Photo Editing: Theory of photo editing

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Photo editing

Theory of photo edi�ng for beginners by Krzysztof Serafin

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introduction

1

Saturation

46

Editing software

2

Vibrance

50

Adobe Photoshop

Local adjustment

54

Adobe Lightroom

Sharpening

58

Capture One Pro

Black and white

60

Affinity Photo

Lens correction and Transform Tool

66

ON1 Photo RAW

Layers

72

Camera RAW processors

Do you need layers

Other options

Layers for composite images

RAW files

3

Layer Blend Modes

Basic theory of digital photography

5

Layer Blend Options

Photo assessment and editing tools

8

Layers for photo editing

Cropping

10

Assessing your cropping Exposure

20

General Editing Tool Conclusion Editing Take 1 - assessment and quality improvement 84

Histogram

Editing Take 2- edit for purpose

88

Exposure vs. brightness

Editing Take 4 - artistic variation

96

How to apply exposure

What’s next?

Camera vs. software Brightness and contrast

30

Curves

34

Colour adjustment

38

106

Editing Tools vs. common photography elements But what’s next? Edit, edit, edit.

In traditional, analogue, film photography, photo editing was difficult and usually performed only by professional photographers. In nowadays photo editing is much easier and far more common. A huge amount of software designed specifically for photo editing become cheaper and therefore more accessible. Photo editing is now a common task performed daily by most of the photographers, not only professionals. However, the quality of editing became rather poor. In my opinion, the reason for that is, that since nearly everyone has access to editing software, people usually believe that photo editing is easy. On the other hand, companies producing this software care more about explaining how to use it than why to use it. Obviously, for them, it is quite an understandable approach. After all, if you’ve purchased the software you should know why you need it. But do you? In my short work, I want to show you what kind of editing you may need, and most importantly, how to assess your work in terms of photo editing.

White balance I’ve seen many nice pictures being over-edited or even edited in a really wrong way and often simply ruined by editing rather than improved. I will give you some examples of software you may use but my main task here is to show you how photo-editing can take your photographs to the next level and even help you with taking photos. I believe that you already know something about photo-editing and you may be tempted to skip some content but I really encourage you to spend some time and read it all. Information here is prepared in specific order to show you rather all process than separated techniques. This information is not specific to any software, and tools which I will use are present in virtually every software available on the market.

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Affinity Photo, like Photoshop, has no tool for photo management.

Editing software In most cases, you will need to decide what kind of software is the one which suits you. I don’t believe that the most powerful software is the one which everyone should use simply because the more advanced the software is the more difficult it is to learn. Let’s go through a view examples.

ON1 Photo RAW Less expensive than Capture One. It has similar editing abilities to Lightroom and Capture pro and allows working with layers. Has a lot of defined filters which helps to achieve quick results.

Adobe Photoshop

Camera RAW processors

Probably the most advanced and definitely most famous software used widely by professionals.

Many camera manufacturers offer free software for editing RAW files produced by their equipment. Nikon has its Capture NX-D, Pentax – Digital Camera Utility end so on. Most of them are rather basic and not very comfortable to use but may help you to decide which editing options you need the most.

It is only available to rent which means that you pay monthly to use it. For many photographers, including me, this form of payment may not be the best option. My biggest concern about this kind of agreement is that at some point I may not want to pay anymore and then I will lose access to all my work because without the software I won’t be able to re-edit it. Also, if you don’t edit your photographs on regular basis it means that the cost of editing may be rather big. In terms of using it, it is the most complicated software and learning it will take some time. Also, as a photographer, you will be using less than a half of its tools. I worked with Photoshop since version 3, the first version available for PC to late CS versions. It is really powerful software for editing and photo manipulation but for photography only I would rather consider something less complicated.

Adobe Lightroom Also available with renting scheme only. More specific for photographers and easier than Photoshop. Its big advantage is that you can not only edit your work but also organise your photos by adding keywords, sorting, searching and much more. I currently use Lightroom 6 which was the last version I could purchase on DVD and actually own. It’s worth to mention that Adobe put a lot of work into colour management and their product really make great work in this field. If you are planning to print your work yourself, colour management will sooner or later become quite important. Having said that, it is not the only software with the ability to edit and manage your files.

Capture One Pro The strongest competitor to Lightroom. You can purchase or rent it. If your choice of camera is Sony or Fuji then the price for you will be much lower. By now it is rather expensive but many photographers are considering switching to it from Lightroom. Most users emphasis its ability to produce better colours. Others love its ability to work with layers which is achievable in Photoshop but not in Lightroom. Another thing worth mentioning is a really good tethering option. Lightroom also allows tethering but Capture One does it quicker and have some more advanced approach including live view. I personally believe that it is very powerful but for me not worth a price since I have Lightroom which is sufficient enough for the tasks I use it.

Other options There are many more apps you could use including free software like Gimp, RawTherapee, LightZone etc. The choice will mostly depend on your needs and budget but I would strongly recommend trying some of them if you are new to photo-editing to see the difference and decide what’s best for you. You should know that usually free software has little or no support and learning it may not be easy.

RAW files RAW format is now the most popular choice for photographers. It allows collecting extensive information from camera sensor including colour and dynamic range. If you intend to edit all your photographs this format is the one you should always use. But it is worth mentioning that if you decide to take photos in jpeg format then editing is still possible and will give a reasonable effect. On the other hand, the RAW format basically is the one you definitely need to edit while some of your jpeg files may be good enough without editing or you may simply decide to leave them as they are because they are not worth additional effort. In most contemporary DSLR cameras you will have an option to save your photos in raw and jpeg simultaneously. It will increase the space they take on your memory card and hard drive but may help you decide whether you want to edit them or not.

Affinity Photo Advertised as Photoshop replacement. Really impressive software, quite cheap and easy to learn. If you need layers and extensive local adjustment, this might be a good option to consider. Is it as good as Photoshop? I wouldn’t say that but again, the first version of Photoshop was developed in 1987 so finding a competitor for software with over 30 years of development history is really difficult. Photoshop is quick, stable and reliable. It also has a huge community of users which for that advanced software may be very helpful.

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BASIC THEORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Basic theory of digital photography I could write a separate book about digital imaging and colour but I assume that you have some basic knowledge so here I’ll only describe the most important concepts of digital photography without getting to deep into theory. First of all, we have two different media to present digital photography and two different media to digitise picture. Unfortunately, we use at least two different models of representation depending on those media. To digitise the picture we can capture the picture with a digital camera or use a scanner to scan a picture from a printout. To present the picture we use a screen or a printout. Now, the way how the picture is presented, strongly depends on the media. If we capture a picture with digital camera or present it on a screen we use RGB colour model. When we print a picture we use a CMYK model. When we scan it from a print we use RGB which need to be translated from existing CMYK. RGB as an idea is older than digital imaging but for our use I will only discuss a digital part of it. A CMYK model comes from printing and is also older than digital photography but again here I will only use CMYK as a model for digital imaging. Here you can see how all basic colour components are placed in the additive colour model: Mix of Red Green and Blue gives us White, mix of Green and Red Yellow and mix of Blue and Red - Magenta. Black is simply a lack of any colour. Remember those colour components because you will work with them whenever you attempt to do colour manipulation with photo editing. First of all, as humans, we perceive all phenomena as linear. This also applies to the image. To be able to use a computer for image processing, we need to digitise this image. The computer uses bits and bytes to represent data. One byte consist of eight bits and is traditionally the smallest ‘chunk’ of information used by computers. This byte may store a number from 0 to 255 or 256 different values. To write a digital representation of black and white image we use 256 different values. If we have a colour picture we use different colours (called channels in editing) and these are Red Green and Blue. So we have over 16 million colours. It is quite enough for viewing and your computer, no matter how advanced, can only display this number of colours. The accuracy of display strongly depends on the quality of your monitor and graphic card. Can we store more colour in the picture? The short answer is yes but I’ll explain it in more details when it comes to colour editing. For now, you must remember that 0 is a complete lack of colour and 255 is a maximum value of either Red, Green or Blue. The maximum value of all of them gives us white. For printing, we have four different colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. In this case, you can see straight away that the number of colours should be 256 times bigger. In practice, it is bigger but not that much. In this model, lack of colour will give us white page. In fact, the page with its own colour, not necessarily clear white. When we get a maximum of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow we should, in theory, get the black colour. But in practice, it is a rather very dark brownish colour. So, to get real black or any shade of clear grey, we use black ink without any other components.

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You might ask why we don’t use a black channel in RGB model. Fortunately, the lack of any signal (R=0, G=0, B=0) will give us black. Or nearly black depending on your monitor quality. Unfortunately, if your monitor cannot display real black then there is nothing we can do to change it with colour modelling. It’s worth to remember that shades of grey are achieved by setting all three component to the same value e.g. R=100, G=100, B=100. In the real world, those two models are not fully compatible. Printing model consists of some colour which cannot be displayed on monitor and screen model consists of some colours which cannot be printed. To keep screen and print representation of the same photo as close as possible, we use colour profiles. Making the long story short, values of RGB model are translated in these profiles into CMYK. Furthermore, because of different qualities of printing papers, we need specific profiles for printers. To make our life even more miserable we need to make sure that the colour captured from a camera is accurately displayed by our computer. To do so, we use colour profiles for monitor calibration. These profiles are supposed to make sure that certain colour is properly and accurately shown on your monitor. And here is the point where the quality of your monitor becomes important. All this information here is only an introduction to rather complicated matter but it’s the basic idea you need to understand in details when I come deeper into different aspects of editing.

work, you save your files back to 8 bit RGB and get the most accurate result. With one layer manipulation, it is usually not needed. When you work with many layers using different blend modes the effect of your work may be visibly different depending on used colour mode. You must remember that 16 or 24 bit per colour files are very big and not only occupy more space on your hard drive but also need way more memory to work with them. Simply, don’t use it as long as you don’t really need it. Try to understand as much as you can about colour profiles because this knowledge is essential to understand photo editing.

The most important things to remember: 1. The term colour profiles refers to different colour settings. 2. Basic use of colour profiles is in regards to RGB and CMYK. RGB and CMYK are called the colour model or colour space. Colour profile is a translation of one space to another. 3. RGB is a basic definition of displayed colours and stands for Red, Green and Blue. 4. CMYK is a basic definition of printed colours and stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. 5. We also use term ‘colour profile’ to describe a method of translation for colour adjustment in printing and for monitors colour adjustment. That’s it for very basic theory and term definition. Because of a great number of printers, monitors and graphic cards on the market, some of the basic colour models were standardised and you will come across different names e.g. sRGB, Adobe RGB or CMY. For now, all you need to know is that all those terms represent particular profiles used by different software to translate a photograph from linear to digital state and then allow it to be printed accurately. Although RGB and CMYK are the most common ways of describing pixels, you may come across some different ways which in some circumstances may be more convenient. One of them is HSB (hue, saturation, brightness). You need to remember that these pixels are still stored with their RGB values and using HSB does not change the colour mode but only its description. These different descriptions and different models of pixels manipulation may sometimes influence the accuracy of data in bad way. For example with RGB manipulation you have 256 x 256 x 256 different variations. This gives us 16,777,216 possible colours. With HSB model you have 360 values of hue and 100 values for both saturation and brightness. It gives you 360 x 100 x 100 = 3,600,000. It is still a lot but significantly less than RGB. To translate RGB to editable HSB your software must calculate approximate values. Sooner or later some data will be lost. To help prevent this, some software uses different ways of storing data. For example, you can save your files in 16 or 24-bit colour mode. That means that you could save your RGB values in 16 or 24 bit instead of the usual 8. That gives you an enormous number of colours which you... could never see. Your monitor still can show you only 8 bit RGB. So, what is it for? When you perform a lot of different changes and calculation on pixels your work is saved more accurately. When you finish your

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Photo assessment and editing tools

Photograph assessment In order to perform good photo editing, you need to make a number of decisions and it is important to know what you need to look for in your picture to make the right choices. First of all, you must know that there are two general kinds of editing. First of them is simply a quality improvement, the second is editing for artistic effect. As long as you usually need to do the first one, the second is optional. But you should decide on the very beginning whether you only want a quality improvement or you have some artistic vision and you want to make some adjustments which are not necessarily connected to quality. Many editors make a mistake by editing photos to achieve their artistic view and not caring enough for the quality of their photos. You should always start with quality improvement even if you want to make some artistic changes. Let’s say that you make exposition adjustment. Use auto exposition or auto brightness first, then adjust shadows and lights manually to get a well-balanced exposition. Even if you know that your goal is to produce the moody and dark effect, you should leave it with properly adjusted exposition and finish your edition to get the best possible quality. Only after that, you can come back and darken your photograph. The reason behind it is that you always lose some quality when you make some artistic adjustments. Getting a good quality photo gives you a chance to have the best possible quality after editing. If, instead, you just go and make all the changes you need in one step, you take a risk that your image will deteriorate too much and its quality may not be acceptable. You need to realise that by making many different adjustments you decrease the quality with every step. If you finish your job ending up with poor quality, getting it right may be much more difficult. It is worth mentioning that some editing software allows you to do a non-destructive adjustment and some people think that therefore they won’t lose quality because changes are reversible. Unfortunately, after making many different changes it takes an expert to find out what went wrong if the final effect leaves you with fancy looking but poor quality photograph.

Editing tools

Here are the most common steps of photo-editing: •

Cropping

•

Exposition

•

Brightness – contrast

•

Shadows and highlights adjustment

•

Colour balance

•

Colour adjustment

•

Lens correction

•

Sharpness

•

Local editing, spot removal

In following chapters, I will try to explain how it all works and how you can master your editing skills by using a proper assessment of your work and following some basic rules of photo editing.

