Matte Color Macro

[v_kyr]

For certain photos like street, casual wear, but also sometimes for portraits, I tend to use matte color effects if those shots have to underline some more urban style. It is an easy task to apply some matte color effect to your shots, though if you need it quite often a reusable macro is the way to go for this. - Here is one adjustable matte color macro for Affinity Photo, which you can reuse for such matte effects for either color or b&w images.

BEFORE

AFTER

LAYERS

 

This macro creates three layers for you with corresponding layer masks:

1. A curves adjustment layer which applies the main matte coloring to the image, which lowers contrast and flattens blacks. You can use the mask (draw with a
   white/black brush) to exclude/include specific areas from the matte color. For example you could exclude in portraits the eyes from being matte here etc.
2. A contrast boosting layer which allows to give back a little bit of the contrast lost by the matte color effect. This is as default a copy of the matte layer with an
   applied soft light blending mode and half lowered opacity. Again you can use the mask to remove or reapply certain image areas here.
3. Finally a desaturation layer which can be used to lower the saturation of possibly still too bright colors. You can use the mask here too in the same intended
   way as before mentioned for the other layers.

 

THE MACRO

• matte_color.afmacro
• Matte color.afmacros

 

[Frogger]

It works well.
Thank you.

[Richard S.]

Looks great, but unfortunately doesn’t import from the macro studio on iPad.

I think you need to export it from the library, and also rename it macros (with an S on the end), in order for it to be iPad compatible.

Thanks anyway, nice to see people sharing