Master Adjustment Layers in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Adjustment layers are the bread and butter of Affinity Photo. They allow you to edit the color and lighting of your images. But with so many to choose from, it can be hard to know which ones to use. In this course, we'll take a deep dive into all of affinities adjustments, all 23 of them. By the time you finish, you'll know exactly how every adjustment works. But even more important than that, we'll learn when and why you should use one adjustment over another. When should you use levels versus curves or color balance versus selective color, or even posterize versus threshold. We'll learn the pros and cons of every adjustment so you can know exactly which ones to use. But before we jump into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with some important exercise files. I encourage you to download these files because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of the new skills you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson and then we'll jump right into the adjustment layer master class. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the project and resources tab. Then click on the Download Link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Right vs. Wrong Adjustments : To begin the course, we need to lay some groundwork information for this lesson, I want to talk about the right versus the wrong adjustment layers. I've been teaching people how to use affinity photo for a long time and over the years, one of the most common things beginners want to know is if they're doing something the right way Honestly, that's a totally understandable question. But the problem is, there's no right or wrong way to do things in affinity. While working in affinity, you're creating art, whether you're editing a family photo, a beautiful landscape, or a professional portrait. These are all forms of artistic expression, and when it comes to art, there's not a right or wrong way of doing things. All of these paintings were done by very skilled artists, and it would be silly to say that one of these artists was making art the right way while all of the other artists were making art the wrong way. The same way, there are many ways to make art in affinity. As an example, let's say you want to brighten an image. Well, in that case, you could use levels, curves, exposure, brightness and contrast, or shadows and highlights. All of these adjustments can brighten a photo, but which one is the right one to use? Well, none of them. They can all be used to create wonderful photos. But coming back to our painting analogy, just because all of these are valid forms of art doesn't mean you can't have a personal preference. Personally, I like the woman with a parasol painting the best because I think the flowy brushstrokes and the lighting are so pretty. The same goes for adjustment layers. Just because all of these can brighten an image, that doesn't mean I don't have a personal preference for which one I like the best. Throughout this course, I'll explain how to use all of the adjustment layers in Affinity Photo and then I'll also tell you which adjustments I prefer using. These lessons are titled Does Allie use Blank with the name of the adjustment layer in the blank. During these lessons, I'll tell you whether or not I like to use that specific adjustment and why or why not, I like to use it. Maybe you'll agree with my reasoning or maybe not. Either way is totally fine. My only hope is that you'll have a greater understanding of why or why not, you'd want to use each adjustment so that you can discover which ones work best for you. Now that we understand that, I just have one more introductory lesson for you. We'll learn some important color theory in the next video and then we'll jump into affinity and start looking at all of the adjustment layers. 4. RGB vs. CMY : This video, we'll learn about RGB versus CMY. Of these two, you're probably most familiar with RGB, which stands for red, green, and blue, but you might not be as familiar with CMY, which stands for cyan, magenta, and yellow. These six colors are very important in photo editing because they're opposite. Red is the opposite of Cyan, green is the opposite of magenta and blue is the opposite of yellow. But what exactly does that mean? What's the opposite of a color? To see what this means, let's take a look at the most common opposite colors, black and white. In this gradient, the color goes from completely black to completely white. But because these colors are opposite, there are two special things to notice. Number one, the colors cancel each other out. If you look in the very middle of the gradient, the color is pure gray. That's because opposite colors will always cancel each other out and form pure gray. Number two, I want you to notice how black and white affect each other. As you move from one side of the gradient to the other, you will always affect the amount of black and the amount of white. You won't affect one without affecting the other. For example, take a look at this color compared to pure black. You could say this color is more white or you could say it's less black. Or take a look at this color compared to pure white. You might say it's less white or you might say it's more black. Either way, you're saying the same thing. That's because black and white are opposites, so they're always connected to each other. Now let's come back to the topic of this video, RGB versus CMY. In this image, I want you to look at the