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Cropping

Cropping Let’s start by stating the obvious. By taking a photograph you always capture only some part of your environment. We can see much more than a camera and it’s up to us what we want to show in our picture. By properly framing our picture we can drag somebody’s attention to certain parts of it and show our own vision of the object. Therefore, we should always think about framing when we take the picture. Saying this I fulfil my duty to tell you that framing your picture with desirable composition is important. We all know that it is not always easy or even possible. During editing, we may need to adjust our composition by removing some parts of the picture or by changing the position of our subject. This is, however, the matter of a photographer’s artistic vision and I won’t discuss it here. From an editing point of view, there are many things you should consider to be able to crop your pictures properly. The most important thing here may be your picture’s resolution after cropping. I say may be instead of is because it strongly depends on the camera and the media you use to publish your photographs. For example, if you want to print your picture in 15 x 10 inch format you should have a picture of 3600 by 2400 pixels. This comes from the assumption that you want to maintain 240 ppi resolution. This resolution is considered the minimum for good quality prints. Now, for a 16.3 mpx camera e.g. Pentax k-50, your pictures have 4928×3264 pixels size. Which means that you can crop out no more than 25 per cent of your actual picture. For 36 mpx camera e.g. Nikon D800, which has a size of 7,360 x 4,912 you can crop as much as 50 per cent of your image ending up with the same print size. As it sounds a lot in the matter of fact it is less than you may expect. See this example: 50% cropped off Full frame Nikon D800

11.1 Maximum crop for prin�ng

11.2 Maximum crop for prin�ng rotated

For online publishing, the usual resolution is only 72 ppi because that is the resolution of most, if not all, web browsers. If you need to place your picture in a movie clip then it needs to be cropped to fit your film frame. For full HD it will be 1920x1080px and for 4k video 4096 x 2160px. You must remember that the aspect ratio for film is different than the one for camera. The typical camera will have 2 by 3 or 3 by 4 aspect ratio while Full HD has 16:9 and for 4k - 1:1,85 or 1:1,9. Most of film editing software will allow you to place your picture and it will crop it for you but, from my experience, the photo editing software always gives you more control and precision.

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Apart from cropping for the composition you may also want to change the picture ratio in order to present your picture in different format. Here are some examples:

12.1 Square crop for prin�ng

12.3 16:9 - monitor ra�o crop for film

12.2 3 by 4 crop for prin�ng

12.4 A4 format - 297 by 210 mm ra�o crop for prin�ng

The other thing is to understand that when you crop your picture you change its content. As obvious as it sounds there is more to it than you may think. Every software you use analyses content of your picture and allows you to see it on the histogram. By cropping your picture and changing the content you change the histogram as well because some of the brightest or darkest pixels from your image may be removed. It will have some impact on automatic correction like automatic exposure, auto color balance and even auto contrast. Therefore, you need to decide whether cropping should be the first or the last operation you make. And last but not least; picture’s resolution, and therefore size, affects the use of two important filters: sharpening and noise reduction. In both cases, your program will reduce noise or sharpen the image depending on its resolution. If you do sharpening and noise reduction before cropping you may end up with picture being over-sharpened and with visible artefacts left after sharpening. So, sharpening and noise reduction should be done always after cropping. In the matter of fact, these two adjustments should be always done as the last ones because they also depend strongly on other adjustments such as colour, contrast, brightness, and clarity. If you want to save your image as it is and then use different cropped images produced from it, then cropping is your last operation. If you want to crop a picture and never use uncropped one, then you should crop it first. It’s worth mentioning that it is possible to enlarge the picture after cropping. Most programs allow you to enlarge the number of pixels in a picture using more or less sophisticated algorithms. Anyway, the quality of the picture will always suffer so unless you have some very good or important photograph to be printed, enlarging photographs, in general, is not a good idea.

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Assessing your cropping You may have seen many examples and tutorials showing you how to improve your composition by cropping images. Unfortunately, none of those pictures was yours. And now when you try to decide how to work with your pictures you still need some guidance. You may know all those rules like the rule of thirds and focusing techniques and still not be sure how to crop this exact picture. Here are some reasons: Firstly, there are many rules which contradict themselves. You either use the rule of thirds or centre your object. You may follow leading lines or centre the main object or use a rule of thirds. And the real issue here is, which method is the best for this particular picture. From my experience, the rule of thirds is the most overused, and quite often wrongly applied the rule in photography. You must remember that most of those rules come from the painting. As long as you can place your objects whenever you wish in your painting you cannot do this with most pictures. Also, most painters were not limited to certain proportions in their work while we take photos in certain proportions and, usually, need to present them in certain proportions. If, for example, you need to prepare web gallery, you would need to establish one proportion to all presented pictures and some of your photographs will look better and some other worse. Let’s say that you took a portrait on a busy street. Now you would like to recompose your photograph to place your subject in strong place using the rule of thirds. And all of a sudden some person in the background ends up being cut by half. Not a very good idea.

Crop from 4 by 3 to 3 by 2 cuts out the top and the bo�om of the frame.

The same photograph with rule of thirds lines on it.

Now, starting with the rule of thirds I played with composition and ended up with these two pictures below. While one on the left looks OK, the one on the right brings more tension and seems to drag more attention to the main object. It is all the matter of taste but I think you would agree.

So, the most important thing is to decide what looks good and what doesn’t using rather your common sense than some strict rules. Here is an example of a very simple composition which may show you how sticking to the rules may not always be the best option.

15.1 cropped image

The original photo was taken with a point and shoot camera in 4 by 3 ratio. To fit it to my collection of others DSLR shots I changed the ratio to 3 by 2. Furthermore, to make it look more like 14.1 panorama I decided to change its ratio to 16 by 9 . It gave me an opportunity to recompose the frame. Now, before you look on the next page, imagine how you would like to crop it. It is essential to develop a skill of imagining the result of your cropping and deciding what exactly you would like to achieve instead of simply applying rules.

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15.2 cropped image

Take a look at the same photographs with guidelines (below). As you can see, in a picture on the right, the main subject is way beyond the strong line. And in both, the horizon is below the horizontal strong line. It wouldn’t be anything wrong with following the rule of thirds to the letter but the real thing about editing is not only to make it right but also to make it interesting. So, even in very basic situation, it is really important to follow your taste and instinct rather than rules. Obviously, the more complicated the composition is, the more difficult it is to make a right decision. The key skill here is to try to apply the rule but not lose your sense of taste and be creative.

15.3 the rule of thirds

15.4 final crop

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Here is our first solution. By cropping out left part of the image I managed to get rid of one window, move the subject out of the centre and cut out the unnecessary top part. Also, the subject’s legs are still cut out but in a rather less unpleasant way. As you can see the rule of thirds is again ignored and it does not affect a picture in the wrong way. Below, final photographs after cropping. Let’s see another way of framing.

Here are the same photos cropped to 16 by 9.

So to generally conclude, the good knowledge of certain rules is essential but then there is way more to good editing than only applying these rules. Let’s try to assess a simple portrait and find some different ways to crop it.

We can crop it vertically and place our subject on the left side of the picture. This time the subject’s face lays nearly exactly on a leading line of rule of thirds grid. In this case, you must remember that a huge part of a photograph was cut out and the remaining pixels will not allow you to print it out in some big size. And the last example (to the left) is a square format. Rarely used but may be very useful if you have a set of

To learn how to improve it, we first need to find out what is wrong. As you can see it is another picture taken with a subject in the centre. Subject’s legs are brutally cut out and there is to much free space in the top part of the picture. Two windows on both sides are not symmetrical and the one to the right is cut by half.

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pictures taken vertically and horizontally and would like to present them together. Let’s try to fix another shot. Here is a great example of a ruined picture. Taken by accident, seemed to be useless. One hand and a part of a foot are cut out and a model is somewhere close to the centre of the shot with too much space over her head. What if, instead of trying to make it more proper, we will go in the other direction. Is there a way of turning a disaster into something interesting? I really like this photograph because it is very dynamic and looks natural. Here is what we can do: 18.1 original image

Let's try to summarise all this and specify a handful of rules that could help us when framing our photos. 1. Remember that cropping always removes some pixels from the photo, which affects its final size. Too much framing may prevent you from printing the photo at the size you need. 2. Along with pixels, cropping also removes some information about colour balance, white balance and exposure. If you want to edit any of these parameters, frame the picture before making any other changes. 3. The proportions of the photos are often determined by the medium with which they are to be used. In some cases, e.g. for editing movies or presentations, the resolution obtained after cropping is also important. 4. It is worth knowing and applying the principles of creative framing such as the Golden mean, the principle of thirds, and specific principles of framing a portrait. However, it is also worth remembering that many of these rules come from painting and may not always be followed. Sometimes it's worth deliberately ignoring them, although they should always be a starting point for you. 5. Knowing all the above rules, try to first evaluate what you want to improve and what proportions to apply to avoid unnecessary experiments. Remember that there are always infinite framing variations and when you don't know exactly what you want, it can cost you a huge waste of time.

As you can see this approach has nothing to do with any kind of centring, rule of thirds, or symmetry. But it became even more dynamic and maybe even more natural. Just a quick shot taken unexpectedly.

6. Usually, if you want to get an interesting effect, cropping should be bold. "Just a little" correction usually doesn't give any results.

Here are some hints if you want to try this with your pictures: 1. Try to imagine that your model lost the balance and is just about to 18.1 cropped image get it back. If you tried to turn this pic counterclockwise, instead of clockwise, it would look like a person is about to fall. Bad idea.

7. Framing portraits, apart from the usual technical rules, is also guided by many rules related to posing and strongly depends on the purpose of the portrait. It is worth remembering that e.g. photos for fashion magazines are in a sense portraits but their purpose is different than in the case of classic portraits. Portrait photography is specific and discussing all aspects of photographing and framing portraits is beyond the scope of this study. And this finally summarises basic information about cropping and framing pictures. Now is the time for you to edit some of your pictures and try to use what you’ve just learnt. Remember that the proper assessment is always a key.

2. Don’t be afraid of cutting parts of the model’s body. Yes, we all know the rules but sometimes there is no way of following them. 3. If you decide to make a ‘tight crop’, make it really tight. Being careful or shy won’t work. 4. There is no rule on how to do this properly. If you like the effect it is what you want. If you don’t, tray different angle and crop. 5. If you tried every possible angle and crop and it still doesn’t work then it may not work at all. Unfortunately, not every photograph look good being turned. 6. As with every editing technique: when you get tired of trying - take a break. You may come up with the best solution when you come back to your desk after 10 minutes or the next day.

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Exposure

Exposure ‘Correct’ exposure may be defined as an exposure that achieves the effect the photographer intended. And that is the only exposure you should take care of. However, there is no simple way of achieving it without knowing some basic theory about the camera sensor and the way how photographs are taken. When a photographer takes photos in any automatic exposure system like shutter speed priority, aperture priority or any other auto system, his camera sets all parameters to record the brightest and the darkest areas of the scene. It means that in a rather dark environment the photos become brighter than the scene really is and in a very bright environment, slightly darker. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that we take black and white pictures. Regardless of your camera’s sensor and processor, you will get pixels having limited number of different values of brightness. Let’s assume again that we use 8 bit picture format and it gives us 256 different values of brightness. What if you want to brighten a photo? Your software will add some values to the actual pixels. For example if you push it by 10 then the pixels having the value of 200 will become 210, those with value of 20 will get 30. However, all pixels in range between 246 and 256 will become 256. It means that in the areas which originally had different shadows in this range you will get one, equal, white area. The same applies to darkening, only this time some dark grey areas will become black. Here are the same pictures with changed exposure:

21.1 clipping blacks 21.1 correct exposure 21.3 clipping whites This example is slightly exaggerated but I wanted you to see that with an underexposed photo some details (e.g. pattern on the table) are lost and in the over-exposed photo, we get simple white background while originally we had a gradient. It is important to understand that there is nothing wrong in losing some details in shadows or highlights intentionally but quite often it might be a mistake because we usually stay focused on some part of our picture which we want to improve and do not pay enough attention to other parts of it. Keep in mind that with colour pictures you may lose even more details since some different colours may all become black or white. On the next page, you can see the same pics in colour. According to the editing software, in that case, Adobe Lightroom, the picture in the middle is correctly exposed. In my opinion, the picture to the right which is highly overexposed looks more interesting. Again, your artistic vision is a key and should not be ignored however it is important to remember that in any case of lowering or increasing exposition you may lose some details. Let’s see how so-called correct exposure is achieved by a camera and the editing software.

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23.1 Picture after using auto exposure in Adobe Lightroom.

22.1 clipping blacks

22.1 correct exposure

22.3 clipping whites

Histogram Do you remember that ‘Correct exposure may be defined as an exposure that achieves the effect the photographer intended’? Well, most editing programs disagree with that. Let’s take a look at how they work and discuss a histogram. The histogram is a graphic representation of the actual numerical values of all pictures in your photo. Here is a simple example of a black and white photo as it was taken: clipping No white pixels

Here we have the optimised photo after automatic adjustment. As you see there is still some clipping and no white pixels. It is like that because some information was not recorded by the camera when the shot was taken and these areas cannot be improved. But there is more detailed information on the left side of our photo. Ideally, you should aim to take well-exposed photographs and preserve as much information as possible during editing. Unfortunately, photography is more about art than accuracy and in many cases, too dark (underexposed) or too bright (overexposed) images are exactly what a photographer wants. When we work with exposition in coloured photographs the case becomes a little bit more complicated. Program will analyse the brightness of all pixels based on three values instead of one. That is in RGB model and for CMYK colour mode it would be four different values. In that case for every single pixel we get 256 different values for red, green and blue colour component. Bear in mind that proportions of those three values in the single pixel must be the same otherwise the colour will change. Let’s see the example: R 160, G 100, B 220 R 195, G 135, B 255 - brightened by 35

This photo of a pot was originally taken in colour but here is it’s black and white version because it is easier to explain the basic functionality of a histogram in black and white. The histogram shows the number of pixels with a different value of colour where black, zero light, is on the far left and white, maximum light (255) is on the right. As you can see there is a lot of dark pixels and not too many of bright ones. There is also no white pixels and that’s why the far-right part has no values. The height of this chart represents the actual value of colour from 0 - black to 255 white. When you adjust exposure you either increase or decrease this value but if it goes under 0 it is recorded as 0 and when it goes over 255 - it stays at 255. Most histograms show white (0) as a tiny white line on the chart. As you can see there is nothing on the far right which means that this picture does not contain any white pixels. You can also see a flat line where the chart ends on the top of the left side. It means that some of the dark pixels were too dark and all became black even thou they may originally have different shades of dark grey. Some colour information is missing and we call it ‘clipping’. When you want to fix it there is something called auto exposure in your software. You could do this manually by moving exposure up. Let’s see how Lightroom can fix it automatically.

