Can't Invert Live Filter Layer

[lepr]

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[GDPR-354025]

@walt.farrell Yes, I did. If you scroll up and look for my pretentious italicized French response, the links are renamed #1 and #2. The second is masterful.

[lepr]

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[GDPR-354025]

@>|< It is what I want to see. I’m going back to my old-school light interface and work on this and see if I can replicate what @walt.farrell did. 

A demain, les gars.  

[walt.farrell]

On 4/28/2019 at 8:59 PM, Guest-354025 said:

Both videos I cited this morning make the assumption that the Affinity user can Zoom In to the Nth degree in color, and by zooming in alone—alone—know which areas of the image that need sharpening have in fact been sharpened and which have not.

The second video did not use High Pass filtering at all. It used an Unsharp Mask filter, which does not have that gray overlay that the High Pass filter has. The zooming in allowed the presenter to see what had become sharper, and to verify that no artifacts were created.

The first video used High Pass, but changed the blend mode so the underlying image was visible. (I don't quite understand the complete effect of that.) It then inverted the mask, and painted over specific areas to sharpen them. Personally, I could not see any sharpening happening during that process. But it was the change of the blend mode that allowed viewing of the image.

When the image is visible, yes, zooming in will let you see what is happening or has happened.

[GDPR-354025]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

The second video did not use High Pass filtering at all. It used an Unsharp Mask filter, which does not have that gray overlay that the High Pass filter has. The zooming in allowed the presenter to see what had become sharper, and to verify that no artifacts were created.

The first video used High Pass, but changed the blend mode so the underlying image was visible. (I don't quite understand the complete effect of that.) It then inverted the mask, and painted over specific areas to sharpen them. Personally, I could not see any sharpening happening during that process. But it was the change of the blend mode that allowed viewing of the image.

When the image is visible, yes, zooming in will let you see what is happening or has happened.

You're right about the second video. I'm not certain the blend mode affected what the first video presenter did. I say this after having edited a great deal of grainy B&W newspaper articles the last year, at the beginning of which venture, I was asking here on the forums for tips on how to clean up grainy B&W scans. High Pass being one of the suggestions, in addition to Denoise, Frequency Separation, FFT, etc., I know I never set the blend mode to other than Normal, nor, to my recollection, did anyone who offered tips. I did not understand the term "High Pass" at that time.

THIS dialogue on a forum for the competition was something that would have been helpful all those months ago (especially the section numbered "7"). Speaking for myself, the arcane terminology that holds photo-editing in its menacing grip  is part of the reason people of average intelligence either stay completely away from or give up trying to feel at home with photo-editing, an enterprise that makes me feel stupid. What this all has to do with the price of tomatoes is that I overlooked, yesterday, the fact that the desired result of all photo-editing, no matter which manipulation is applied to a given image, is what looks good. So it doesn't matter if there is no way other than the naked eye to use to judge the results when applying High Pass or any other filter. The Thumbnail Mask is something that would be nice, if available, but that in the end makes no difference. As the forum member with the Prince-like unpronounceable name suggested on this thread, my insecurity explains why I needed that thumbnail, or thought I did.

Thank you again, very much, for sticking with this thread and for your extremely helpful comments. If not for your images and Alfred's arrival on the scene, I would never (ever) have known I could return to a Photo Plus-era interface. 

 

[R C-R]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

It then inverted the mask, and painted over specific areas to sharpen them. Personally, I could not see any sharpening happening during that process.

He is using a 64 px brush set to 0% hardness & a Soft Light layer blend mode, so the sharpening effect on the eyes is not very noticeable (which I think was his intent) but it is there. You can see this at about 4:39 where he very briefly turns off the live filter layer.

[GDPR-354025]

2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

He is using a 64 px brush set to 0% hardness & a Soft Light layer blend mode, so the sharpening effect on the eyes is not very noticeable (which I think was his intent) but it is there. You can see this at about 4:39 where he very briefly turns off the live filter layer.

As long as I cited on a forum for the competition the segment #7, I'd like to know what about the Overlay and Soft Light blend modes (called Linear Light in PS) is of great importance to applying a High Pass Live Filter. If the answer involves mathematics or physics in any way, no need to reply. If the answer is conceptual, on the other hand, I would appreciate a response from anyone who happens to read this. 

[Alfred]

On 4/29/2019 at 11:46 AM, Guest-354025 said:

the forum member with the Prince-like unpronounceable name

Funny you should mention that! I always think of @>|< as “the forum member formerly known as ‘owenr’; I suspect he changed his moniker because he got fed up with other forum members thinking he had mistyped ‘owner’.

[Alfred]

On 4/29/2019 at 11:56 AM, Guest-354025 said:

segment #7

There’s no such thing as a ‘segment’ in a Stack Exchange thread, as far as I’m aware. I think you must be referring to this answer, which (currently) has 7 ‘upvotes’.

[GDPR-354025]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

Funny you should mention that! I always think of @>|< as “the forum member formerly known as ‘owenr’; I suspect he changed his moniker because he got fed up with other forum members thinking he had mistyped ‘owner’.

Alfred, I felt SOO dumb after reading what you wrote yesterday about changing the User Interface, which choice I did not know existed since getting Affinity in 2016. In fact, I wish Affinity would create a special forum and intentionally title it Scared Little Urchins. I would be a life member.  There are just too many choices. Affinity is a Garden of Unearthly Delights. 

