Enhancements to Blend Ranges

[littledetails]

Affinity Photo includes an awesome "Blend Ranges" feature that I use to accomplish exposure blending with my photographs. It takes a little practice, but this tool is more flexible than Photoshop's "Blend If" sliders (because it supports customizable and non-linear luminosity feathering), and more efficient than Luminosity masks (smaller file size).

 

I would love to see the efficiency of this feature further improved by the addition of presets within the blend ranges panel to create common blending curves, which would save me the trouble of frequently recreating similar curves over and over again. Presets such as "highlights only", "midtones only", "shadows only" or combinations of these would be a real time saver. It would also be great to see the histograms of the current layer, and composite histogram of the layers below, drawn behind the respective curve graphs in this panel. Without histograms it's hard to visualize how the luminosity information is distributed across the current layer and the layers below, and creating the blend curves becomes a bit more of a trial-and-error process to find the right spots in the X-axis to start or end your curve.

 

Photoshop users have plugins like Raya Pro and Lumenzia that make exposure blending easier, although they suffer from poor UI and other issues. It would be great if Affinity Photo put some more effort into fleshing out the Blend Ranges feature for photographers who want to do manual exposure blending.

[TEcHNOpls]

+1

Also, a marker to show that default ranges have been changed.

[yakk]

Yep. Being able to save profiles as presets or to copy from one layer to another would be great.