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R 255, G 228, B 255 - pushed to far - changed hue. When you reach a maximum of 255 for one or more colour components, the software will change the hue because values over 255 cannot be increased. Since your pictures consist millions of colours the final effect may be far from the original. The same applies if you want to decrease exposure. From the software point of view you need to know that different programs presents different options for auto adjustment. In Lightroom, for example, pressing ‘auto’ in colour adjustment will cause automatic adjustment of exposure, contrast and brightness. The last one is divided into shadows and highlights. In Photoshop it is possible to auto adjust every aspect separately. If you want to see how auto exposure work in Lightroom without affecting brightness and contrast you can click “auto” and then reset contrast and brightness to zero. Let’s see how our picture looks like in full colour. My first photograph is the one strait from the camera and it looks exactly how I wanted it. The picture was taken with manual settings and this dark, moody fill was intentional. In the histogram, you can see that there is no missing information on left or right and there is slight clipping in shadows which always appear when we take underexposed, low key picture. Notice that, this time, apart from general data showed in grey, we also have five different colours representing red, green, blue, cyan and magenta. As long as you don’t adjust the colour of the picture, these coloured areas will never show clipping. It is, however, important to know that the histogram shows this additional information for further use.

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Exposure vs. brightness

24.1 original photo Fig24.1 Original photo, dark area clipping correspond to the lower left corner of the photograph. Notice that nothing is missing in histogram’s bright area despite the fact that this is the same picture as the first black and white.

You may notice that decreasing exposure make a photo darker while increasing it - brighter. Some software also offers brightness, sometimes coupled with contrast, or even changing brightness for shadows and highlights separately. So what is the difference? First of all, exposure is a relatively new feature for editing software. It was implemented specifically for photographers which are more familiar with this term widely used in photography. You can allow more or less light to get into your camera and you will get a brighter or darker photo. For different editing software, those options work slightly different. Affinity Photo offers exposure which can make your photo nearly completely white or black and brightness adjustment which will only change it for some degree. The rule of thumb here is to get your exposure as close to desired as possible before you go to brightness and contrast. One of the reasons we still have exposure and brightness is that some software like Photoshop or Affinity Photo also allows you to work with text and vectors which are highly resistant to exposure and respond much better to brightness. For software like Adobe Lightroom which is typically for photography, exposure is the key ingredient. On the other hand, when you work with RAW files which contain extra data giving you a chance to change the exposure after taking a photograph, exposure is the parameter you would go for. The main difference between brightness and exposure is that brightness either brightens or dims all pixels equally while the exposure is more sophisticated and usually affect bright pixels rather than dark ones. From the practical point of view, exposure allows you to protect information in dark and light areas while brightness and contrast are more radical and may cause a loss of details in dark or bright areas.

How to apply exposure

24.1 auto adjustment Fig24.2 Full auto adjustment includes exposure, brightness and contrast. A properly balanced picture with the majority of dark pixels because that is how it came from the camera. Fig24.3 Exposure auto adjustment. Notice that exposure itself basically affect only right part of the histogram.

For most pictures, it is recommended to try auto adjustment first. It should usually give you a wellbalanced exposure with maximum details in dark and light areas. You must be aware that some colour may be affected so it is a good idea to check “before and after” and decide whether you are happy with these changes or not. In most cases, it will look more attractive but sometimes you may wish to keep the colour very accurate and then it may not be good for you. If that is the case, use the manual exposure adjustment and watch colour and histogram. When you see that either bright or dark area starts clipping then it is time to stop there. If the photograph is still too dark or too bright, use brightness and contrast. That way you will preserve your original colour and get the desired exposure. This technique is particularly important when you have a set of photographs with different exposure. If you adjust them with auto-exposure you may end up with a set of pictures of the same scene with slightly different colours in them. Usually it does not look really professional. Also bear in mind that typical, photographic exposure is not exactly the same for the camera and software.

24.3 Auto adjustment. Brightness and contrast to 0

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Figure 27.1: correct exposure according to the camera (middle photo on the previous page). It looks a little bit dark but it is because how it was outside when this photo was taken. As you can see below Lightroom has different idea.

26.1 +3 EV

26. 2 +2 EV

26.3 +1 EV

Camera vs. software Here you can see seven pictures taken with a camera with different exposure settings. From top to bottom we have +3EV, +2EV, +1EV, correct exposition, -3EV, -2EV, -1EV. EV stands for Exposure Value, it is a logarithmic scale and is used in photography so your camera will use this scale. How about software? Adobe Lightroom also uses some scale similar to EV but it does not give exactly the same result as in-camera adjustment (e.g. -3 in Lightroom gives slightly darker image than -3EV from a camera). The scale in Lightroom allows you to go from -5 to +5 in 0.01 steps while camera usually has settings for 1EV, 1/2EV or 1/3EV steps in the range from -3 to +3. You must remember that camera adjusts white balance with every shot while the same white balance is used for adjustments in software and therefore at some point the hue of some pixels will change with exposure adjustment as I described earlier. It is worth mentioning that while auto-adjustment in Lightroom will adjust exposure together with brightness and contrast, you need to adjust white balance separately if you wish. How about other software? Affinity Photo has two different exposure tools. One in the Develop Persona - and it works similar to Lightroom although affects colour more than Lightroom, and another one in Layer Adjustment which works more like brightness although there is also separate adjustment for brightness and contrast. Adobe Photoshop works similar to Lightroom simply because it is designed by the same programmers.

27.1

26.4

Figure 27.2: auto exposure from Figure 1 adjusted in Lightroom According to Lightroom, this photograph was to dark so it was moved to +0.9 EV with contrast increased by +12. That way, the Histogram was moved to the right and looks more balanced.

26.5

-1EV

27.2

Figure 27.3: -3EV exposure according to camera (bottom photo on previous page) auto-adjusted in Lightroom. 26.6

-2 EV

Exposure increased by +3.1, contrast +9. Because the contrast was increased in different way you can see the difference with colour contrast and in the hue of some colours (notice the difference in the red vase in the background).

26.7

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0 EV

-3 EV

27.3

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28.1

28.2

Here, we have a picture underexposed by -3EV (left) and then auto adjusted with Lightroom and properly exposed picture from camera (right). As you can see the adjusted picture is more saturated, little bit brighter and with some changes to colour and hue.

It’s time to put this all together. 1. If the photograph is under or overexposed, use the auto-exposure function but remember that colour may be slightly different than original and “correct exposure” according to software is not always the correct exposure from the camera. 2. If your software offers exposure and brightness, use exposure first. It changes the brightness in a more natural way than brightness/contrast. 3. Histogram is a powerful tool but do not overestimate it. Use your eyes and taste to judge the photograph. 4. Exposure should be adjusted just after cropping and before any other changes like colour, contrast or saturation. 5. Auto exposure often affects skin tones. Be careful and compare before and after. Getting right skin tones is a complex task so try not to lose it if you have it right from the camera. 6. In most cases, the auto-exposure adjustment gives a very nice looking photograph. It may look very attractive but be careful with colour changes. Attractive not always means correct. Now it’s time for you to practice. Try to look at your photograph first and imagine what will happen when you use auto exposure. Try to change it manually up and down and see which areas of the histogram are mostly affected. Choose one of your well exposed pictures and change exposure drastically. Sometimes this kind of editing gives really interesting effects.

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Brightness and contrast.

Brightness and contrast I have already mentioned that Brightness and Contrast affect equally dark and bright areas of a picture. For that reason, it is usually better to use exposure adjustment to prevent tones from clipping. The problem with clipping may be sometimes used as an advantage when you actually want to achieve a more dramatic look and do not necessarily care for correctness. Here is an example of how you can change your photograph by using Brightness and Contrast. Bear in mind that Exposure should be adjusted first if you wish to use both adjustments. Here is a rather dull photograph taken in London. The most common issue with this kind of urban photography is, that there is too many different objects so it looks messy and rather pointless. Cropping would definitely help but here is another idea.

By adjusting very high brightness and boosting contrast we may get more eye-catching look despite losing some details. The picture is not correct but more interesting.

Using the same adjustment but in the opposite way we end up with a dark, moody look where only one object, skyscraper, is exposed.

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2. This method allows clipping and darkening or brightening all pixels equally so is more predictable than Exposure however usually less natural. 3. It is recommended to use Exposure before Brightness and Contrast to properly balance the photograph. Exposure gives more control over clipping and usually better-balanced shadows and highlights. Exposure and Brightness are two basics tools for brightness adjustment and I prefer to use them over other methods which I will describe later. An important thing to remember is that, if you need to correct your brightness - keep away from Brightness and use Exposure. If you want to lose some details in dark or bright areas, use Brightness and Contrast.

And here is the picture with cropping and a few more minor adjustments. It does not look natural but has this punch which may look more ‘catchy’. In some cases, it is useful to present a picture taken in daylight like it was a night shot. As I mentioned, Brightness and Contrast has a little use for correcting photographs since you can use exposure but may give you a chance for dramatic effects when it is needed. One very common task I would employ Brightness and Contrast to, is to improve low or high key pictures. In most cases, I would like for the background to be clearly black or white. Here I used Brightness to darken the whole picture and then masked the foreground layer. Because Brightness easily allows clipping, it was quite easy to make whole background plain black. I will discuss high and low key and masks later. For now, let's summarise the basics. 1. Brightness and Contrast is an older method of adjusting brightness and therefore less effective than Exposure.

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Curves Tonal curves is a very common tool used to improve contrast. It works based on the same principles as brightness and contrast. Here, however, we have an ability to change brightness and contrast together and see the graphic representation of our changes. In very specific work when great control over colour and contrast is needed it may be worth using it instead of simple brightness and contrast. Similarly to brightness and contrast, it will allow you to cross the line with clipping so using the histogram is a necessity. Also, in most photo editors, curves can be used separately for different colours. Let’s see an example: Really difficult picture taken in the dark, straight into the sun. The view was way more impressive than the picture itself so let’s see what we can do to make it better. The example below works exactly as if the brightness/ contrast was used. The darker parts of the picture were

darkened and the brighter pixels - brightened. The red line represents the starting point and the curve - its adjustment. Notice that in this example these two lines cross in the centre. We can click on the adjustment line and make as many nodes as we wish. And this is the difference between contrast and curves.

Curves

You probably noticed the bottom part of the graph which looks like a histogram. The big difference here is that this part does not change when you make adjustments because it only represents input values. In this picture, we have a great area of sea and sky and very bright sun. It would be nice to make everything darker and only the Sun brighter. We can easily do this by moving our crossing point towards bright area of the graph. Because the details in the left part are less important and don’t bring anything interesting to the picture we can clip them. You can see the flat line in the left part of

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Picked node

Picked area

picker tool

the graph - this is the area where all pixels were reduced to black. Also, the gradient in the sky became now a solid red. Here, in Affinity Photo, you can also add specific nodes by showing the program the area of the picture which you want to modify. So far I have only used the general channel which here is called “master”. The cool thing is that we can adjust curves to separate colours. From drop-down menu, you can choose the colour mode e.g. CMYK or RGB and then select the channel you wish to adjust. Because the dominant colour in this picture is red I decided to introduce some other colours in the dark area by removing the red from it. In all pixels where the adjustment is clipping all the red component was removed and replaced by dark blue.

Here is a typical example of using only one channel contrast to improve green. By reducing red colour in shadows I made all dark leaves more green and by improving reds in lights I managed to make the red flowers more ‘outstanding’. Curves is a very powerful tool but a rather difficult to master. It is quite easy to dramatically change colour with it but rather difficult to achieve more sophisticated colour and contrast adjustment. Since software engineers discovered easier tools to do so, curves are not very often used. If you, however, want to be a good photo editor, it is really important to know how it works. Curves is a very old tool and ‘old school’ editors still use it. Even if you prefer other, less complicated ways, of colour contrast, it is still a good idea to try curves and get some experience. Curves are quite useful when you have a strong, dominant colour and want to improve contrast and remove less important colours from the photograph. Let’s sum up: 1. Curves may be used to improve general contrast and to change the contrast in separated colour channels. 2. This tool allows clipping so you need to be careful. Watching histogram is a good idea. 3. Curves are very precise but therefore difficult to use. 4. Because you can adjust separate channels this tool also works as channel mixer. 5. Mastering curves may be somehow challenging but definitely is beneficial if you want to have great control over contrast and colour mixing at the same time.

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Colour adjustment To understand different methods of colour adjustment let’s first take a look at the colour definition and different aspects of colour description. Colour as we see it depends on the colour of light used to lite a scene. The same objects will appear in a different colour depending on light. In the extreme situation when the scene is really dark we may even come with an impression that all objects are dark grey which indicates lack of colour. On the other hand, different professionals describe colours in different ways. As I explained earlier, colours in digital manipulation are simply described by numbers and therefore are rather precise. In photography, however, the description of colour vary on its purpose. For the black and white picture, we may use terms like dark or bright. For colour, we use terms like hue, saturation, colour balance and so on. Some of these terms have a very similar meaning and were employed in photo edition mostly for photographer sake. It is essential to understand what all those terms mean and how photo editors work with them. I have already explained that computers use the RGB colour model to store colour information. For convenient editing however, it is quite common to describe colours in different way. We often use the HSL or HSB model. In that case we use Hue, Saturation and Lightness or Hue, Saturation, Brightness. In this model we operate with Hue which may be additionally modified by Saturation and Brightness. Here is how it works: Hue represents possible colours in numbers from 0 to 360 and is graphically represented as an angle of the circle. Saturation takes values from 0 to 100 and is shown as a distance from a centre and brightness (or lightness) is again from 0 to 100. Brightness 0 indicates a simple black. Here is the same red colour in different variations. Hue 0 Saturation 50 Brightness 100

Colour adjustment

Hue 0 Saturation 100 Brightness 100

Another concept associated with colour is colour temperature. Because the colour of the scene depends on the colour of light there is a need to somehow define the colour of light. We often use terms like warm colours or cool colours. Now, the colour temperature seems to be related to this description but may be somehow misleading. Here is a simple but accurate definition:

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The colour temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal black-body radiator that radiates light of a colour comparable to that of the light source. Colour temperature is a characteristic of visible light.

Here is an example of the same photograph with colour temperature changed in Lightroom. The picture to the left seems warmer and the one to the right - cooler. Ligthroom uses lower numbers for cool colours and higher for warm. Develop module in Affinity Photo has the same white balance option but uses lower values for warm colours and higher for cool ones which actually correspond to the common definition of colour temperature.

Take a look at the pictures. We would normally describe the top one as warm and the bottom one as cold because what we see brings this feel. Technically, it is rather the opposite. Colour temperature is recorded in Kelvins and goes from orange low numbers to blue - high numbers.