center of each gradient, just like with the black and white gradient, the center of each of these gradients is gray. That might look strange because the left and right sides of the gradients are so vibrant. But remember, opposite colors will always cancel each other out, eventually leading to gray. But even more importantly, I want you to see how these opposite colors are connected to each other. In this example, we have the whole color wheel, just like you'd find in the color panel of Affinity Photo. As an example, let's say you want to make your color more cyan. You bring your color over to the left. At this point, you could say your color has moved more into the can side of the circle, but you could also say that your color has moved farther away from the red side of the circle. If one of those statements is true, the other has to be true as well. And of course, the reverse is true as well. If you move the color to the other side of the circle, you could say you've moved it towards red, or you could say you've moved it away from Cyan. Both are completely true and it would be impossible to do one without doing the other and as you might expect, this is also true for other opposite colors. If you move the color towards magenta, you're also moving it away from green, or if you move it towards green, you're also moving it away from magenta. Just to really solidify this, we can see the same thing with blue and yellow. As you move the color towards blue, you're also moving it away from yellow, and as you move it towards yellow, you're also moving it away from blue. I know that was a lot to take in, but this knowledge is really going to help you as we learn about different adjustment layers. RGB and CMY will come up all the time, and now you're totally prepared to understand what's going on. Now in the next chapter of the course, we're finally ready to begin mastering affinities adjustments and we'll start off with the two most important ones, HSL and curves. 5. The Big Two : This chapter we'll learn about my two favorite adjustment layers, HSL and curves. The HSL adjustment is great for enhancing the color of an image and curves is my favorite adjustment for editing lighting. So this chapter is actually the only one that won't have does Alli use lesson? Because spoiler alert, I use both of these adjustments all the time. Instead, we'll spend the next few lessons taking a deep dive into HSL and curves. Then throughout the rest of the course, we'll see when you'd want to use one of these two adjustments and when a different adjustment might be a better tool for the job. With all that being said, let's jump right into it and start mastering the two best adjustment layers in affinity photo. What 6. HSL for Beginners : This video, we'll do a basic overview of the HSL adjustment. To start, let's apply the HSL adjustment by going to our adjustments and then clicking on HSL. This adjustment has some very powerful sliders for affecting the colors. So let's quickly go through each of these. First, we have the hue slider. As you shift this. You can see all of the colors are shifted in your image. To reset this slider, I'll double click on the node. Next, we have saturation. As you raise this, the colors will be boosted and as you lower it, they'll become less saturated until they become black and white. I'll double click on this to reset it. And last, I'll show you the luminosity slider, which makes the colors lighter or darker. I don't really use this slider much because I think it makes the colors look lighter or darker in an unnatural way. I'll just double click to reset that. Now, as powerful as these sliders are, the real power of HSL comes from being able to target specific color ranges. So let's go through each one of these to see how they'll affect this image. First, we'll go to the red channel, and to see which parts of the image are being affected, I like to raise the saturation slider all the way to see which parts of the image change. In this case, her skin is really being affected in this red color channel. All skin colors are in the red and yellow range. So as we adjust both of those, you'll see her skin change. I think it looks nice to boost her skin, maybe not quite that much. So I'll just raise the saturation slider like this. All right, for the yellow channel, let's increase the saturation slider. Okay. I can see that most of the image is being affected here. Maybe I'll raise this just a little bit so this image isn't too affected. And we can also adjust the hue slider. As I shift this over to the left, you can see those yellow areas become more green tinted. And as I shift it over to the right, you can see the yellow areas become more red tinted. We'll talk more about why this is happening later. But for now, I'm going to add a little bit more warmth by just raising the slider a little bit. Okay, next, let's go to the green color channel and raise the saturation. I can see there's some strange coloring in the dress with those greens. I think I'm actually going to fully desaturate them because I don't like how they look. And now we can move on to the star of the show Cyan. Since her dress is Cyan, I think this one's going to be really fun to play with. As you raise this, you can really see what's being affected. I think I'll raise this a little bit and play around with the hue. We can lower it to make the dress more blue, or we can raise it to make it more green. Okay. And next, we can go to the blue color channel. As I raise this, you can see nothing changes. I'll just lower