Selectively edit blown out street lamp

[IvashistaI]

 

Hi, I am new to learning Affinity Photo. I have taken a long-exposure street photo, and the street light is blown out. I want to lower the brightness of the street lights so that the star shapes appear more distinctively. Is it possible to do something in photo persona that only affects the street lights?

[firstdefence]

Welcome to the forum @IvashistaI

As a hind-sight tip for next time, take several shorter exposures as well, you can then create a stack photo. Another option is to take a photo before darkness/night and somewhere in between blue hour and the end of nautical twilight.

To the problem, underexposure is better than overexposure, in overexposure there is no detail so you can't drop the exposure and expect there to be detail within it. you may have to find a street light that looks the same and overlay it and add star shapes, else you will need to silhouette the street lights head by painting the shape of the street lamp head and add star bursts over it to simulate light.

[thomaso]

Hi @IvashistaI,
welcome to the Affinity forums!

You can limit an area for editing by a Mask. https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Layers/LayerMasks.html?title=Layer masks

With a Luminosity Range Mask you can narrow it down to the highlights. https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/LiveMasks/mask_liveLuminosityRange.html?title=Live Luminosity Range Mask

Nevertheless, as @firstdefence mentioned, overexposure is harder to fix than underexposure and might contain RGB 255/255/255 only. As workaround you could colourize the area instead, e.g. by painting a colour with an according soft edge and low opacity.