Temperature

Source

1700 K

Match flame, low pressure sodium lamps (LPS/SOX)

1850 K

Candle flame, sunset/sunrise

2400 K

Standard incandescent lamps

2550 K

Soft white incandescent lamps

2700 K

"Soft white" compact fluorescent and LED lamps

3000 K

Warm white compact fluorescent and LED lamps

3200 K

Studio lamps, etc.

3350 K

Studio "CP" light

5000 K

Horizon daylight

5000 K

Tubular fluorescent lamps or cool white/daylight compact fluorescent lamps (CFL)

5500 – 6000 K

Vertical daylight, electronic flash

6200 K

Xeon short-arc lamp

6500 K

Daylight, overcast

6500 – 9500 K

LCD or CRT screen

15,000 – 27,000 K Clear blue sky

41.1 warm colours

41.2 cool colours

The colour temperature is linked with transition from yellow to blue where blue is ‘colder’ and yellow, ‘warmer’. This feature is rather ‘flat’ so it is usually coupled with ‘tint’. The tint is a transition from green to magenta and is used to emphasis warmth or coolness even more. In that case, green comes together with blue and magenta with yellow. Changing temperature towards yellow and tint towards green gives rather mixed effect. Tint become very important in portrait photography. Our eyes are very sensitive to skin colour, probably because our skin colour is connected to our health. If someones face is pale or too red we usually suspect some health issues. In portrait editing, tint helps us to warm up or cool down the photograph and correct the colour to avoid this pale or red hue. In most software, the white balance is the first option to consider while working with colour. Getting the right colour balance at the beginning of colour adjustment is crucial even if you want to make some radical changes in colour afterwards. It will give you a ‘real’ or ‘proper’ colour of all objects in the scene. For most of the portrait work and fashion photography, you will nearly always need it as a starting point for further colour adjustment. Remember that portrait and food photography is very sensitive to colour balance. If you have an option of automatic white balance like in Lightroom it is always worth to try it first. In Affinity Photo, you can use a white balance tool to find a grey area in the photograph and set neutral white balance. While you can use the white balance as an artistic asset, remember that for a group of photographs presented together you will often need to get the same white balance. Somehow any, even slight, difference in white balance in different photographs of the same scene, is visible and rather considered unpleasant. Let’s put it all together:

Colour temperature is widely used with cameras to describe the setting called white balance. This setting tells the camera what is the colour of light in a particular scene. With most cameras, the automatic settings work just fine and usually photographers do not change them as long as they don’t want to achieve some particular effect. White balance is usually recorded in RAW files and may be seen and changed in post-processing. For files where white balance record is not supported, we can still adjust it in post-processing. The only difference is that we cannot see the original setting. It is important to remember that colour which we instinctively perceive as warm will be represented by lower colour temperature and the ‘cold’ blue hue will be recorded as higher light temperature. A few different adjustments are using this concept so it is essential to really understand it.

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1. Colour adjustment is usually described by hue, saturation and lightness. 2. Hues value goes from 0 to 360 and saturation and lightness - from 0 to 100. 3. The linear transition from blue to yellow is used for colour balance called white balance. 4. Colour tint is used with white balance to compensate colour on the green - magenta axis. 5. Adjusting photograph to neutral or ‘correct’ white balance should be the starting point for every work with colour.

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White balance The critical property of colour photograph is the white balance. In the camera, it may be used as Auto White Balance or as different pre-programmed adjustments. It is also possible to set up colour temperature manually in Kelvins. The last option is commonly used by photographers while working with studio light. In most of the modern cameras the white balance work quite well so you may think that there is nothing to worry about. The white balance is automatically adjusted by a camera based on the area which is “suspected” to be white, grey or black. Essentially any variation of equal values for Red Green and Blue components is considered as “neutral grey”. Sounds great. The problem arises when the same objects or people, dressed exactly the same way move from one light to another. For example - some photos were taken outside in strong sunlight, some in the shadow and some others inside with a flash. If you put these photographs one next to another you may easily notice a significant difference. There are a few ways to approach this challenge.

43.1 Original photo with camera white balance : Temperature 4500, Tint -13.

43.2 Lightroom - WB adjusted with colour picker. Temperature 4700, Tint -5.

43.3 Warm photo : Temperature 6500, Tint +10.

43.4 Cool photo: Temperature 2850, Tint 0.

White Balance work slightly different depending on the software used so let me just mention some different options and then we will get to the more general settings. Firstly, some strict photo editors like Lightroom, have an option to restore different camera settings during editing. If you open a RAW file in Lightroom you will get a chance to choose from any White Balance preset from the camera. For example, NEF files from Nikon D800 will let you choose between Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent and Flash. For other files like jpg or tiff, you will only get As Shot, Auto and Custom. In some other photo editors e.g. Afinity Photo, these options are not available. If you have those options - it is worth to try them just to have some starting point or just to check different looks. If you don’t, not a problem. When you get some experience you won’t be using them anyway. The safe way to start is to set up white balance based on the colour of something in the picture that you know is grey. It is usually only starting point so don’t be disappointed. When you are editing the portrait remember that the skin tones are the most important. Manipulate your colour temperature to get as close as possible to the point you like. Then make the final adjustment with the Tint slider. Later I will get to Colour Adjustment but remember - get as much as you can from the colour balance before going to Colour Mixing. White balance is the leading setting for every photograph and helps you to keep colour consistent. You may wish to change colour to be, for example, more flattering then natural. Again, use White Balance and avoid Colour Adjustment as long as you can. The reason for that is quite simple. If you have a group of photos and want to keep them consistent it is easier to copy only Colour Temperature and Tint rather than many different adjustments from Colour Mixing. Colour Balance is a really powerful tool. Here is how you can change a ‘feel’ of a scene with it. Here we have a photo taken in a studio. Auto camera settings did a good job and the colour balance is nearly perfect which means that colours are exactly as they were in the scene. Lightroom read these settings and showed Colour Temperature = 4500 and Tint = -13 ( slightly moved toward greens). To see what was the perfect balance according to Lightroom I grabbed a colour picker, choose eye grey area and adjusted WB automatically. This gave Colour Temperature = 4700 and Tint = -5. Now image looks slightly warmer. In the next two photographs colour temperature was changed to achieve warm portrait and a rather cool one. Notice that the last, ‘cold’ photo still keeps colours looking natural giving the picture kind of ‘night out’ look. The following photo was easily achieved by copying White Balance settings. While white balance is considered as a tool for correcting colour in the picture there is no reason for not using it more creatively. There are however some things to remember while using this tool. Firstly, there are some situations when you really need the white balance to be precise.

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One of them is when you edit product photography. Whether it is some fashion photo, car or interior design - correct colour will be probably very important for the client. And here is where the white balance is the most useful solution. There are some tools you can use while taking photograph to improve accuracy. One very simple is a grey chart. You simply take one photo of the scene with the neutral grey chart in it and then you have an anchor point for all other pictures taken in the same location and light. Some useful variation of this technique is to use colour checker sometimes called a colour passport. Here is how it works in practice. In Lightroom, I opened a photo with a colour picker in it, grabbed a colour picker from white balance adjustment tool and hovered over the neutral grey square. As you can see, Lightroom tells us that the colour here is: R= 75.2 G=77.7 B=86.0.

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43.1 Cool photo: Temperature 2850, Tint 0.

Lightroom also reads the actual white balance with Temperature = 4650 and Tint = +13. When I click, Lightroom automatically adjusts Red, Green and Blue to be equal meaning that now it is grey, and change the white balance to Temperature = 6950 and Tint +11. Now, I can copy this one particular setting to all photos taken during this session and make sure that all colours are as accurate as they can be. The colour checker may be used for many different tasks e.g. warming or cooling colours and setting some starting values for further adjustment. The obvious question here may be, why do we need this kind of tool when the camera is supposed to get accurate white balance automatically. The answer is - the accuracy of the white balance strongly depends on the dominant colour in the picture. Because the background usually occupies most of the picture, the dominant colour is usually taken from the background. So if you take a picture of the same object with the brick wall in the background and then let’s say the other one with some green plants you will end up with a different white balance. The solution here is to set the white balance manually while shooting in the camera. In practice, you get the picture for editing and the white balance is as it is. White balance is the vital tool to understand and since you master it you can make a huge improvement for both technical and creative adjustment. One more thing to point out: in most cases, auto white balance will work with any object which is neutral grey which means its RGB values are equal so it might be very bright or really dark grey. In practice, try to find rather mid-grey if you can. Ideally, 50 % grey will give the best result for whole tonal range in the photo. While white balance should normally be the first tool to use for colour adjustment, use it after adjusting exposure end brightness. Let’s summarise it: 1. White balance is used to ensure the correct colour in the picture. 2. You can use this tool to change the ‘feel’ of the scene and make it warmer or cooler. 3. White balance is usually safer to use for creative purpose than other techniques because in most cases keeps colour consistent. 4. It is the only tool to use if you need to get the correct colour in product or documentary photography. 5. For a group of pictures the same white balance will give you consistent look and is easy to use for that purpose. 6. White balance can be used for artistic purposes and give really nice and still natural looking effects.

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Saturation

Saturation Saturation is an old and widely used term to describe the amount of colour in the picture. As for single, basic colour e.g. Red or Green it seems rather straightforward. For a mix of colours, things get complicated. Saturation adjustment works to increase and decrease the intensity of colours in an image. I hope that you remember the RGB and HSL colour description. As I explained your computer only works with RGB to show your picture. Let’s see an example: Fully saturated Red:

47.1

R255, G0, B0

47.2

R255, G125, B125

As you can see Red value is 255 and green and blue are 0. H=0, S=100, Lightness = 100. How to make it darker working only with RGB? Lower Red value. Simple. How to make it less saturated? We need to get it brighter. But it has already reached its maximum. Well, we get two other colours up, simultaneously. For basic colours full saturation works like that: Red: R=255 G=0 B=0, Green: R=0 G=255 B=0, Blue: R=0 G=0 B= 255, Cyan: R=0 G=255 B=255, rising Red lowers the saturation. Magenta: R=255 G=0 B=255, rising Green lowers saturation. Yellow: R=255 G=255 B=0, rising Blue lowers saturation. And it all works nice but for so many colours in the picture, the only way of getting it done is to allow clipping. With saturation, it means that a photograph can easily get over-saturated. The flowers below look more like a painting rather than a photograph.

47.3 original photo

47.4 photo with high saturation applied

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48.1 original photo

48.1 over-saturated

48.1 de-saturated

Here is an example of a clip-art with rather basic colours and well-balanced contrast. Like in the previous example, oversaturation does not look good. You could use oversaturated picture for some artistic project but be really careful with this tool because, quite often, it is very easy to overdo it and, in most cases, it does not look nice. The safe alternative to saturation is a vibrance tool and I will describe it later. Saturation can still be very useful for some other 48.4 de-saturated with mask tasks. One of them is to de-saturate an image completely and easily achieve a greyscale picture. Although some programs provide specific tools for black and white transition, saturation is easy to use and predictable. You can also use saturation separately for chosen colours. In that case, it makes it easy to de-saturate some part of the photo in order to drag attention to the object. One particular type of photography is very sensitive to saturation and it nearly always looks unpleasant when the photo is oversaturated. It is a portrait. In the example below you can see that, as long as a background could be acceptable, the skin tones look really bad when oversaturated.

Decreased saturation, usually coupled with increased clarity and contrast, is often used for architectural photography when this vivid urban style is desirable. It helps to expose form and texture rather than colour and makes pictures look sharp and clean. Quick sum up: 1. Saturation works to change the intensity of colour and it allows colour clipping. 2. It may be used for all colours together or for separate colours. 3. It is quite useful to make drastic and predictable changes but must be used with caution because of colour clipping. 4. It gives a simple way to desaturate a photograph and make it black and white. 5. It helps to achieve artistic changes to colour. 6. Should be used with great caution with portrait photography because the skin tones are very sensitive for saturation change. 7. For colour improvement it is usually better to use vibrance adjustment because it prevents colours from clipping. The saturation tool is one of the most important tools in photo editing and its understanding will seriously improve your skills as an editor. Spend some time working with different photographs and using saturation for photo improvement and creative purpose. Make sure that you can see when picture become over saturated. It will become essential when you start doing some serious photo correction because it is very easy to over saturate a photograph and it certainly does not look professional.

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Vibrance Vibrance adjustment was invented to fix problems with saturation. To avoid or at least lower probability of colour clipping, Vibrance works in a slightly different way. Without getting to deep into technical details, it affects more the colours which are less saturated than the well-saturated ones. Also, it more affects middle tones than dark and bright. Vibrance cannot be applied to separate colours but it is a very simple solution to improve colours and not over-saturate them. It is usually coupled with Clarity. Clarity improves colour contrast between pixels which are close to each other. Somehow it makes photos look sharper or ‘clear’. In most cases, you should use Vibrance rather than Saturation unless you need colour clipping for some artistic effect. Vibrance will usually help to improve colour definition without changing colours to drastically so it is safe especially for skin tones. Below is the classic use of Vibrance and Clarity. Notice how sky and branches pop up in the upper right part of the photo.

51.1 original photo

Vibrance

51.2 vibrance added

As you can see the Vibrance adjustment is a simple way of improving colour saturation. For the creative purpose it has rather limited use but may be used instead of Saturation when the changes we want to make are not that big. Here is an example of its use in portrait manipulation. The photograph is already well saturated, has a right white balance and contrast. To make it warmer and more interesting we can simply increase Vibrance and Clarity and get it more saturated without risking any problems

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with skin tones. For some creative changes, the next picture has Vibrance and Clarity decreased. Bear in mind that Clarity increase or decrease the colour contrast. By lowering Clarity we make the colour contrast lover so the general contrast in the picture decreases. The photograph with low Vibrance gets this ‘dreamy’ look. Notice that it is soft but not blurry. To compensate the lightning, I could simply increase brightness or exposure but decided to leave it slightly darker to make it look like a photograph taken just before dusk. Clarity may be used with Saturation but usually gives to drastic changes so isn’t very helpful for quality improvement but may be an interesting choice for some creative ideas. It is time to conclude the topic: 1. Vibrance is a simple and safe tool to increase or decrease colour saturation. 2. Use it for quality improvement especially with portrait photography to keep skin tones well balanced. 3. Clarity affects colour contrast and can be also used with Saturation. 4. In most cases, when you need quality improvement, you should always use Vibrance instead of Saturation. 5. Creative use of Vibrance is also possible and decreasing Vibrance and Clarity will give you a soft but not blurry photo.