this down since there's no blue in this picture. And that does happen. Not every picture will have every color represented. And last, we have the magenta color range, which, again, isn't in this photo, so I'll lower that down. Okay, with that all done, I'll just close this. And now you can see the before and the after those changes were some pretty good changes. But let's say you want to go back and change the colors again. Maybe you want the dress to look a little bit more blue and less green. In that case, all you need to do is click on the layer icon right here. Then you need to click on the color channel that you want to effect. The HSL adjustment will remember whichever color channel you last had selected. In this case, it was the Magenta one. So make sure you're working in the right one. I'm going to shift the hue to make the dress more blue and I'll lower the saturation a little bit. All right. So so far, we've added color to the whole image, but you can also apply HSL adjustments to specific areas. As an example, let's add a little bit more color to her skin. We'll need a new HSL adjustment for this, and I think this is a great time to show you the shortcut for adding an AGSL adjustment. If you press Command or Control, it will automatically bring up the HSL adjustment. I remember this because rhymes with Hu. So if that helps you to remember command or control, that's great. Okay, to affect her skin, we need to choose the right color channel. So I'm going to click on the red channel, and I'll raise the saturation. Okay, so as you can see, we've definitely boosted her skin, but I really only like how this looks on the left side of her arm, where it was more desaturated. This area that's more in the shadows looks way too bright now. So, to fix this, we're going to need to use the built in mask on this layer. I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I now you can see that mask pop up there. Now using the paintbrush tool, I can paint in white paint to reveal that red color on the left side of her arm. I'm just going to adjust my brush settings here. I'll completely lower the hardness and I'll paint with a little bit lower of a flow just so I can build up my paint. I'll change the color to white, and then I'll use the bracket keys on my keyboard to make my brush larger. Now I can gradually paint this color over her left side, adjusting my brush as I go. Okay, let's see how that looked before and after. I think her skin looks a lot more even now before and after. All right. And now we can see the before and after of both layers. So I'll hold Shift to select them both, and you can see the complete before and after of this picture. I think this looks so good. The HSL adjustment is definitely my favorite tool for enhancing the color of an image. And in the next video, we'll take a deep dive into how this adjustment works, so you can become an HSL master. 7. HSL Deep Dive : In this video, we'll take a deep dive into how the HSL adjustment works. When you apply an HSL adjustment, you'll be given a color wheel like this. This will show you which colors you're affecting, and by default, it's all of the colors in your image. But as we learned in the last video, you can target specific color ranges. For example, this is what it looks like when you're editing just the reds in a photo. That's simple enough, but what exactly do the four circles mean? Well, those circles are actually how we know that we're only affecting the reds. In between the two inner circles is the color range that you're most affecting. Any changes you make will be fully applied to those colors. So if you increase the saturation slider by 20%, then all of the colors in that range would have their saturation increased by 20%. And as you move to the outer circles, affinity will apply your changes less and less until they're not applied at all. So in our saturation example, the pinks and the oranges would only get their saturation increased by 10%, not the full 20%. And any colors outside of the circles wouldn't have their saturation changed at all, but we can actually move the circles. So if we moved the outer circles farther out, then we would increase the number of colors that are having their saturation partially increased. And if we move the inner circles, then we'd increase the number of colors that are getting the full 20% saturation boost. We'll put this knowledge to good use in the next video. But for now, let's set the circles back to normal. At this point, we know what the four circles do, but there's still something else we haven't explored because the HSL adjustment actually isn't one color wheel, but it's two. We have an inner color wheel that shows which colors you're affecting, which is what we've been talking about so far. But the outer color wheel shows what color your selected colors are turning into. This is applicable as you move the hue slider in the HSL adjustment. As an example, here's what it looks like when you move the hue slider to 180 degrees. By looking at the inner and outer circle, we can tell that all of the reds in the photo are going to be turned into cyan. This is because we moved the hue slider by 180 degrees, which took all of the cyans from the left side of the color wheel and moved them all the way over to the right side of the color wheel. And that makes sense because 180 degrees is half of a circle, and the sians moved halfway around the circle. But this is just a simple example. And when you're working in affinity, it's not always so obvious what's going on. So