Level out color

[StevieDesigns]

Dear fellow Affinity Photo users,

Is there someone that could give me tips on how to level out the color fluctuations on the attached album cover? It is a scan I have cleaned up but when you zoom out there's visible spots/patches that are darker than others. Is it possible to even this out? I hope there are possibilities other than removing the text and putting in a blue background as I couldn't get it quite right with the text I wish to keep the same.

 

Many, many thanks for any tips and infos.

 

Steve

 

PS. I'm not too familiar with all the tools

[Pšenda]

41 minutes ago, StevieDesigns said:

when you zoom out there's visible spots/patches that are darker than others.

If you use the Flood Select Tool with zero tolerance, click to the middle of the blue area - you can see that the blue area is not uniform.

Select the blue color with the eyedropper, select the Flood Fill Tool - tolerance 5%, and click in the middle of the blue area.
Then the blue area is uniform.

 

Edit: alternatively - you can set a lower tolerance for the Flood Fill Tool, and by gradually clicking in the blue area you can unify its color.

Edited March 11 by Pšenda

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @StevieDesigns

Because the forum software has a tendency to modify images that have been uploaded, we might not be seeing the same image as you are.

And since you suggest that the differences are subtle we may need to see those subtle difference for ourselves to get a better idea of what you are working with.

If you can ZIP the image before uploading the ZIP we will be able to extract the image from the ZIP to see what you are seeing, and therefore be in a better situation to advise you.

[StevieDesigns]

@Pšenda Thanks a lot! I just tried it. It works quite well, but zooming in I can still see a blue edge around the writing. Is there an even more noble way of doing this whole thing? I will upload it as a .zip file.

[StevieDesigns]

@GarryP Thanks! Sure, here it is attached:

ToRecordOnlyWaterForTenDays.png.zip

[markw]

I approached it only slightly differently to Psenda;
Food Selection tool to 25% with Add to selection enabled.
Click once on every Orange item.
Cut and past all the selected Orange areas to a new layer.
While they are still selected i.e the “marching ants” are still “marching”, go to Filters > Blur > Average.
Clear the selection and now select the Blue layer in the Layers panel and again go to; Filters > Blur > Average.

But I wonder about the slight edge to the original letters, if that is not deliberate and part of the original design?
Not sure I would have expected to see that happen to text on a high quality scan of an album cover?
In the attached I added a small amount of a bevelled edge to the “new” Orange items as without it, to me it just looks too flat.

ToRecordOnlyWaterForTenDays-markw_Adjusted.afphoto

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, StevieDesigns said:

I hope there are possibilities other than removing the text and putting in a blue background as I couldn't get it quite right with the text I wish to keep the same.

You’ll get a much cleaner result if you redo the text and put it on a solid blue background.

The attached was done with the Eurostar font that I happen to have installed here. I used Artistic Text so that I could compress it to match the narrower width in the image that you posted.

[RichardMH]

Suggest you try this. Live Hue Range Mask has a picker that lets you pick just the orange. So duplicate the image and do that. Then put a fill layer below that and use the picker to colour the fill layer a uniform blue that you select from the original image. 

[StevieDesigns]

@markw Sorry for responding so late and thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I couldn't open the .afphoto file as I'm still on Affinity Photo 1. I Just tried every step you listed, but the writing ended up looking like it was cut off and the font, when zooming in was a bit more rounded than the original. Very interesting approach though.

The slightly dark edge and fade are definitely part of the original which is what I try to preserve as every version of that cover on the internet either has a rebuild font or not the correct details. I would love to only make most of the blue color uniform without those spots from the scan while maintaining the effect of the font. Definitely tricky...

[StevieDesigns]

@Alfred Thanks, the font indeed is very close to the original and it also looks good, but all the small details making the font 3Dish are missing that way. 

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, StevieDesigns said:

all the small details making the font 3Dish are missing

I hadn’t noticed that! You can add things like an outer shadow, or even a 3D effect, quite easily.

[StevieDesigns]

@Alfred True that but it's quite a specific outer shadow, quite uneven, which is part of the album cover.

[StevieDesigns]

@RichardMH This sounds very good! But I would need Affinity Photo 2 for the Hue Range Live mask, right? Can you upload a high quality picture of the result you got? Many thanks!

[Alfred]

23 minutes ago, StevieDesigns said:

@Alfred True that but it's quite a specific outer shadow, quite uneven, which is part of the album cover.

You can create an outer shadow manually by duplicating the text layer and changing the colour of the lower copy from orange to grey. Offset it by different amounts in the X and Y directions to make it slightly uneven, and optionally make it more uneven by converting to curves so that you can tweak each letter individually with the Node Tool.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, StevieDesigns said:

it's quite a specific outer shadow, quite uneven, which is part of the album cover.