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Local adjustment Quick advice. Stay away from local adjustment as long as possible. Why? Because it is powerful, fascinating and... time-consuming! In most cases if you apply general adjustment properly, you should not need any local adjustment. Some times local adjustment may even make photos look over-edited and this is something that you should avoid at any cost. You’ve been warned. Basically, local adjustment is any kind of adjustment being applied to some part of the picture. It includes colour, brightness and contrast adjustment which were explained before. But, because some tools have fancy names, there is a good enough reason to dedicate some space for them here. Some of those tools get their names from old photo editing techniques used in traditional, analogue photography like burn or dodge. It was widely used for portraits for quite a long time and it is still worth mastering. You need to remember that it is very easy to overdo this kind of adjustment so it may look unnatural. The local adjustment also consists of tools for fixing photos when you have some artefacts or imperfection. You can use a wide variety of healing tools e.g. healing brush, spot removal tools, or inpainting brush. All of them attempt to copy surrounding pixels over imperfect part of a photo using quite sophisticated algorithms. Initial quality assessment is very important while you use healing tools. To work with them, you need to enlarge your photo. It’s is very easy to get dragged deep into repairing imperfection which nobody, except for you, would ever see. So be reasonable. Zoom out your picture to full screen from time to time during edition and if you can’t see any problems in it, stop correcting. It really may take hours to remove very small particles invisible in normal view. For local burning and dodging, be careful. Here is an example. I used the dodge tool to brighten up models eyes, lips and hair. Also I brightened up the left side of his face which is in the shadow. At first glance, it may look attractive but is overdone. This kind of editing might be OK for some big poster in printing. For any other use, the basic version looks way more natural.

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There is one very useful technique which I use a lot and which is especially helpful with local adjustment. All you need to do is to control the time of your editing and at least every half an hour, go away from your computer. Just like that. Take a break. At least 10 minutes. First of all, if you spent over 20 minutes with one picture with local adjustment, it is either finished or not worth saving. Quite often, when you come back to work you will realise that there is nothing else to do, despite the fact that when you were leaving you thought that you had a lot more work. By the way, it is very good practice in every kind of photo editing. Our eyes get use to vivid colours and contrast and after some time perfectly good pictures seem to need some extra editing. In local adjustment, every single tool requires some training to master its use and understand when to use it. It is worth to try them all but remember, keep all the local adjustment simple and don’t overuse it. If someone looks at the photograph and says that it was over-edited their in most cases mean - over-edited with local adjustment. There is a group of adjustment which is also local but based on masks. In that case, you can use rectangular or circular mask or even a masking brush to make some basic adjustment like exposure or saturation which will affect only the masked part of the photo. Below is an example of product photography. The aim here was to attract the viewer's attention to the reflection of hand in a pickup. Using simple local adjustment I darkened parts of the picture.

This particular example was done in Lightroom but it would work in the same way in any other software. Notice that using gradients makes editing more discrete and that’s what we want to achieve in most cases. Time for sum up: 1. Local adjustment has a group of tools which are used to fix small imperfection or emphasis small areas of a picture. 2. Tools like dodge, burn or sponge are suppose to mimic old techniques derived from analogue photography. They have interesting use but should not be overused since a photograph may be easily over-edited. 3. It is usually better to edit slightly bigger parts of the photo with gradient tools to achieve a more natural look.

56.1 source image

4. Local adjustment should be the last to use in editing. This chapter basically concludes all editing which you might need in over 90% of your work. If you master all presented techniques you should be able to successfully edit any photograph. Following topics will cover some additional options but for most of the time, you should not need to use them.

56.2 gradient tool - decreased exposure

56.3 local adjustment brush - decreased brightness

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56.4 circular gradient increased exposure and contrast

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Sharpening

Sharpening If you are a photo editor and a photographer, here is a moment when I have to disappoint you. You can get away with many mistakes in photography but, unfortunately, blurred or out of focus shots are not one of them. Simply, if a photo is not sharp it never will be. Sharpness filter is the last resort of trying to save a blurred photo but it has very limited use and works only with pictures that you want to print. As long as a viewer have a chance to zoom in or out, sharpening is a bad idea. The filter works simply by increasing contrast between adjacent pixels. The photo does not become sharper, but rather locally more contrasty. You have some options to set up and try to mask the area which are supposed to be soft leaving the other lines sharper. But, because it only makes an impression of being sharp, it is important to make sure that a picture will not be enlarged. Hence the main use of this filter for printing. Here are possible options: Amount - the amount of contrast being applied to adjacent pixels. Radius - radius on which pixels are to be analysed - generally, the bigger resolution the bigger radius. Detail - the size of details being taken into consideration - smaller number of details give you a chance to avoid increasing contrast on small areas like skin shadows. Masking- is supposed to mask the area of the picture which you do not wish to sharpen. Areas with the lowest contrast will be affected first. This prevents smooth backgrounds like sky from being affected by grain. Bear in mind that photos straight from the camera do not have resolution so 100% zoom means that your photo is enlarged related to your screen resolution. That is why, when you have your photo sharpened in Lightroom you may not get a print quality as you suspect. The only way of getting it right in Lightroom is to set a zoom whitch is as close as possible to your printout size. It is not what the Lightroom help files would advise but it works. In Photoshop or Affinity Photo you first need to set the desired resolution for your picture and then use the unsharp mask. If you plan to change the resolution of your photo, do it before you use the unsharp mask. If you still want the sharpened photo to be published online, use 100% zoom and it will work in some Internet Browsers better than in another. Sharpening tools are rather unpredictable, unreliable and difficult to use. Use sharpening only if you have no other option. In a picture to the right I attempted to sharpen it but also decreased sharpness in the left part of the picture making impression of blurred background. And this use of the sharpening tool is the one I do the most. There are other methods of sharpening in Affinity or Photoshop but they involve layers and that is a topic for another occasion.

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Black and white Black and white photography is nowadays less popular than in times of film photography but it still is a very powerful kind of art and black and white editing is definitely worth learning. There are a few ways of transferring a colour photo into black and white. You can reduce saturation and get a photo in greyscale. It is simple and gives a very natural look. After transferring your photo, you can use all local adjustment tools like dodge and burn, to increase contrast and make a photo more appealing. This is kind of old school editing but gives you great control over the final artwork. Here is how it works:

Our starting point is a RAW file with basic adjustment so Exposure and White Balance have been already applied. It is a good practice to make basic adjustment in colour because it is easier to work with a photo which already has a proper contrast.

And here is what we get by decreasing saturation to zero. Notice that, for photos with vivid colours, the black and white version will usually lack contrast. Boosting contrast is something that you would do nearly always with this technique but be careful and do not overdo it. Bear in mind that the next step will improve contrast locally.

Black and white

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Here we have a modern technique of black and white conversion based on colours. It allows us to use compounds colours to change the brightness of certain areas. This technique works different depending on set of colours we have in the image. Here, for example, I wanted to brighten up the jeans but not necessarily the background. Unfortunately, the background consist blue colour so it’s brightness was also increased.

Next step: increased overall exposure, here, in Lightroom to + 1.32 and contrast +40. Remember that at this point we are looking for a middle point rather than a final contrast.

Obviously, we can combine these two methods by making black and white conversion based on colours and than make local dodging and burning.

And the final image comes after very simple local Exposure adjustment. In some cases, to make the result more dramatic, I decrease sharpness in the background but here it was not necessary.

Adjustment based on compound colours will work better for photos containing many different colours. When the picture is less colourful then it is better to use old school dodging and burning preceded by desaturation.

I used local adjustment tools available in Lightroom but in Affinity Photo or Photoshop, it might be more convenient to use dodge and burn. Lack of colour makes us more sensitive to contrast and textures. In many cases, black and white photography is more appealing then colour and for some kind of photography is even more desirable. This kind of editing gives us full control over all details in the picture. Let’s take a look at the other option.

Black and white photography can be very appealing and dramatic. There is plenty of great examples of black and white photography. You should try to convert some of the pictures to black and white to see how different and sometimes more interesting the may look. In landscape photography, you will find a lot of examples of beautifully converted images with really impressive and dramatic sky. Also architectural photography is full of beautiful forms, shapes and textures extracted with black and white editing. 62.1 Gradient mask decreased exposure

62.2 Local adjustment brush decreased exposure.

62.3 Local adjustment brush increased exposure.

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62.4 Local adjustment brush - increased exposure and contrast.

Well done black and white conversion is an essential step to duotone conversion. Here we have the same image converted with split toning in Lightroom.

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Sometimes you will need to increase the contrast before applying split toning. Here the balance was moved down because the overall image was intended as a low key. In well-balanced photos balance should stay in the middle however good practice is to move the balance level up and down to see which setting looks the best.

Here is what to remember: 1. Converting a photo to black and white introduce the very interesting concept of shapes and tonal transitions and can bring really powerful results. 2. Conversion can be done by decreasing the contrast or using B&W conversion present in most photo editing programs. 3. Learn how to use local adjustment tools like dodge and burn, available in your software. It requires some practising so try them with different photos to gain confidence. 4. Remember that after using the B&W conversion based on colours, you can still use local adjustment to increase local contrast. 5. Like with other editing techniques, do not overdo it.

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Lens Correction and Transform Tool

Lens correction and Transform Tool Some of the tools may be considered being essential and any automatic correction of errors caused by camera or lens is definitely one of them. As I mentioned in Introduction the order of using particular tools is important and I suggested to use them in the order presented in this book. Shouldn’t we apply lens correction first? Well, it seems to be the obvious choice but maybe not yet. Here is why. The producer of the lens usually gives a technical characteristic of it and then a programmer can prepare an algorithm to correct any imperfection. That’s the theory. In practice, every producer tends to convince us that his product is better than it realty is for economic reasons. The better the product specification looks, the more likely we will buy it. This, by the way, applies also to camera and sensor characteristics. Now, the lens correction algorithm is only as good as the specification is correct. If the certain lens does not exactly fit the specification then the correction may be far from accurate. There are web sites like DXO Mark where you can find independent tests of lenses and cameras but we cannot be sure whether the software engineers based their programs on independent tests or official specs. And, when you use automatic lens correction in different software you will quite often get slightly different results. And that’s why, I personally, do not use lens correction for every single photo I work with. Often photo distortion is realy small and correction is not needed. There are, however, some cases when you at least should try this tool before you do any other correction related to distortion e.g. architectural photos. But what is it about? Distortion is an optical aberration that describes how the magnification in an image changes across the field of view. In practice, the effect of distortion is mainly visible near to the photo border and is nearly negligible in the centre of a frame. When you crop a photo, you most likely get rid of distortion anyway. The graph beneath illustrate the effect but is exaggerated. In most cases, you wouldn’t notice any deformation until you apply lens correction. The problem becomes more apparent when you have a photo containing a lot of horizontal or vertical lines. Most applications offer automatic lens correction but you need to check a few things before you apply it. If the photo comes straight from the camera, whether it is a jpg or RAW, it’s metadata includes a camera and a lens model. This is a part of information required by the software to apply a correct adjustment. If the photo was previously edited and saved in some other formats and then saved as jpg, this information may be missing and then the auto adjustment won’t work. If some exotic or old lens were used, it’s profile may not be available in your application. It is a good practice to take a look at lens info and make sure that it is an actual lens that photo was taken with.

Barrel Distor�on

Pincushion Distor�on

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Here is where lens correction can be handy. This picture was taken in very difficult angle and it’s hard to say which lines are parallel and which are not. Notice, that Lightroom here shows the model of the lens. Also notice that the corners of adjusted photos are slightly brighter. It is like that because Lightroom has information about vignetting. To evaluate the quality of correction take a look at the lamp on the left side of photo.

strait up the picture, and distort it to get vertical and horizontal lines. Notice that vertical lines are now parallel but cylindrical objects became visibly distorted. Option ‘Vertical’ will give exactly the same effect for this particular photo. And option ‘Full’ will drastically distort all curves in the picture so it is simply unacceptable. But do not jump to a radical conclusion yet. This example is here to show

you how Transform tool affects curves. In many cases with the contemporary architecture we only have straight lines and in that case Lens Correction and Transform can be very useful. The photo below was taken with 32 mm focal length. I wanted the lines to be more parallel and normally, moving back and using longer focal length would help. In this case, I had no space behind my back. Using Auto Transform solved the problem very quickly. In most photos like this, lens correction is essential. Even with a good lens, you will get some minor distortion which would be noticeable because of the nature of the picture.

The rod is slightly bent in the original photo and looks better after adjustment. In this kind of photography, I always use the Lens Correction however sometimes the change is hardly visible depending on the lens. If you think that the correction is not precisely right, you can do some manual adjustment using Distortion and Vignetting sliders. Using the Lens Correction is essential if you want to straighten up the photo like this. Now, we can try to use the Transform tool. Here are only the basic options to show you how it works and how new problems may appear while some other are fixed. First, auto transform. The software attempts to 69.1 original photo

69.2 original photo

Using both techniques work the best if the subject is at least close to being levelled and does not contain curves especially near the borders of the picture. Notice that original photo looks natural and in many cases you may not want to straighten it. Do not think that, because vertical lines are not parallel, you should always fix it. There are some other situations when Lens Correction and Transform may be essential. Below there is a picture of decking. I take every chance to improve my collection of textures. Since the texture is nearly always about shapes and geometry, keeping lines strait is rather important. Again, I was limited by the distance between a camera and the subject. Even though the lens was rather a good quality 50mm prime, Lens Correction helped a lot. Full Transform with following manual adjustment helped to get a flat, regular texture.

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Lines are now strait and parallel and a vignette were accurately removed by Lens Correction. Quick summary: 1. Lens correction may work slightly different depending on used software but is always worth trying. 2. In portrait photography its use is rather limited so as long as you don’t see the need of using it, you don’t have to. 3. Lens Correction shows its usefulness in product and architectural photography when there is a need for correcting imperfections caused by lens aberration. 4. If the lens correction doesn't solve all the problems you can use Transform tool. 5. Always check if the correction is really necessary. In many cases some distortion is caused by perspective and then should not be fixed. 6. It takes some practice to learn how and when to use Lens Correction and Transform Tool but using it properly is quite a handy skill. 7. Remember that the easier way of straightening a photo is to use a Crop Tool so if there is no need to Transform and distort photo simply use Crop Tool instead.