instead of telling you what's going on, let me show you. For this demonstration, I've already opened one of the photos that was included in the exercise files, and I applied an HSL adjustment to it. And just so it's easier to see, I've also zoomed in the video. Okay, now let's take a closer look at how the two color wheels work. First, let's select the red color range. As an example, let's say we want to change our red colors into purple. So this red area, we want it to turn purple. So how do I get the purples from up here down into the reds? Well, it's actually easier than you might think. With the hue slider, we can move the outer color wheel. So if we move the hue slider to the right, the color wheel will move clockwise. This is like a car tire moving forward. We move the hue slider forward, and this rolls forward. And if we move the hue slider to the left, then we'll rotate the color wheel counter clockwise, like a car tire moving in reverse. So coming back to our example, if I want the reds in our photo to become purple, then I need the purples to come from up here and move down here like a car tire moving forward. And as we just learned, we can do that by moving the hue slider to the right All right. And you can see that that worked. We've successfully changed the reds into purple, and you can see that over here. I'll just turn this on and off so you can see before that circle was red, and now it's purple. Let's do another example to really solidify how this works. But just so this doesn't get confusing, I'm going to reset the HSL adjustment. For our next example, let's select the green color channel. In this example, let's say we want all of our greens to turn into blue. On this color wheel, you can see where the greens are, and you can see the blues are up in here. So this time, we need to move the color wheel counter clockwise to bring the blues down into the greens. This is like a car wheel going in reverse. So we know we need to move the hue slider to the left. So I'll move this to the left until our greens become blue. As you can see, over here, this worked perfectly, and over here, this worked perfectly. Here's the before and the after. All right. Nice work. I know this was a pretty technical lesson, but I hope that it helped you to demystify the HSL adjustment. I think this adjustment is amazing, and in the next video, we'll learn how to put our new knowledge to good use. 8. HSL - Advanced Application : In this video, we'll take what we learned in the last lesson, and we'll change the color of a man's shirt from blue to red. Okay, to get started, let's apply an HSL adjustment. I'll use the shortcut to do this with command or control. Okay, if we want to change his shirt to red, we need to go to the blue color channel. If we want the reds on this color wheel to move over here to the blues, then we need the outer color wheel to move counterclockwise like a car moving in reverse. We need to shift the hue slider over to the left so that it's moving in reverse. With that moved over, you can see that this doesn't look like red, and it doesn't look very good. Even though this color wheel is set to red now, this just isn't right. I'm going to reset this. And this time, let's use the Cyan color channel. Again, we want the reds to move in reverse like a car wheel going counterclockwise to get over here. So I'm going to shift the hue slider over to the left. Okay, so the color wheel looks right, but his shirt just doesn't look right. It doesn't look red, and it doesn't look very good. So, what have we learned from this? Well, I think now we know that his shirt has cyan and blue in it, since moving the hue slider did affect his shirt in both color channels. So if we want to change the color of his shirt, we need to move the color wheel circles so that blue and Cyan are included. To do this, I'm going to click right in between these top two color circles, and I'm going to click and drag to move them up into the blues. Okay, and with a little bit of adjusting of the hue, you can see now his shirt looks red finally. So now that his shirt looks good, it's time to do a little bit of cleanup. I'll turn this on and off so you can see what I mean. Here's the before and after the background has a little bit of redness on the building, and his blue jeans have turned red. To remove the red from those areas, I'll grab the paint brush tool and I'll paint in black paint over those areas. Always leave his pants red if you wanted to go for a monochromatic look. But I think blue jeans are a little bit more classic, so I'm just going to remove the red from them. All right. And now we can see the before and after turning his shirt red. And I think this looks great. So this was a great strategy for recoloring his shirt. But I want to show you another way that you could do this. As a bonus, it's a little bit faster. To start, I'll delete the HSL adjustment and apply a brand new one. This time, instead of adjusting the color circles, we're going to use a special feature called the picker. When you click on the picker option, you can come over to your photo and click anywhere on the photo to choose that color. So I'll just click right here to choose that color. With that color sampled, now we can adjust the hue and you can see his shirt turned red right away. That looks really good, and it was even easier. So if the picker works so well, why didn't we use it to begin with? Well, for this particular photo, we could have, but the picker doesn't really work for every photo. So it's important to know what's