[GDPR-354025]

Just now, Alfred said:

There’s no such thing as a ‘segment’ in a Stack Exchange thread, as far as I’m aware. I think you must be referring to this answer, which (currently) has 7 ‘upvotes’.

Yes, Mr. Smarty-Pants. I did not know that such a thing as a "stack exchange" was other than a fancy name for a forum. Will it Never End?... 

[Alfred]

On 4/29/2019 at 12:04 PM, Guest-354025 said:

Yes, Mr. Smarty-Pants. I did not know that such a thing as a "stack exchange" was other than a fancy name for a forum. Will it Never End?... 

LOL. (“Sorry, you cannot add any more reactions today.”)

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for pointing to that Stack Exchange thread; I think it has helped me understand High Pass filters better.

I do wonder about one statement in the answer that you pointed to:

Quote

Now what would you use this for? Well it can get used to isolate edges, and the primary use case is to use it as a sharpening tool. In fact unsharp mask does this in one step. Sometimes, however, unsharp mask does not give you enough control of the results. So you might use the high pass filter to split out the intermediate stage and manipulate it to control where you want the sharpening to happen and where not.

With Affinity Photo, I would think that one could control where the sharpening applied by Unsharp Mask occurs simply by using the built-in mask that all the adjustments have.

I'm not sure why using High Pass (for sharpening) would have an advantage. More experimentation needed

[GDPR-354025]

55 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks for pointing to that Stack Exchange thread; I think it has helped me understand High Pass filters better.

I do wonder about one statement in the answer that you pointed to:

With Affinity Photo, I would think that one could control where the sharpening applied by Unsharp Mask occurs simply by using the built-in mask that all the adjustments have.

I'm not sure why using High Pass (for sharpening) would have an advantage. More experimentation needed

I was thinking about "Chris'" video; he does not reference High Pass and is all about working in Lab (Color Format). I think he addresses why Unsharp Mask isn't the best choice in particular situations. But this leads to a thought below:

The sheer amount of manipulations/operations that all seem to accomplish the same thing is what I'd pay for Affinity to address in extended tutorials or even online classroom sessions (obviously with some fee). I'm sure I'm wrong, saying all these operations seem designed to, and do, accomplish the same thing. Affinity's Sharpening Tutorial video covers Unsharp Mask, High Pass, and Clarity in under five minutes. I would so dearly appreciate videos on the terms "Radius," "Factor," "Threshold" alone, dilatory and relaxed for the average Affinity user. The gentlemen behind Affinity technology are geniuses for whom no dwelling or enlarging upon abstract concepts is needed. The majority of Affinity users, or at least I and many forum members, could benefit mightily from tutorials on even 1/10th of the terms in the Sharpening Tutorial alone. Say the word "algorithm" to probably 70% to 80% of Affinity users, and it brings out the Homer in us.

(Cough, Alfred): "I am not a physician!"   

Well, back to work.

[jmwellborn]

On 4/29/2019 at 2:32 PM, Guest-354025 said:

 

Well, back to work.

Well here is an idea.   Why not try the CURVES adjustments??????   At least that ought to gum up the works a little more.

[R C-R]

FWIW, there are quite a few sources for technical info about layer blending modes. This post by @James Ritson has a few tidbits of interest, as does the Layer blending help topic. The web is also a good source, for example articles like this one, even though it is for Photoshop & some of it does not apply directly to Affinity, much of it does.

That said,  the technical details of most layer blend modes are largely only of academic interest because they don't tell you a whole lot about the look they will create when applied partially or completely to typical images. For that, nothing beats the experience gained through experimentation.

[lepr]

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[walt.farrell]

27 minutes ago, >|< said:

Edit: I nearly forgot to mention... the presenter thought it was normal for the document view to become darker and more saturated when converting from sRGB to 16 bpc LAB with a wider gamut, when in fact there should have been no visible change when converting in that direction in a properly colour-managed system.

Thanks. I wondered about that when I watched it. It didn't seem right.

[GDPR-354025]

On 4/29/2019 at 4:58 PM, >|< said:

Really?

The presenter didn't realise that switching the document from LAB back to RGB, meant that his live sharpening filter was then operating in the RGB mode that he had been saying was problematic for sharpening and was his reason for temporarily switching from RGB to LAB. He should have baked the LAB sharpening result into a pixel layer before returning to RGB mode.

But he was doing the LAB sharpening wrongly, anyway! He didn't know that only the L (lightness) channel should be sharpened, otherwise there is a very good chance of creating worse colour artefacts than happens when sharpening in RGB mode.

Edit: I nearly forgot to mention... the presenter thought it was normal for the document view to become darker and more saturated when converting from sRGB to 16 bpc LAB with a wider gamut, when in fact there should have been no visible change when converting in that direction in a properly colour-managed system.

I didn’t get this response in my Auto Notifications, Mr. Unpronounceable , so thank you belatedly. I think Affinity has me on a quota system for Notifications (seriously).

Anyhoo, this will sound fey , but I actually did wonder about the quoted section of your response here that I bolded. I also didn’t know that you can sharpen only one of many channels. I like this presenter because he has a slow and cat-filled manner.

My team of psychics tell me I will master Affinity photo-editing on February 29, 2136.