Reducing exposure on a portion of picture

[Bwood]

Windows 10 and Affinity photo question. New user. 

I’ve taken a series of our local museums Christmas lights. The museum has a street of older buildings all decorated with lights. One side of the street has more lights than the other and is much brighter than the other side. The photo is in raw, and I’d like to balance the brightness. From what I’ve read I could use stacks, or a brush, but the easiest option might be to select the brighter portion and trim down the exposure. I’ve done one picture thus far to show what the “street” looks like. Also I want to sharpen the right side. 

[NotMyFault]

14 hours ago, Bwood said:

From what I’ve read I could use stacks, or a brush, but the easiest option might be to select the brighter portion and trim down the exposure

If you want to go that way:

1. Start with raw image in Develop Persona
2. Inspect histogram, and do basic exposure correction using exposure slider, and shadow/highlights, to ensure no highlights are cut off
3. In lens correction, check CA, uncheck remove vignette 
4. Click Apply to get  into Photo Persona
5. Add an brightness & contrast adjustment
6. Reduce brightness slider to e.g. -30%
7. Select the erase brush
8. use a huge radius, low hardnes
9. While the adjustment layer is active, brush over areas where you want to remove its effect, e.g. everything except the area which is too bright 
10. Repeat that process a second time, to increase brightness on the left side

Regarding Sharpening, i don’t have good news. The unsharp area seems out of focus, there is little you can do about that, except you have more images where that area is in-focus (focus stack), or you have an image with different aperture settings giving a wider depth of field.

 

Screenshot from iPad, looks similar on Desktop.

Edited December 10, 2021 by NotMyFault
Typos and wording

[RichardMH]

Simplest way might be with curves. Go to Gray (instead of RGB), change blend mode to softlight or overlay  and have a play with the slider. (Push up the darks and bring down the highlights) Use blend ranges if you want to protect the dark sky.

[Bwood]

Thanks @NotMyFault and @richardMH.  The out of focus is depth of field. I take a lot of daylight, but I think the shot defaulted at the widest app possible. It was a challenging shoot and very cold.  I’ve got a lot to learn but you’ve both put me on a path. Thankfully one can play and be non destructive. All these shots are exported to jpeg for web use. 
Many thanks.