actually happening so that you can adjust the color circles as needed. Let's take a closer look at how this picker works. First, look at the color circles right up here and look at them as I click the reset button. Notice how those color circles move when I reset the adjustment. And now, as I click the picker again and choose a new color, watch the circles as I choose a color. So you can see that they just shifted. I wanted you to pay attention to the color circles so that you can see that the color picker isn't doing anything fancy. It's just moving the color range circles. And, you know, we can do that manually, too. Just click on the center of the color range and move it around. It's that easy. The picker is just moving the center of the color range to the color that you clicked on. So for some photos, this works really well. But for other photos, you will need to extend the color circles on this color wheel to include the whole color range that you want to effect. Or you might need to tighten up the circles like this if you're affecting too many colors. That's why it's important to know what's actually going on and not just rely on the picker option. Okay, and I have one last tip for you. To use this picker option, you need to be in one of these color ranges. The master color wheel doesn't have any color circles to move, so the picker option isn't available. So just choose any color range that's close enough to the color you want to pick, and then you can use the picker to adjust that color range. All right. Congratulations. You are now an HSL master. Great job. Now in the next video, we'll learn all about curves, which is my favorite adjustment for enhancing the light in an image. 9. Curves for Beginners : This video, we'll learn how to use the curves adjustment layer. To keep things simple, I've prepared a few screenshots of the curves adjustment to help you see how it works. The main thing to know is that this line controls all of the lighting in your image. If you bring the line up, it will make your photo brighter. And if you bring the line down, it will make your photo darker. But if that's all that Curves did, it wouldn't be all that special. What makes this adjustment so useful is the fact that we can independently affect the shadows and highlights in our image. If you move this part of the line, you'll affect the highlights in your image. And if you move this part of the line, you'll affect the shadows in your image. So with this control, you could brighten the highlights in your photo while also darkening the shadows. And it gets even better because this line isn't actually broken into just two sections. In reality, this line is a gradient allowing you to control every shade of lighting in your entire image. This gives you incredible control over your lighting, and it's why I'm such a big fan of this adjustment. Okay, now that we understand the basics of curves, let's jump into affinity to see this in action. For this demonstration, I've prepared a photo that's divided into 16 sections with nearly pure black over here on the left side, and over on the right, we have nearly pure white. Okay, now let's apply a curves adjustment. This photo will help us to see the difference as we adjust this line right here. So first, we can click and drag on the line and raise it up to brighten our image. We could also lower this down to darken the image. That's just about the most simple thing you can do with the curves adjustment. Let me show you a few other things you can do with it. I'll reset this. This time, I'm going to go over here to our highlights and I'm going to raise them up and then over here on the shadow side of the line, I'm going to click and drag this downward. This is called an S curve because it's in the shape of an S, and this is a great way to add contrast to your image by brightening the highlights and darkening the shadows. Another thing you can do. Let me just reset this is you can darken just the shadows. To do this, pull down this part of the line down here to darken the shadows and then go about here and bring the line back to meet the center point. Now you can see that we're only darkening the dark parts of our image, and the bright parts of our image are left alone. And of course, you can do the opposite, brightening the highlights and then bringing the line back to meet itself so the shadows aren't affected. So now you can see we've brightened the highlight side, and the shadow side is left alone. So at this point, you have almost everything you need to use curves. But there's just one more thing we need to cover, which is how to use the black point and the white point. So the black point is this node over here. This controls the darkest shadows of your image. And the white point is right up here, and it controls the brightest parts of your image. As an example, let's say you wanted to brighten the white point of your image, which would make your photos highlights even brighter. In that case, we could click and drag on this white point and move it over to the left. You can see as I do this, more and more of the image becomes pure white since white is the brightest that anything can ever be. We've also brightened the whole image quite a bit. And if we take a closer look at the curves adjustment, we can see why that's happening. When we moved that white point over to the left, you can see what we really did was increase the slope of the entire line. So now the whole line is brighter than where it originally was. Even the shadows down here have been