Affinity Photo : Blend Ranges Tutorial
Part 3
On the Brightness / Contrast dialog, bring the brightness up using the brightness slider. In the example photo, we've gone with 27% for now.
Open up the Blend Ranges dialog for this Brightness / Adjustment layer. You can do this using the little cog at the bottom right of the Brightness / Contrast dialog, or you can use the little cog at the top of the layers panel while the Brightness / Adjustment layer is selected.
Once you have brought up the Blend Ranges dialog, move it out of the way of the image by dragging it from its title bar.
Bring down the left point to zero, which will bring down the opacity of the dark colours.
If we move it all the way to the right, this will effectively disable the Brightness / Contrast adjustment completely, because no colours are being effected.
Move the point to the left, until the "In" value in the textbox below the graph is at about 65%.
Now, only the lighter colours (the highlights in the photo are being affected, which is what we want. The "ramp" in the graph shows that we are going from medium white colours, up to white.
However, we want all of the brighter colours in the photo to be as bright as possible. Move the other point left, until the "In" value in the textbox below the graph is about 80%.
Now, from the Brightness / Contrast adjustment, the darker colours (everything up to the first point) in the adjustment will be completely invisible. Then we let more and more through as the colours get brighter up to the second point in the graph. And finally, everything after the second point, or, all of the brighter colours from the adjustment, are fully shown.
You can see how it looks before we added the Brightness / Contrast adjustment, by turning off the Brightness / Contrast adjustment layer. To do this, untick it in the layers panel.
To turn the layer back on, you can re-tick it in the layers panel.
As you can see, the highlights on the top of the flowers and in the sky are brighter in the second photo. But because we used blend ranges, we didn't effect the rest of the photo.
Let's try using Blend Ranges with a colour change adjustment. Open up a photo. We've gone with a photo of a big yellow flower.
We are now going to use blend ranges to change the colour of just the darker parts of the petals.
Click the adjustments icon, and then select HSL.
For the moment, we're going to change the colour of all the Yellows in the photo. On the HSL dialog, select Yellows on the dropdown menu.
Using the slider, set the hue to change the colour. In the example photo, we've made the petals a dark orange by setting the Hue to 22.4.
Next, we're going to use the blend range options on this adjustment, so that the colour change is only applied to the darker parts of the petals!
Open up the Blend Range dialog using one of the little cogs.
Bring the second point all the way to the bottom, and then left until the "In" value is about 62.2%.
Bring the first point across intil the "In" value is about 44.4%.
Now, the darker parts of the HSL adjustment, that is, everything up to the first point in the graph, has been let through. Then there's a small transition. Then, the brighter parts of the HSL adjustment, that is, everything after the second point, is fully transparent, or not let through.
We can turn the HSL adjustment off and on by ticking and unticking the HSL adjustment layer in the layers panel. Let's take a look at the before and after.
Next, we're going to take a look at using blend ranges to reduce noise in just the shadows of a photo, without affecting the rest of the photo.
Open a photo. We've gone with a photo that's quite noisy in the shadows to demonstrate this technique.
You can zoom in and out of a photo by holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling the mouse wheel. Here, we've zoomed into the bottom right to take a look at the noise in the shadows.
The rest of the photo is noise-free.
Click the Live Filters icon, and then select Gaussian Blur Filter.
On the Live Gaussian Blur dialog, using the slider, bring the radius up until the noise is gone. In the example photo, we've gone with a value of 4.8px.
At the moment this will affect the entire photo, and we only want to target the shadows. So let's bring up the blend ranges dialog.
As this is a Live Filter, we will need to use the little cog above the layers panel.
On the graph on the Blend Options dialog, move the first across about a quarter of the way. Move the second point to the bottom, and left until the "In" value is about 37%.
Now, the Gaussian Blur adjustment which will be used to remove the noise, will be fully visible in the shadows, then a small transition, and completely invisible everywhere else.
Let's take a look at the shadows, and then the highlights. You should be able to see our adjustment has only been applied to the shadows, thanks to the blend ranges.
