo. I am hoping to make some kind of macro to reproduce these curves with their blend set up.

 

Thanks,

Jim

[DM1]

10 hours ago, 3DJ said:

, it just wasn’t working as expected

In Affinity Photo the vertical (y axis) of the graph shows how transparent those pixels are. At the top they are 100% visible, at the bottom they are completely invisible and in the middle they are 50% visible. The horizontal (x axis) of the graph shows the brightness of the pixels, dark spread out to light. The far left contains the black pixels, the far right all the white pixels, and the mid grey pixels in the middle.
If you apply it to an adjustment layer (or group of adjustment layers), then drag the left node of the Destination curve down to the bottom of the graph, the darker pixels of the underlying image will be invisible to, and unaffected by the adjustment layer, the mid range pixels will be partially affected, and the brightest pixels will receive the full effect of the adjustment. Adjusting as a curve rather than  a linear line allows further fine tuning. Really very powerful tool.🙂

 

[3DJ]

@DM1Yep, thanks that is how I understood it to work, but it just didn’t seem to be working that way…. I was still allowing the curves to adjust beyond their values. It seems to be working with the PSD I brought in. Sometimes  I think the iPad version does wonky things and a restart fixes it up. I know thats true with Designer and Adobe fonts, but I’m just glad it sees them now.

 

-Jim