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Do you need Layers? Concept of Layers was present in Adobe Photoshop nearly from the beginning of digital photo editing. Many applications use layers and many editors believe that good software should have layers. What are Layers? You can open several pictures, place them one over another and edit them independently. But if one picture is under another you cannot see the one beneath. With layers, you can make a part of one layer transparent so it shows the image beneath. It is called masking. And this powerful ability was the initial use of layers. You could, for instance, increase brightness in one layer, decrease contrast in another and then get one image with some area brighter and some other softer. And, because you could have multiple layers, you could make a local adjustment for different parts of the image. Thanks to masks, you could dynamically change the area affected by a certain adjustment. That was the initial purpose of layers and, by the way, the great idea. Very quickly editors started using layers for compound images. They could insert different images and place an object from one photo to another. So you could have your friend with some rock star in one picture. The biggest problem with layers was that a file had to hold information from multiple images in the computer memory all the time even if only a small part of one image was visible. And the use of Layers is still the only option if you want to use different images. This kind of photo manipulation is used in publishing and digital art and there is not enough space here to cover it all. This book is about photo editing and there are better ways of local editing than layers. You can do extensive local editing in Lightroom without layers. You can do the local adjustment with dodging and burning in applications which have layers. And in application like Photoshop or Affinity Photo, you can use adjustment layers. With adjustment layers, you do not add another layer with the same picture but instead, the software only records the adjustment you want to make and then applies it to desirable part of the photo. This information takes way less space in memory than the whole image and the process itself is less resource - consuming. So, for most photo editing, you won’t need traditional raster layers and most of local adjustment can also be made without them. Generally, for sake of efficiency, don’t use pixel layers as long as you don’t need them. If you use Lightroom you can never need layers if you master your skills. Remember that layers significantly increase the file size and in most cases for a picture to be editable you will need to keep it in your software native file type. It is not always convenient. But, since for Photoshop and Affinity Photo users, layers are favourite and probably most used tools, here is how their work. In general, you can have raster or pixel layers or adjustment layers as I’ve already mentioned. In Phtoshop there is also a functionality called Smart Object which works in a very similar way as adjustment layers. You can also have vector and text layers but these are tools for graphic designers and not for photo editing. I will use Affinity Photo to show some examples but all this information applies to any other software with layers.

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that much thanks to huge flexibility of masking. I added this photo to my document by dragging the file from Explorer window to my workspace and Affinity Photo automatically placed it as a new, top layer. As you can see the new picture nearly completely covers the main photo. And here the real magic of layers begins. I have already demonstrated how to hide some part of the layer by painting over the mask but with so many details in the main picture, it would take a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, layers offer much more than placing one picture over another. There is a general rule that the sky is almost always brighter than the rest of the picture because it is normally the source of light. To automatically cover only the bright area of the photo, we can use layers blend modes. In this case, I used Darken and all the part of my top layer which was darker than the bottom layer stayed visible. Because the sky was originally nearly white it was all covered by the new sky. This particular sky replacement has a dark bottom part but this could be easily fixed by simple masking. Another available option is the layer opacity. I lowered it to 55% because the sky was unnaturally dark. Because the main image was still rather dull I added the Hue Saturation Lightness Adjustment Layer and masked the top half of it. Just to show you how it affects the file size: The original main photo was a 20.45 MB DNG file, sky: 14.0 MB jpg, final Affinity Photo document with layers: 179 MB. Thanks to some very useful Layer abilities some operations like sky replacement are now simple and can be done quickly. Hopefully though, you won’t need to do this kind of editing too often because it is still time-consuming

Layers for composite images As you probably guessed I am not a big fan of layers but let’s make some composition exercise. Here we have a rather dull photo taken at a beautiful location but not necessarily at the best time. The sky is too bright and there are two branches in both top corners of the image which are looking rather unpleasant. I wanted to move the centre of interest lower and closer to the left. First of all let’s get rid of those branches. I duplicated the layer and moved the top layer to the right so the right branch ended up outside the picture. Now, I added a layer mask and masked nearly all top image except for a small patch in the right top corner by painting it black. Really convenient thing about masks is that you mask something by painting black and unmask by painting white. You can also make image partially transparent by painting grey. That way I masked the branch to the right.

I duplicated the main layer again, moved it to the left and again masked it leaving the patch in the left top corner. And now we have one three closer to the left part of the photo which is a classic example of applying the rule of thirds. I could also get rid of some branches sticking up from the tree but I left it to demonstrate some really useful functionality of layers which actually cannot be replaced by any other method of editing. I hope you would agree that now the photo still doesn't look very impressive simply because the top part of it is pale and empty. Let me demonstrate one very common and quick method of replacing the sky. I always have a few photos of the sky on my hard drive waiting for this kind of picture. Here is the one I chose for this occasion. It is too dark and too saturated comparing to the basic image but here it does not matter

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and making these changes with a group of, let’s say, 20 or more photos can make you tired. Here is how the Layer Panel looks like for this image. I have already mentioned that Layers may have a different purpose than photo editing and because I only cover the photo adjustment here, I will focus on this part of using layers. Abilities of Layers may vary depending on the software. For further examples, I will use Affinity Photo. Bear in mind that most application supporting Layers work in a very similar way but the terminology may be different. Here are the basic functions of Layer manipulation in Affinity Photo: Layer opacity - transparency Layer blending modes Layer mask Adjustment layers Layer Effects Live Filters Some of these functions are used for graphic design rather than photo editing. This is because, at some point, Adobe Photoshop became the main programme used for any purpose connected to digital imaging and other software developers followed this trend. In here I will skip all text and vector related use of Layers because they have no use for photo editing. I have already explained how Layer opacity works so let’s move to the next topic.

Overlay It is like Multiply and Screen combined to increase contrast. In essence, it darkens darker areas, and lighten light areas. If the underlying layer’s pixels are 50%, it screens. Useful for: Increasing contrast. It works in a really interesting way when the top layer is black and white. It increases contrast without increasing saturation. Works also interesting when you put one colour layer over a black and white picture. Creates a duotone with great sharpness.

Layer blend options (ranges) On top of blending modes, there is another option which helps with blending and it is called Blending Mode or Blending Range. In two different panels, we have a linear representation of tonality of both: source (top) layer and the underlying layer. Here we can independently mask some colour range using either master channel or affect Red, Green and Blue channels separately.

Layers for photo editing All layer modes and range options are widely used in Art and Graphic Design where the top layer is often one colour vector image or text. With two or more pixel layers, all those options become less predictable and are not that often used. This part of photo editing requires a lot of time to master and is probably the most time-consuming task. In some specific applications, it may be very useful but still you’ll spend a lot of time experimenting with different sets of settings. There are great examples of Layer blending in the night, urban and landscape photography.

Layer blend modes Now, let’s go through the process of one example.

Blend modes determine how an upper layer’s pixel colours will blend with those on the layer beneath. Blend mode names, such as Multiply, Overlay, and Screen are pretty much the same across all photo editing applications. They function in much the same way too. Multiply It multiplies the blend layer’s colour channel values with those of the base layer. Black in either layer gives black; white leaves the other layer’s colour unchanged. Lighter colours will give softer shadows, while darker colours will give deeper shadows. Black has a value of 0, and white has a value of 1, and all other multiplied values are divided by 255. Used for: Restoring shadows in faded antique photos. Darkening of filters. Toning down overexposed photos. Removing white backgrounds in image composites. Screen Then Screen will lighten the image below and is the opposite to Multiply. The inverse of the blend and base layer colours are multiplied. The resulting colour is always lighter. Used for: Boosting underexposed photos. Removing black backgrounds in composite images.

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Starting point. Colour and white balance are OK. I will duplicate this layer to present different options and try to make the shot more interesting.

Duplicated layer with Overlay blend mode. Notice that colour contrast is now greater but some details on hands are missing. The picture has greater contrast and colours are more vivid.

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The saturation in the previous example seemed too big so I added Black and White adjustment layer and then used it with the same Overlay option. This time contrast is increased but saturation is not because the top Layer has no colour.

The simple way of producing monochrome: top layer with solid colour and blending mode set to Colour.

Here there are two adjustment layers: White Balance moved colours towards blue and Brightness - Contrast increased contrast. You can see that details on hands disappeared nearly completely. Very vivid, cinematic, look.

The top layer may be really colourful. You can even make a coloured picture from black and white. Again Colour blending mode.

Here is an added Layer with plain teal colour. To show the difference I used it only on the left part of the picture. Blend mode is still Overlay but with one colour layer, we can see some other options. Looks good but this green stain on the left bottom part of the guitar is to strong.

Using Soft Light instead of Overlay helped to soften this green cast.

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And above... I used Gaussian Blur filter on the top layer and then used Blend Options to make the bright area look sharp again. The left side graph allows to mask bright area (right side of the graph) and leave darker area affected by blur.

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The old way goes as follow: - Duplicate a Layer - Go to - Filter - Sharpen - High Pass - Set the Radius - the bigger the Radius the more edges will be affected. In this method, you can click on icons in the bottom of dialog window to view the final effect side by side before you apply it. - Mark ‘Monochrome’. It helps to see the edges. - Click apply.

Here is how to make a very high contrast image with great sharpness. The top layer is Black and White and the Blend Option only apply it to dark areas. The blend mode is Overlay. Finally, here is a set of all layers used for these examples. The single picture is a 6.9 MB jpeg file while the project with layers is 117 MB composite picture. For my taste, most of the layer’s techniques are to strong and I do not use them too often. In my opinion, photo editing is more about getting natural, nice look rather than overcooked ‘flashy’ images. But, on the other hand, learn Layers because you may need them at some point. I worked a lot with layers when I was using Adobe Photoshop and from what I remember they worked better in Photoshop then now in Affinity Photo. I mentioned before that Affinity has much less experience than Adobe with photo editing software and layers are probably the most obvious example of the difference between the two. But Affinity Photo is still version 1 while Adobe stopped counting. There is one interesting use of layers which shows it’s unique functionality. Remember when I said that any sharpening has rather limited capabilities? There are at least two techniques for sharpening involving masks. The problem with sharpening is that the software does not recognise which lines are the ones we need to be sharp. The program analyses adjacent pixels and improves contrast between them. Quite often some of those pixels should not be sharpened. The common technique is to use either Unsharp Mask or High pass filter and then manually mask the areas which are not supposed to be affected. It is time-consuming task but it may fix some pictures which must be saved for any cost. High Pass filter is easier to control so I will demonstrate this solution but with Unsharp Mask the idea is the same. Sharpen the image and then remove sharpness from unwanted areas by masking the layer. This is, by the way, good example how both Photoshop and Affinity Photo, multiply their functionality by putting the same function in different places. I understand that Photoshop added some functions and left the existing ones for users which were already used to old school editing. Why Affinity Photo did it? I have no idea but anyway, you can access High Pass filter in a few ways.

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81.1 mask with affected edges

81.2 original photo

You will get a grey layer with some edges. These are the edges which will be sharpened. - Set Layer Mode to Overlay. It usually works the best but also try Linear Light. For some photos it may work better. Now, you have a sharpened image but in most cases, with a lot of heavy grain. - Add Layer Mask - Use the brush to paint black and mask the filter in the areas with grain and carefully avoid masking edges. Like I said. It is time-consuming method. The newer approach is to use exactly the same filter but from Live Filters collection. - Go to your Layer Panel. - Click on Live Filters and choose High Pass. Notice the difference: Here you cannot see the effect side by side but, because you are making a new layer, you can choose Layer Blend Mode and see the final effect instead. - Choose monochrome. - Close the window.

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Because you already have a mask attached to the filter, use the brush tool to mask grainy areas by painting black. If you make mistake, paint white to restore the effect. The advantage of this method is that you can always double click the Layer icon and adjust the Life Filter. Sometimes it is easier to set Normal Blend Mode while masking. Layers give a lot of creative flexibility and allow endless editing variation for the same photo. The general rule here is to use them with caution. In most cases, you can achieve your goals without using Layers and it saves a lot of time.

but it is visibly less precise when used as a Layer Adjustment. There is a workaround but it is timeconsuming. When you want to use Layers for local adjustment with different exposure it is also possible to use the exposure from Develop Persona but it takes even more time. All these tasks work much faster in Lightroom. Lightroom also works as a photo library and with thousands of photos to manage it is, so far, the best option. Now, since I have already explained the use of most common editing tools, it is time to try some real editing.

In most editing programmes you can: - Make multiple Layers which can be edited independently. - Mask Layers which allows applying all adjustments locally. - Use adjustment Layers which already work like masks. - Use additional filters which are non-destructive and also work as masks. - Use Layer Opacity, Blend Options and Blend Range to automatically blend different parts of Layers. Newer effects may come with different names depending on the software. In Affinity Photo, we have Live Filters while in Photoshop - Smart Filters with similar functionality. Huge part of Layers abilities were invented to work with vectors and text and were not mentioned here because the main focus of this book is on photo editing.

General Editing Tool Conclusion Now you have an idea of how all the basic tools work. You may come across some other tools but in most cases the photo editing is fully covered by the tools which I described here. For detailed instruction on how to use them you will need to refer to your app’s help files. Unfortunately, even experienced editors have to check the help section because after some software updates they take a different result from the tool they used for a long time. A really important part of editing is to understand the basic element of edition and use them consciously. Here are these elements: - Framing and cropping- the main tool for publishing and composition. - Exposure and contrast. - White Balance. - Colour adjustment: vibrance, hue and saturation. - Local adjustment. - Sharpness. - Lens correction. - Transform Tools. - Layers: tonal improvement, local adjustment and composite images. If you haven’t decided yet which software is your favourite, take some time to try the same tasks with the same pictures in different applications. You can find some small differences which may help you decide. For example, I use Adobe Lightroom more often because the results are more consistent and the software work fast. I only use Affinity Photo when I need to do some tasks which I couldn’t do in Lightroom (e.g. layers and masks). For some software, the difference lays in details and sometimes it is a rather significant difference. In Affinity Photo the same function, Exposure, is available in different places and works differently. It works more like in Lightroom when used in Develop Persona

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Editing

Editing Take One: Assessment and Quality Improvement We will go through all stages of editing using a live example and here is our photo. For more complicated tasks you may need to do the full assessment first and than make the adjustment. Here we will do the assessment and quality improvement in one step. Let’s open the picture in Adobe Lightroom. Since it is a RAW uncompressed format I always make a Virtual Copy. In Library module go to ‘Metadata Panel’. If you cannot see desired info choose EXIF from the metadata drop-down list. Basic info Dimension: 4912 x 7360 Exposure: 1/50 sec at f/4.0 ISO 800 Focal Length 78 mm

If you are a photographer you could spot some info which my reveal potential problems. 1. For full-frame camera the maximum exposure time based on the focal length should be 1/80. We may be looking at ‘shaken’, blurred picture. 2. Native ISO for most cameras is not greater than 200. For this particular one is 100. ISO 800 potentially introduce high ISO noise.

