Where are 'Levels'?

[rafikiphoto]

Where do I find the Levels tab? Affinity Photo.

[Alfred]

‘Levels’ and other adjustments are applied via the Adjustment panel.

https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_levels.html

https://affinity.help/photo/es.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_levels.html

[rafikiphoto]

By ajustments panel you mean the where Exposure, Enhance. White Balance etc are seen? If so I don't see levels. I would expect it with Exposure... or is it not available for RAW files?

 

[Alfred]

I’m not on my Windows machine at the moment, and I don’t shoot raw, but I think it may only be available in the Photo persona.

[rafikiphoto]

I see. Thank you. I have been used to adjusting levels in RAW.

[Madame]

22 minutes ago, rafikiphoto said:

By ajustments panel you mean the where Exposure, Enhance. White Balance etc are seen? If so I don't see levels. I would expect it with Exposure... or is it not available for RAW files?

 

When you are in the raw persona and have done the ajustments there, you have to click "develope". You are then transfered to Photo Persona, and there you have levels and all the other adjustments layers.
Good luck! 

[rafikiphoto]

4 minutes ago, Madame said:

When you are in the raw persona and have done the ajustments there, you have to click "develope". You are then transfered to Photo Persona, and there you have levels and all the other adjustments layers.
Good luck! 

Ah. Thanks. I was assuming that 'Develop' would process the RAW file to jpg/tif/png but I see it produces a RAW (modified) file and then offers Levels plus the adjustments which were also available in the Develop 'persona'. I shall have to dig deeper into this process as I find it confusing after the other converters I have used.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, rafikiphoto said:

I was assuming that 'Develop' would process the RAW file to jpg/tif/png but I see it produces a RAW (modified) file ...

The output of the development process is a document in the 'native' Affinity format -- if you save it, it will have an .afphoto file type extension.

This is not the same as the jpg, tif, png, or any other image file format. It is a proprietary format that only the Affinity apps can open. It can optionally save things like the editing history or snapshots or a document palette, plus a few other things like mipmaps that only Affinity apps can use.

An unusual feature of the native file format is that documents created in Affinity Designer will have an .afdesign extension but it is identical to the .afphoto file format (the extension just determines which app will open the file by default if both are installed), which means either app can open native format files created in the other one without loss or conversion.

[John Rostron]

8 hours ago, R C-R said:

The output of the development process is a document in the 'native' Affinity format -- if you save it, it will have an .afphoto file type extension.

Surely, the output of the Develop process is an internal representation of the full image with one or more layers, plus one or more mipmaps (screen representations of the full image). It is only when it is saved that it becomes a file in the 'native' Affinity format.

John

[R C-R]

47 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

Surely, the output of the Develop process is an internal representation of the full image with one or more layers, plus one or more mipmaps (screen representations of the full image). It is only when it is saved that it becomes a file in the 'native' Affinity format.

It isn't clear to me exactly what the format of a document is before it is saved. Since there could be quite a few different documents open in Affinity Photo & many different apps & processes all competing for active memory (RAM) space at the same time, it seems likely that at least sometimes the full image will not be memory-resident, just some different (as you say) representation of it. I am far from sure about how that works or how OS level memory management, screen buffers, GPU processing, & such might affect it.

[lepr]

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[rafikiphoto]

4 hours ago, >|< said:

In Develop persona, Exposure and Blackpoint are the levels controls. Exposure adjusts the white point and Blackpoint adjusts the black point.

Thanks. I'll check that out.  I wonder why they don't just call it 'Levels', for consistency at least. It's a standard term and used elsewhere in the software. Levels is one of the first tools I use when processing RAW files.

[Fixx]

46 minutes ago, rafikiphoto said:

Thanks. I'll check that out.  I wonder why they don't just call it 'Levels', for consistency at least. It's a standard term and used elsewhere in the software. Levels is one of the first tools I use when processing RAW files.

I would say "Brightness" is closest to gamma adjustment in Levels. Black and white points are like >|< said. I though think Exposure and brightness do not exactly work like white point and gamma but "leak" to each others territory.

I agree that simple black point, gamma, white point would be understandable way of adjusting values. Maybe though that is how graphic designers think of colour, and adjustment of exposure and brightness is something photographers do. Plus there may be some recovery/protection magic that happens at the very ends level scale ("knee" and "shoulder" of the tone curve).

[lepr]

.

[Fixx]

Possibly so. Still, I said " Exposure and brightness do not exactly work like white point and gamma but "leak" to each others territory" which should cover a lot of what you say. Anyway there should be a way to adjust white point and gamma without current guesswork *wish*

[lepr]

.

[Fixx]

21 hours ago, >|< said:

Currently, Develop persona's Exposure and Brightness both work like white point and neither of them has any similarity to a gamma control. Develop persona has Curves which can make non-linear adjustments to the image.

OK, then they work different from all other developing tools and can be considered to be broken. I cannot see any reason having two tools that do the same thing.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Fixx said:

OK, then they work different from all other developing tools and can be considered to be broken. I cannot see any reason having two tools that do the same thing.

Not that it is of much help, but the Exposure Adjustment help topic says this:

Settings (Develop Persona; in Basic panel)

The following settings can be adjusted:

• Exposure—controls the highlight/shadow levels of the image. Drag the slider to the left to increase shadows, drag to the right to increase highlights.
• Blackpoint—determines the range of pixels in the image considered to be pure black. Drag the slider to the right to include pixels in the range (thereby increasing shadows), drag to the left to exclude pixels (thereby reducing shadows).
• Brightness—controls the lightness/darkness of the image. Drag the slider to the left to decrease brightness, drag to the right to increase it.

The Exposure slider goes from -5 to +5, which I presume is in f stop units. The Brightness slider goes from -25% to +25%, but I have no idea what the reference for percent is -- like is it relative to the brightness range of that specific image or some absolute value?

[lepr]

.

[R C-R]

54 minutes ago, >|< said:

Brightness is either broken or redundant.

Do you think it is possible that it is not broken in the sense that it is intended as a less sensitive or narrower range control than Exposure, or that it is intended as some sort of adaptive or content-relative adjustment & that is what is broken?

Regardless, the help topic needs to tell us a lot more about its function than it does now.

[lepr]

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[Patina]

Hi, 

 

I am just starting, so I might have dumb questions, please forgive me. Is there a way to show the levels in numbers or light (0  to 255) instead of ink %? I have the same problem with the curves.

 

Thank you for your help

 

J.