brightened and of course, we can do the same thing to the black point. So I'll just reset this and we can move the black point over. As I click and drag this over, you can see more and more of the picture becomes black since black is the darkest that anything can ever be. And just like before, we've affected the entire photo. Here's the before and after. But now that you've seen that, let me ask you a question. We've seen how we can make the white point brighter and how we can make the black point darker. But what if we wanted to do the opposite? What if we wanted to make the black point less dark? Well, we already know that raising the line makes things brighter. So really, all we need to do is raise the black point. And just like that, now we have some very bright shadows. And as you could probably guess, we can do the exact same thing with the white point, lower this down, and now the bright parts of the image have become darker. But just so you know, darkening the white point or brightening the black point, that's not a very common thing to do. But sometimes for artistic reasons, you might want to do that. So I just wanted to make sure that we cover it. Okay, now you have everything you need to use curves, and in the next video, we'll put our new skills to the test and edit a few photos together. 10. Curves for Light : Let's practice using curves to enhance the lighting of an image. We'll practice by editing multiple photos together all with the power of curves. So let's go ahead and start with the most common thing I use curves for brightening an image. I'll add a curves adjustment. And then to brighten up this image, I'm just going to click right in the center of this line and raise it up. You can see how that looks. Here's the before and after. Curves works really well for brightening a photo because the black point and the white point are kept in place unless you purposefully move them like we did in the last video. This makes it so your photo gets nice and bright while keeping the highlights and the shadows from getting too bright. All right. Let's do another example. I'll add a curves adjustment. And for this photo, I do want things to get a little bit brighter. So here's how that looks before and after. And just to edit this a little bit more, I know I mentioned how the black point will keep your shadows from getting too bright. And while that is true, we don't just need to rely on where the black point currently is. I'm going to add a node right here on the line, and we can bring this up and down to just how bright or dark the shadows get. I think having them a little bit darker looks nicer for this image, and now you can see the before and after. Being able to brighten the overall photo while keeping some depth in our shadows is really nice. Now let's come to our next example. Here we have a really fun photo of the Marina Bay in Singapore. This is such a cool photo, but I do think it would look even better with more contrast. So we're going to use curves to darken the shadows and brighten the highlights to make the city lights really pop. And for this photo, let's practice using the keyboard shortcut to apply curves. To apply curves, just press Command or Control M I don't know why M is the shortcut for curves, but I like to think about how M is a very curvy letter M for curves. I don't know if that will help you remember. But now that we have this pulled up, let's go ahead and edit this photo. I'm going to darken the shadows and brighten the highlights to create an S curve, and you can raise or lower either one of these points as much as you want to create the amount of depth that you're looking for. Here's the before and after. Very striking. Let's go ahead and move on to the next one. For this photo, I thought it would be fun to make the giraffes look very dark, like pitch black. And then after that, I thought we could brighten the sky to add even more contrast to this photo. So let's do our shortcut Command or Control M. All right. And from the last video, we learned that we could move the black point to make our photo more black. And to do that, we'll just move this node over. We don't have to move it very far for the shadows to become black. I think I'll just move it like that. And with that moved in place, we can also brighten up the highlights. But since we don't want the sky to become pure white, I'm just going to leave the white point alone and brighten the line from here. Okay, I think this looks pretty nice. Here's the before and after. So pretty. Okay, for the final photo, you might be wondering what we're going to do with this photo. It's already nice and bright and it has good contrast between the shadows and the highlights. Those things are usually really good to have for a good looking photo, but they aren't the only way to make a photo look good. You can also make artistic decisions to make your photo look however you want. Like with this photo, I thought it might be fun to lower its contrast to give it a more vintage feel. So let's try that. So to give it a vintage feel, I'm going to raise our black point to make it lighter. I'm also going to lower the white point to make the whites darker. And to give the photo a little bit more depth, I think I'll also lower this line down a little bit. You can play with this however you want, but the point is, I wanted to make this photo look a little bit more faded. Here's the before and after of that. I think this looks pretty good, but to give it a really vintage feel, I think we need to edit the colors. We'll