Take One: Assessment and Quality Improvement

3.Picture is quite big since taken with 36 megapixel camera so we could do some cropping if needed. Questions: What is the purpose of the photo? What is the overall quality of it? Framing, levelling? Contrast? White balance? Colour balance? Sharpness? Distortion? Any spots or imperfection? Time for our small investigation. Questions: What is the purpose of the photo? In this case, it is simply a Clip Art or a Stock Photo. The purpose is important because some kind of imperfections may disqualify the photo. For example, if we had an 800 x 600 pixel photo which we wanted to print in A3 size than serious improvement in size would be necessary. All possible imperfections will most likely become more visible. So, it is good to know how you will use your picture to prepare some strategy. What is the overall quality of it? Look at the picture in full-screen size. (In Lightroom go to: Window – Screen Mode – Full Screen Preview, or just press F ).

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Contrast Exposure and White Balance: Always start from White Balance. Unfortunately, we do not have any grey area in the picture so the white balance selector will not work here. White Balance now seems to be neutral but I need a sunny picture so from White Balance options menu I tried different options to check which one looks nicer. Finally, I have chosen ‘Cloudy’ to get a warm feel. As for Contrast I always start from clicking on Auto Tone. Here is what we get.

Assess the following: Framing, levelling, Contrast, White balance, Colour balance, Sharpness, Distortion, Any spots, scratches or imperfection. To look for problems with sharpness and spots you may like to enlarge the picture. Remember that for sharpening we normally zoom in to 100% for precise settings but with that big picture zooming in to 1:4 should be sufficient. Here is my assessment: Purpose of the photo - Clip Art, Stock Photo.Overall quality: Framing: is rather OK for a stock photo so, for now, we will leave it as it is. Notice, however, that it is correct but rather boring. Now is the time to decide whether we want to use Automatic Lens Correction. Go to Develop Module and find Lens Correction. Tick ‘Enable Profile Correction’ and check if Ligttroom recognised your lens correctly. There is no big improvement with distortion because there was no big distortion in the first place.

86.1 dark vignette 86.2 bright vignette

86.3 chromatic aberration

Notice that Automatic Profile correction is not perfect. We had a dark vignette in the original photo. Now we have a bright one. At this point, you may argue if this correction was necessary. Now, zoom int to 100% and analyse the picture. The blue line on the border on our subject is caused by chromatic aberration. Check ‘Remove Chromatic Aberration’ to remove it. Sometimes you may need to go to Manual page in Lens Correction to remove Chromatic Aberration manually. Fortunately, not very often. By the way, check if there are any blemishes while you are in 100% zoom. If there are any, use ‘Spot Removal Tool’. Levelling: seems to be OK but you do not need to trust your eyes only. Click on the Crop icon. In Crop Panel grab an Angle Tool. Click and drag vertically over the wooden frame on the left side of the picture. Nothing happens because it is vertical. If it were not, the crop would change to make it vertical. Conclusion: no cropping needed, Lens Correction and Chromatic Aberration applied.

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For now, let’s leave Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation as they are. For a Stock Photo, it is a kind of standard to keep Colour Tones neutral. We are nearly there. Go to ‘Detail’, check if any sharpening or Noise Reduction is necessary. Be careful. In high-resolution files you will always get some noise. In most cases, it comes unnoticeable and do not fix it if you don’t need to. Noise reduction quite often makes the image look ‘soft’ and removing the noise which no one can see and then sharpening picture is not worth the effort. And this is the end of Phase One. We have the picture corrected. If you don’t have any idea where and why you’d like to use it, leave it like that for further use. Here is a summary: 1. In Photo Assessment, it is important to analyse a picture step by step. 2. First - check if you need cropping or levelling - if you think it is necessary it will be your first step in editing. 3. If you decide to use Lens Correction do it now. 4. Next- White Balance, Exposure and Contrast. Your goal for good quality is to get rather balanced result. Do not overdo it. 5. Colour Balance and Curves - in most cases you won’t need them for basic quality adjustment unless the picture was taken in very a mixed light (e.g. music concert, an event with disco lights) or was intended as Low Key or High Key. Do not change it unless you have a particular reason. 6. After completing all above check Transform tool. I would only use it for specific tasks like architecture or property photos. It is quite easy to make a picture look worse rather than better so don’t use it if you don’t really need it. 7. Local Adjustment - for the quality purpose only remove visible spots or scratches. Any local darkening or vignetting should be left for the moment when you want to publish your photo and already know how you want it to look like.

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Editing

Editing Take Two: Edit For Purpose We have prepared a clean photo for further use. Let’s try some of its possible variations. The picture is taken in portrait format so let’s make the first option A4 printed portrait. First question - what is the resolution we need. For most editors, the resolution of 240 ppi is considered to be a minimum. Here is the easy way to use Affinity Photo: Start Affinity Photo. Create a new document - A4 - Portrait - change DPI to 240. Find your photo’s location. Drag the file on top of your new document. Because the original photo is bigger than the document canvas, drag the corner of it to resize the picture to fit in horizontally. Vertically it is slightly too big because the original proportions don’t match the A4 format. Position the picture as you want it and export as jpg with 100% quality. Job done. Because the rest of the workflow will be done in Lightroom let me show you how to do the same thing in it. Now, make a virtual copy, go to Develop module and click on Crop icon.

Take Two: Edit for purpose

From the drop-down list next to Aspect icon choose Enter Custom... Insert 210 and 297 into the dialog box. Lightroom will translate it to 2.10 and 2.97 and show you a crop frame. Now we can move it up or down because the picture is too high. We still have our photo in original size and no defined resolution. You could leave it like that and send it for printing. The printer would make all the calculation for you. But if you insist on making it as it should be, here is how you can: First, quick math: A 4 size is 210 x 297 mm or 8.267 x 11.692 in. When we multiply this by 240 we get 1984 x 2806 pixels. Right-click on your photo, choose Export - Export... In Export dialog box go to the Image Sizing section. Check ‘Resize To Fit’ box Choose ‘Width and Height’ from the drop-down list.

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The oldest trick in the book if it comes to redirecting viewers attention from the borders to the centre is a vignette. And this is my favourite technique. That’s why we won’t do this here.

Insert W: 1984 H:2806 Put ‘Resolution’ 240 - choose ‘pixels per inch’. Click Export.

We all have some tricks we love. Always control your habits.

Choose the file location. To make sure that we get all we wanted: Locate the file on the hard drive. Right click on it in Lightroom and choose ‘Show in Explorer’. Right Click on the file in Explorer, choose properties, go to ‘Details’. I will use Lightroom for the rest of this example. If you work with RAW file I would suggest doing the Export part at the very end. We already have a correct photo. How to make it ‘great’, ‘outstanding’, ‘catchy’ or at least ‘interesting’? Take a step back, take a look. What do you see? The picture is flat. Can we do something about it? Let’s try to drag viewer attention to the subject. Go to Develop module. In the Histogram window, click on the left side small square icon with a triangle in it. Now you have locked ‘clipping alert’ for blacks. Do the same for the right side and lock whites. You will see the red ‘stains’. Here are the clipping areas for white. Let’s leave them for now. In Tone section of Basic panel decrease black slowly. When you see the blue stains coming up, stop. Now go back by about 10. I ended up with -54. We just made the dark signs more visible. Notice that Shadows are on +20. This is how we get them after Auto Tone Adjustment. We only want the darkest part to be darkened.

Let’s make an object look a little bit dirty. Go to Tone Curve and make a slight bent on the lower part of the curve. Our subject just became a little bit more grainy. Now, grab an Adjustment Brush, set up Exposure to 1.8 and paint over a cap of our subject. We want to darken only the bright, right part of it but if you coincidentally paint over the dark part, don’t worry. Now, move exposure back to -1.3. You see, this -1.8 was only to help you see better.

91.1 tone curve with lowered dark tones

I painted too much over the dark area to show you some cool feature in this tool. Here is how my mask looks like with Exposure set to 2.3. You probably remember that the exposure affects more the middle tones than dark and bright areas. But when I move Highlights down and Shadows up, here is what we get. That way I manged to darken the ‘cap’ which is, by the way the part close to the top border. It has more apparent texture and is also darker. Is there any other way to make our subject stand out even more? How about the blurred background? I know, it is already blurred by the depth of field but let’s see what we can do. Grab the Graduated Filter from a toolbar. Hold shift and drag it from right to left. Stop just before you reach our subject. Holding shift will help you to move horizontally.

Now, in the Presence section, increase Vibrance and Clarity to +50. This is quite a lot so enlarge the picture to 1:4 and look for any problems. Because the Colour Contrast was significantly increased we could get some imperfection in gradients. Here it did not happen but always make sure that you inspect the whole picture after increasing Colour Contrast or Saturation.

Now, set Exposure to - 1.70 to make the right part darker. Move contrast to +27. Because the right edge is already dark it will increase the darkness even more.

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91.2 masking in progress

91.3 final effect

Now, move Clarity to -100 and notice how our masked part became significantly more blurred. And here we have a photo with a dark top, dark and blurred right side and the left side also dark although we didn’t do anything to darken it. Just something instead of my favourite vignette. Take a look at before and after. When you see both pictures you can certainly say that the one to the right was edited. But if someone with no experience with editing saw only the final one it could be considered as a natural photograph without editing. And this is, unfortunately, what photo editing is about. Put a lot of work and effort into our job only to convince the viewer that we did nothing at all.

Again let’s make a virtual copy and use a Crop Tool. In Aspect Ratio dropdown list choose 1920 x 1080 (16:9). Here is what we get. Lightroom always adjusts defined proportion to the existing format. Here we have a portrait hence a portrait crop. Grab one of the corners, resize a frame to make it smaller and then turn it. You will get a landscape frame. There are a few interesting cropping options here. I finally used the one on the right-hand side but the one on the left was also tempting.

92.1 gradient mask

In the Basic panel, move White Balance temperature to 4010 making the picture cold. In the Tone section move Contrast to +50 and blacks to -75. Set Highlights to 0. Set Shadows to +45, we need the frame on the left side to have some texture.

92.2 before

92.3 after

I know that at this point you may be bored to death with the same photo being edited again but let me just demonstrate one more example which will prepare us to the next chapter. You see, quite often, the most obvious way of editing is not the only one. It may even be not the most interesting one. This photo was tightly framed and delivered in rather final state. We just have a good photo, let’s leave it as it is. Well, let’s not. What if we use it for something that it is not fit for at a first glance? Let’s use it as a part of a movie presentation. To fit it into a full HD film we need a 1920 x 1080 landscape crop. We will use the original photo with basic quality improvement as we get it from the previous chapter. We will stay in Lightroom since we don’t need any layers.

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Now the fun part. In Presence area set Clarity to +50 and Vibrance to +30. Now, move Saturation to -30. Notice that the change in Saturation is mostly apparent in the bright area to the right. It is like that because Saturation works equally for all pixels and other, darker pixels are already much more saturated than the bright ones. I really like this blue tint but this extra purple shadow is rather too strong. We could try to fix it with White Balance but here we have a solid part with one colour so it should be easier to use HSL instead. Go to Hue area in HSL panel, click on Direct Adjustment tool and click and drag down on the frame on the left part of the picture. Watch sliders and a picture. Stop dragging when the purple tint disappears. And finally, use graduate filter to mask the right part of a picture. Set Exposure to -3.55 and Highlights to -37. If you reduce Saturation to -32 some part of the background will become grey and look like smoke. I personally like it but no Saturation adjustment also works well.

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And here is our final image. It is different than the previous one but as you can see even this kind of unexpected cropping looks interesting. Also notice that the Black and White version of it looks good. I didn’t even have to change contrast because it was quite good in the starting image. The purpose of the editing determines all its aspects and virtually every photo can be adjusted to fit the purpose as long as you know what you need to achieve. By knowing your tools you can prepare any photo for a defined use.

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Editing

Editing Take Three: Artistic Variations Since you already know how to assess and improve the picture’s quality let me show you how to look at the picture. You see, there is always some way to make a picture more interesting. You already know how to. You need to know what you want to create. Which basically means that you need to learn how to look at the photo to see its potential. In this example, I selected a picture that was not even intended to be a photograph. Here is the story behind it. I was testing my camera and a new lens to check the autofocus quality. I needed a subject placed in different distances from the camera to see if autofocus would work properly. From my experience, autofocus might be tricky in a hard light condition so I decided to take a series of photos in the midday. The only purpose of this exercise was a camera test. Now, I will use one of these test shots to show you how a rather pointless picture may be turned into a photograph. What is wrong about this picture? Well, a photographer is on the wrong side of the camera. Autofocus worked OK but harsh light conditions affected white balance and exposure. Framing is also wrong because I couldn’t see it and I didn’t even think about composition at this time. Take a look at the picture and think about one reason for not deleting it. Anything? Let’s take a look at metadata.

Take Three: Artistic Variations

97.1 starting point

Dimension 7360 x 4912 - definitely some room for cropping Exposure: 1/30 sec f/4.0 - stable picture taken with a tripod ISO 200 - OK Focal length : 44mm - rather too wide for a portrait. Let’s define a purpose: Clip Art, Stack Photo, exercise material for heavy editing. A close inspection in 100% zoom shows no grain, spots or scratches. White balance and exposure are OK or fixable. What if we try to make a fashion photo? Something for a web site or presentation? If I could separate background and reveal some interesting textures, well, who knows? Here is the plan. Make sure that the model could not be recognised. Produce an example of interesting editing. Use layers to demonstrate it’s usefulness. Keep the best possible quality. To make sure that no one can recognise the model the drastic cropping will be necessary. We will do it first because the rest of the photo is not important. I’ll start editing in Lightroom and change to Affinity Photo only when necessary.

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The first task, cropping, will be a little tricky. You know, I don’t want to keep my face, I don’t like a background, what else do I have left? We will use something called negative space. It is just empty space which is supposed to make an image interesting. I know, sounds crazy. But it works. It is a very powerful composition technique which is not used too often. In this particular example, I’ll use the fact that a picture is slightly over exposed to my advantage.