To me it looks like an orange glow, exceeding a gray soft shadow. Thus I made a flood selection for orange (tolerance 43):

+ feathered it (20) via menu Select > "Feather" (if wanted you could use "Grow / Shrink" additionally),

  

… checked the feathering visually via Quickmask (shortcut Q),

… then inverted the selection and picked + flood-filled (tolerance 100) the blue, then "Save" (overwriting the initial file).

ToRecordOnlyWaterForTenDays 2.png.zip

[ Alternatively to Flood Select: Menu Select > Select Sampled Colour    ]

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, StevieDesigns said:

but all the small details making the font 3Dish are missing that way. 

If you want to keep the maximum from the original scan, including its inaccuracies, but which make its more authentic, I recommend using a blue brush with a soft edge, and just iron the "spotty" areas a little and unify them.

[RichardMH]

3 hours ago, StevieDesigns said:

@RichardMH This sounds very good! But I would need Affinity Photo 2 for the Hue Range Live mask, right? Can you upload a high quality picture of the result you got? Many thanks!

See if this is OK.

 

ToRecordOnlyWaterForTenDays.tiff

[StevieDesigns]

@thomaso Wow man, amazing! That's it!! Thanks so much! Now I noticed that the orange "stripe" is uneven too - color wise. Any idea on how to change that without removing the white border and the gradient that gets darker towards the edge? Appreciate it a lot!

[StevieDesigns]

@Alfred Very cool idea and definitely a great option. It would take a whole lot of tweaking though to get it like the original. 

[StevieDesigns]

@Pšenda Just tried that too, works very well as well! Got the orange stripe even, using your method 🙂 But I'm all ears for a different approach. 

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, StevieDesigns said:

Now I noticed that the orange "stripe" is uneven too - color wise. Any idea on how to change that without removing the white border and the gradient that gets darker towards the edge?

Since this stripe is very narrow but also straight I would draw a rectangle (actually a trapezoid curve with Pen Tool) with orange fill via picker tool + slightly blurred (for better merge with the background at its right/left edges). For the lower edge I'd draw a transparency gradient at the lower end of this orange shape to achieve the required soft edge in the bottom area of the image.

I am not sure what exactly you want to achieve inside the orange stripe. If you have the printed original you may compare, otherwise I wonder if your scan process did some de-rasterizing, which might blur your scanned result (text included) – or may have caused the white edge? However, there are some images online which look more or less different, in particular the white edge on the left does not appear in them. Quite likely there have been slightly different print results created for this cover globally.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/717-eIAuR7L._SL1500_.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fv1e1n7histt91.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3d59f29d05471f4151a4023b128c7615f8f8b4f4

https://is2-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music115/v4/a3/05/33/a3053338-9c68-5179-104d-9160063be696/mzi.wvohaqqn.jpg/1200x1200bf-60.jpg

[firstdefence]

I did this a bit differently and because of the variation in each colour I targeted the blue background using the colour picker tool and an average 257 x257 which comes out to R: 109 G: 147 B: 216 and for the Orange/Tangerine colour I used the flare at the bottom of the vertical line, which read as R: 233 G: 115 B: 59 The text looks like it's cutout showing a background, so I added an inner shadow to simulate that.

1. I duplicated the scanned image and applied a Black & White Adjustment filter, this makes a nice black and white image, I merged the filter.
   
2. Used The Erase White Paper Filter to remove the white.
3. Added a Layer FX: Colour Overlay and an inner shadow
   
   Colour Overlay: Lighter Colour.
   
4. Created a Fill Layer and filled with R: 109 G: 147 B: 216

If you didn't want the inner shadow on the vertical bar you can always separate it onto it's own layer.

ToRecordOnlyWaterForTenDays - FD.afphoto

[StevieDesigns]

@thomaso Thanks! Just used your approach and rebuilded the whole tripe with a bit of a shadow on the inside as well as the outside to have sort of an average between the my original, the CD from my Brother as well as these to from the internet:

 

 

It indeed seems as if most copies don't feature that white part - this might have happened in the printing process. It's also clear that every original print has that edge/shadow around the writing as well as the stripe. Here's another good example:

 

I've never found an accurate, high resolution picture of the album cover on the internet while archiving all of my music. Which is why it is my goal is to create a fantastic copy of that cover and provide it to albumartexchange.com, which helped me a lot with finding great high resolution album covers.

The writing now seems perfect to me and for the stripe I think I'll settle for the average of the album covers, which is a stripe with a bit of a shadow. More on the right side than the left.

[StevieDesigns]

@firstdefence That's a cool approach too! I wonder how an outer shadow would look though as the original print doesn't look like the writing is cut out rather than hovering above the blue background with a bit of a 3D effect.

PS. My Affinity Photo 1 doesn't allow me to open your attached file because it doesn't have the features Affinity Photo 2 has.

[firstdefence]

Here you go, I saved with history so you can go back and forth to see what was done, the file was made in Affinity Photo v1.10.8

ToRecordOnlyWaterForTenDays.FD v1.10.8.afphoto