learn more about color adjustments later on in the course. But for now, I just want to quickly show you the color balance adjustment. This adjustment is one of my favorite ways to add color effects to a photo. Quickly going through this and we will go deeper into this adjustment. Click on where it says tonal range. Go ahead and change that to highlights. Then we're just going to add some yellow to the highlights. Then we can go to the shadows. And let's just add a little bit of red by moving the red slider up Alright. With those colors done, here's the before and after of those colors. And here's the before and after of the whole photo. Alright. Great job. I know that was a lot of photos to edit, but I hope you feel more confident using curves. It really is an amazing adjustment, and I use it all the time. But curves can actually do more than just edit the lighting of a photo. So we'll take a look at that in the next video. 11. Curves for Color : Let's learn how to use curves to edit the color of an image. To start, let's use Command or Control M to add the curves adjustment layer. Okay, so far we've been working in the master curve, which allows us to control the lighting of an image. But if you click where it says master, you can actually see that curves allow us to edit the red, green, and blue color channels. Let's start in the red color channel. I'll raise this up, and you can see that by raising the red curve, we're adding red into our image. But what would happen if we brought the curve down? Would affinity remove red from the photo? What does that mean? Well, if you watched the RGB versus CMY lesson from earlier in the course, then you might already know we learned that red, green, and blue are the opposites of cyan, magenta, and yellow. You can rewatch that lesson if you need a refresher. But in short, removing red will add cyan to the photo. So if I bring this line down, you can see we are adding cyan. Here's the before and after. And just like when we edited the lighting, we can use curves to independently affect the shadows and the highlights. So if you wanted to, you could lower this line to add cyan to the shadows and then raise this part of the line to add red to the highlights. Here you can see what this looks like before and after. Let's quickly look at the other two color channels, and then we'll practice what we've learned in an actual photo. I'll reset the line and change to the green color channel. As I raise this up, we're adding green to the photo, and as I lower it down, we'll do the opposite, adding magenta to the photo. We can similarly lower and raise different parts of this line to add different colors to the shadows and highlights. I'll reset this, and we can look at the last color channel, which is blue. We can raise this to add blue or lower it to add yellow. And again, we can add color to the highlights and the shadows separately. Here's the before and after of that. Alright, now that we've seen the color channels in action, let's go to this practice photo and see what we can do with it. In this photo, I'd like for the shadows to have blue coloring without affecting her skin. So let's see if we can do that with the curves adjustment. I'll press Command or Control M to add the curves adjustment. And then we can go ahead and start in the blue color channel. I'm going to raise this blue shadow side to add that to the shadows. But then I'll lower this highlights part to match it back up to the line. This looks pretty good so far, but we could also go to the red color channel to add a little bit of cyan to the shadows. So I'm going to lower this red line over here to add cyan, and then I'll bring the highlights back to meet the line up here. Okay, with that done, we can go ahead and see how this looked before, and here's the after. You can see that we've added blue and cyan to the shadows without affecting her skin. Curves is mostly used to edit lighting, but as you can see, it can also be used to edit the colors. We'll learn more about color adjustments later on in the course. But in the next video, let's put the skills that we learned in this chapter to the test and edit an entire practice project using just HSL and curves. H 12. Practice Project : This video, we're going to edit a photo from start to finish. I'm really excited about this practice project. We're only going to use HSL and curves to completely transform it, and I think it will be a really good way to wrap up this chapter and solidify everything we've learned. So let's go ahead and start with a curves adjustment. I'll press Command or Control. And we can go ahead and start by brightening up the photo. I'm going to brighten up the highlight side and then bring the shadow side back down so the shadows aren't over brightened. That's a pretty good start. Next, I'll press Command or Control, and we can go ahead and play with the colors. Now, there aren't too many colors in this photo. So I think I'm mostly just going to edit the red and yellow channels, since that's where her skin and hair fall in. So let's start with the red channel. You can see this is affecting her skin and hair, like I said. I think I'll just raise this a little bit. Then I'll go to the yellow channel. You can see this also affects her skin and her hair. So I'll just raise that up. So other than those two color channels, I'm not seeing much other color in this photo, but I do think that the back wall has some blue in it. So I'm going to go to the blue color channel, and you can see, yep, the back wall is blue. As I boost