Still using HSL panel, Luminance, I click on the darker part of the skin and move up making reds and oranges much brighter. Notice that we are actually making local adjustment without masking. This ability saves a lot of time so always try to utilise it wherever possible.

Step one - tight cropping. Step two - Basic adjustment - White Balance to Auto. It makes a picture a little bit cooler. Tone adjustment:

Final touch:

Exposure - Auto. Helps to see if there are any problems with grain or scratches. Also sets the guideline for Shadows and Highlights adjustment.

With spot removal tool I got rid off some blemishes on the face and then with the local adjustment brush, brightened skin and top, carefully avoiding beard.

Now, Exposure down to -1.4

That’s it for Lightroom. Time for Affinity Photo and layers. Until now I was working with a RAW file. To use Affinity Photo I had to export the photo. There is an option ‘Open With’ in Lightroom but I don’t use it. Instead I exported the image as jpeg file with 100% quality. Jpg is a lossy compression file format and for most task I would rather recommend tiff file but here we are nearly done so quality loss won’t be a problem.

Contrast up to +78 - this will make dark areas nearly black without significant darkening in Highlights. Blacks down to -79. Beard stubble become stand out but the right side of the photo become nearly black. Vibrance to -50 causes skin tones to become pale. It starts to show this harsh lighting. Clarity to +40. Increases the colour contrast especially on the face.

I opened a file in Affinity Photo, duplicated layer, set the blending mode to Multiply, masked the new layer and painted black over the top and most of the skin avoiding beard and lips. That way I gained more definition to the beard and lips became more vivid. Now we have a photo where the main point of interest is the t-shirt in a fancy colour and more than a half of a photo is an empty, black space. We can also see that this t-shirt is worn by a human and not some mannequin.

Background did not disappear completely so: gradient filter from right to left - exposure 1.9. We have all background black as intended apart from small blue stair rail just behind my shoulder. We do not have anything else in this colour so... I go to HSL panel, Luminance, grab the pointer and click on the blue part and drag it down. Aqua and Blue sliders go down and the annoying bit disappears.

And here is the texture which I’ll use to emphasis this dirty atmosphere I was aiming at from the very beginning. I’ve chosen this particular texture for its colour. This teal colour is complementary to the maroon colour

I mentioned before that I would like to make some use of layers. I want to add some scratches to make the photo look old. Because I know that it will make the image darker and I want to slightly smooth the skin...

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of the t-shirt. And this is supposed to help with layer blending modes and colour composition. I placed it on top of the photo and set Layer Blending Mode to Overlay. Looked good but I didn’t like the way how it affected the face so I added a Layer mask and masked the texture by painting black. Notice that black area was not affected at all. That’s how Overlay works.

If I wanted to make some scratches over the background then here is how.

Something was still missing. I duplicated the texture again, resized it so it only covered the right part of the text and changed it’s Blending Mode to Hue. As you can see, colour, or rather hue was only changed on the text and not on the background. It is like that because the black background's luminosity is zero so is the hue. By the way, I hope that you can see here how the size of the picture and its placement in presentation (in this case on the page) also affects composition. I think it was Deke McClelland, who said that to do proper editing you need to have a good photo. His book, Photoshop Bible, was the very first book about photo editing I read and it definitely changed my life but I disagree with this statement. If you know your tools and you know what you want to achieve with editing, even the pointless picture can be turned into something interesting. This example was rather extreme but I hope that you can see the potential of photo editing presented in here. Let’s try to edit one more photo, this time with a lot of quality problems.

Duplicate the texture layer and resize it to only fit the black area. Set Blending to Hard Light.

Remember when I told you that some Layer’s options are quite useful for design? Let me show you Blending Modes in real action.

I prepared a text layer using a bold font in big size ( 144 px). I used Colour Picker from a toolbar to sample the colour from the bright part of a t-shirt. Here how it looks. Now I moved this new layer beneath all texture layers and made sure that first letters, T and L stick out from behind the layer with Hard Light Blending mode.

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Some details from metadata: Dimension 4912 x7360 Exposure: 1/1600 sec f/4.0

Highlights: +34 - recovers details in the centre of the image. Shadows: -45 - increases contrast.

ISO 800 - could be less

Whites: +43

Focal length : 120mm

Blacks: -64 - that was rather extreme but I’ve mentioned that the photo was dull. Now it isn’t.

Quality problems: A quick inspection in 100% zoom reveals a reasonable amount of noise caused by high ISO. No spots or scratches present. The photo was taken through the window so it is rather dull. The most apparent problem is haze. Something that happens very often with landscapes. Roofs of the buildings in the foreground don’t look interesting and the basic composition is rather chaotic. Again, I will stick to Lightroom for as long as possible. As for a composition: problematic objects are marked with red colour. Strong objects with blue. How to improve quality? Remove haze, re-frame picture in an attempt to get rid of problematic objects. Increase the contrast. Review colour adjustment. Just to demonstrate how composition rules may be misleading, here is a crop with the rule of thirds grid. Horizon is placed perfectly on a leading line. BT Tower is exactly in a strong place. St. Paul's Cathedral fits nicely in the middle of the frame below leading line. Not good. Not good at all. But it is always worth to try. And I used common sense instead of the rule of thirds. In some new applications like Lightroom CC, you can find a function called Dehaze. Now would be the time to use it. In my version of Lightroom I’ll do this in ‘old school’ way. But let’s go step by step. Develop - Basic panel - White Balance. I’ll leave it as is. It is tempting to move the white balance towards cool tones but I’m planing finishing editing in AF so it stays ‘As Shot’ by now. Tone - Auto. I always do this first to see what Lightroom have to offer. Not bad but I have a better idea. Exposure: -0.26 - the correct one was a little bit too bright for an urban shot.

Vibrance +44 but Saturation: -22. Together with Clarity +22 helps to increase Colour Contrast without making the photo looks too colourful. Some local colour adjustment. HSL panel - Saturation. I used saturation marker to click and drag up on a group of green trees in the centre and a brown window of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This increased saturation of Oranges, Yellows and Greens. Now I went back to the Basic panel and changed White Balance Temperature down to 5750 making the overall colour balance slightly cooler. From here we will go in two different ways. First one is just to finish this editing fully in Lightroom. The other one involves Affinity Photo. In lLghtroom I went to Graduated Filter, dragged from the top to the horizon, changed Exposure to 2.26, Colour Temperature to -24, Tint to -2 and Saturation to -13. Then I clicked on Brush and Erase and masked the filter over the BT Tower. This gave me a darker and better-defined sky. Then I clicked on Graduated Filter to finish edition and clicked on it again. This time I dragged from the bottom of the image to the bottom of the St. Paul’s Cathedral and changed Exposure to -2.57, Contrast to -100 and saturation to -75. This gave me a very dark shadow on the bottom of the image making the centre more ‘punchy’. The next step might be to open the image in AF, duplicate Layer, set Blend Mode to Multiply and adjust the opacity. But I think that it looks OK as it is now. And that’s it for editing in Lightroom. For Affinity Photo I used the previous version without Graduated Filter adjustment.

Contrast: +90 - it’s a lot but helps to remove haze.

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I exported the image as jpg and opened it in Affinity Photo. Then I dragged a photo of the sky from Explorer and placed it over the top part of the original photo. I set the Blending Mode of the Sky Layer to Overlay. Added a mask and masked the sky layer to fit the horizon. Then I added the Brightness Contrast Adjustment layer and darkened the sky slightly.

Change Layer Blending Option to Colour. Add a mask to this layer by clicking on Mask Layer icon in Layers Panel. Paint black over the bottom of the image and the sky to mask the layer. Pick up the 50% grey from the colour palette and paint over the bottom part of the Cathedral. Here is what I got: This could be good enough for general use. I wanted to make it more vivid so there are a few more steps.

Lowering opacity to 30% makes the effect look more natural.

I duplicated the main layer and set Blending Mode to Multiply getting more contrast but also darkening the photo. I set Opacity to 55% to make it look more natural. Then, I added a Brightness / Contrast Adjustment Layer, set brightness to - 70 and contrast to +4 and used a brush to mask the effect over the most of the picture excluding the bottom of it. I also masked the street in the lower-left corner to make it brighter. This street forms a nice leading line.

Notice that there are three dominant colours in this picture. Blue in the sky and most of the shadows, green, especially in trees in the centre of the image and brown in the cathedral dome. To make a centre of the photo more appealing I introduced a brown cast. Here is how. Zoom in to have a clear view of the cathedral windows. Click and drag a colour picker from the Colour Swatches Palette on the brightest window. When the picker is released, the colour icon next to the picker shows the sampled colour. Now make a rectangle covering all picture using the rectangle tool and click on the colour sample. All picture is now covered with a solid, bright, brown colour.

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What’s next? Photography is an artistic activity. So is photo processing. Unfortunately, many people treat photo editing as an artistic activity, i.e. one in which every action is allowed and justified by practising art. After all, in art you should break the rules. And perhaps this artistic approach to photo editing is interesting. However, it must not be forgotten that photography must be qualitatively correct before it can be artistic. Therefore, all my work has been devoted to the description of editing tools and their correct use. I think this incredibly small group of talented photographers and photo editors, which I believe is less than 1 percent, will do well without any advice. Everyone else, including me, should stick to a certain set of rules, at least until they get to the level of experience where they can edit them instinctively. Let's recall the basic elements determining the quality of photography: Photo and editing common elements: The common editing elements are the same as the common features of the photography. Each photo has certain characteristics and most of them are common to each photo. These features can be changed / edited and are common editing elements. Permanent elements of photography, regardless of its nature, are: Composition the composition is influenced by: framing, position of the object, model, arrangement of light and dark areas, depth of field colour Sharpness Sharpness is the primary determinant of photo quality. Colour and contrast Affects the mood of the photo, but also indirectly the composition. Bright colours attract the viewer's eye and subdued colours are associated with the background. In order to assess the technical quality of photos, check: Framing - composition Sharpness White balance Distortions Dust and scratches contrast All editing items used to improve the quality can also be used for artistic purposes. However, you should use them only after you finish quality improvement editing.

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The order of evaluation of the qualitative characteristics:

But what’s next?

Sharpness - if the photo is out of focus and the sharpness cannot be improved satisfactorily, the photo is qualitatively disqualified. It can only be kept when we have an idea for a creative project that does not need to be sharp.

Many beginners spend a lot of �me analysing tutorials covering various edi�ng techniques, looking for solu�ons to their work. Also, many editors are looking for new so�ware, believing that it will help them with be�er edi�ng.

Composition - framing should be done first, except when the photo is to be saved as a clip-art and we do not know how the final crop will be.

In my opinion, knowing the so�ware and having an interest in various edi�ng techniques is not bad, but it is a waste of �me. It is worth reading about it some�mes, but it is not worth focusing too much on it.

White balance - For quality purposes, always set the correct white balance wherever possible first. For artistic purposes, re-set the white balance after all quality improvement has been completed. Contrast - Neutral for quality purposes, is intended to make all details visible in dark and light areas and not to cause clipping.

If you want to edit photos then you just need to edit photos. These can be your photos or someone else's. The internet is full of photos. You can download any photos and prac�ce your skills on them. As long as you don't publish someone else's work, you don't break any law.

Colour - For quality purposes, try to obtain accurate colours. Later artistic edition should only be done after the end of the qualitative process.

Trying to learn all possible techniques usually serves no purpose.

Editing tools vs. common photography elements

If you edit landscape photos most of the �me, your sky replacement skills will come in handy, and you'll o�en benefit from contrast and sharpness enhancement. If you do portraiture, you will have to learn how to correct the skin tone. In studio photography, improving the contrast and the ability to emphasise ligh�ng will become important.

Edi�ng element

Edi�ng tool

composi�on

framing contrast Local edi�ng to highlight the model's posi�on. local edi�ng to so�en the photo

In any field of photography, some skills will be cri�cal and others will be useless. You will not have the opportunity to exchange the sky in studio photography and in landscape photography the ability to improve skin colours will be of li�le use. Find one program that works best for you at the moment. Get to know all the tools I have described and learn to use them by prac�sing with your own examples. Edit photos, try to make correct edi�ng of each of them. See what you have problems with. Over �me, you will probably no�ce that you cannot cope with some tasks. Only then should you use the tutorials for your specific task.

White Balance

White Balance Exposure

Contrast

Contrast, clarity, tone curve, also B / W if the photo is to be black and white.

Once you know exactly how each tool works, you will be able to edit any photo.

Vibrance, satura�on, HSL, Colour, also a tone curve with separated channels.

Only change the so�ware when you know your program perfectly and you definitely know that it cannot do what you need. Frequent changes to the so�ware necessitate addi�onal learning and if the new program does not contribute anything, learning it is a waste of �me.

Colour

Of course, when you start specialising you will no�ce the need for addi�onal training or even a so�ware change. Here the advice is the same as with the photo gear.

Edit, edit, edit. Do the correct qualita�ve edit. Then make a few variants of the photo for ar�s�c improvement. Then take another photo. Imagine the end result and make the edi�ng to get there. It o�en happens that someone says 'I didn't do what I wanted but what I got is even be�er'. It never is. If you did not get what you wanted, you did not achieve your goal. This 'be�er' is perhaps proof that other variants are also possible. But it's not a success when it comes to edi�ng. You are a good editor when you can always get the effect you want.

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The best results are achieved through prac�ce. Edi�ng techniques and so�ware will change. And you will probably want to change your edi�ng approach or the program you use more than once. But only then will it make sense if it is the result of your own work and experience, not adver�sing on the Internet. Of course, you have to learn new things, but don't spend more �me learning than prac�sing. This is a very common mistake. The result of this error is also the fact that many editors buy or download for free various templates, such as Photoshop ac�ons, LUTs for Affinity Photo or presets for Lightroom. You can do these things yourself. And if you can't yet, then learn. But before you decide to learn, think if it's worth it. Would you use the same se�ngs for many different photos? If your answer is yes, then I have a feeling that you haven't read my book. Every picture is different and most presets are usually useless. Using presets makes limited sense when you take a large number of photos under very similar circumstances. For example, a studio portrait. The Internet is full of informa�on about various edi�ng techniques. Don't waste too much �me ge�ng to know them. The most important thing is to know the basics. You already have all the knowledge you need for proper and effec�ve photo edi�ng. Time to start edi�ng. Good luck.

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