this, I think it's a little bit distracting. So I think for this photo, I'm actually going to desaturate the wall so that that blue color isn't distracting. We could even completely remove it if we wanted to. Alright, let's take a look at our work so far. I'll hold Shift to select both layers. And now you can see that before and after. This is already a really big improvement. Now, because this is a full practice project, I think it would look nice if we also masked some adjustments on specific areas just to really polish the photo. One thing I can see right away that I do want to adjust is her shirt. After we boosted the yellows, it made her shirt look a little bit yellow, and I think this shirt is supposed to be white. I'm going to add another HSL adjustment with Command or Control U, and we can go ahead and adjust her shirt to make it white again. Since we're going to mask this over her shirt, I'm just going to go to the main color channel, and then I'm going to lower the saturation all the way. Then I'll close out of this, and we can go ahead and invert this layer with command or control I. Now we have a black mask we can paint on. So I'll just grab the paintbrush tool. I'll make sure I'm painting in a low flow, and I'll change my color to white so that I can paint this over her shirt. I'll use the bracket keys on my keyboard to adjust my brush size, and then I can go ahead and paint. As I'm painting, I can see that I am desaturating her hair. I'm just going to leave that for a moment, and we can come back to that. Okay, I did my best to avoid her hair over here. And since I was painting with a low flow, I don't think it affected her hair too much, but over here, you can see her hair was very much affected. To bring back the color there, I'm going to change my brush color to black. Then with a nice small brush, I'm just going to paint to reveal that again. It might also reveal a little bit of yellow on the shirt, but I think it's worth it to have her hair not be gray. Go ahead and do this over. Any other areas that you might have painted the gray over? All right. And once you've finished with that, we can go ahead and take a look at the difference. Here's the before and after of turning her shirt back to white. Now, while we're working on the shirt, I think it would also look nice to enhance its highlights to make the shirt look more shiny. To do this, I'm going to press Command or Control M to add another curves adjustment. Then to brighten the white areas of her shirt, I'm going to brighten the white point. So I'm just going to bring this over just a little bit to make the white parts even more bright. Then I'm going to invert this with command or control, and I'm going to paint this only on the shirt. Once again, you can use the bracket keys to adjust your brush. Then I'm going to change my paint color to white, and I'm just going to paint this over the shirt. Since we're not changing the color this time, we're only brightening things. You don't need to be as careful as you paint around the hair. Alright, let's take a look at this. Here's the before and after, brightening up her shirt. I think this looks good, but I do want to click on this curves adjustment again to make one other adjustment. This really brightened up her shirt, but I want to make sure the shadows in these folds are still nice and dark. So I'm going to click and drag downward on this part of the curve. So now you can see there's a bit more contrast. I think that looks better. Okay, that was a lot of work on her shirt, so I'm just going to select both of those layers, so we can see the before and after making her shirt nice and crisp and white. I think that looks great. Another thing we can target in this picture is the background. You can see that the background's nice and dark down here, but up here, it looks pretty bright. So I want to fix this by darkening the background. I'll press Command or Control M. Then I'm just going to darken this midpoint. You can see this is darkening the whole photo, so I'm going to invert with command or control I so that we can paint this only on the background. So with white paint, let's paint on the black mask. All right. So I just painted on these top areas since the bottom is already very dark. And I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Now that we've darkened the background, I think it'd look nice to brighten our subject a little bit more, starting with her hair. You can see it's starting to blend into the background since we've darkened it. So let's press Command or Control M. Then we can go ahead and brighten up her hair. I'm going to move the white point over quite a bit to brighten her hair, and you can already see the difference. Let's invert this with command or control I. Then I'm going to gradually paint this over the highlights in her hair. Anywhere where her hair is already nice and bright, I'm just doing this to enhance her highlights. Okay. I think that added light looks really nice. Here's the before and after of that. Now that we've done that, we can go ahead and adjust the curve however we want. Maybe we can brighten it a little more or maybe you want it to look a little darker. However you want, I think I'll brighten the whole thing. All right. And now that her hair looks nice and bright, let's go ahead and brighten up her face. I'll press Command or Control M. Let's just brighten this a little bit. I don't want to make her face too bright. Then I'll just invert this and paint it over her face. Here's the before and after brightening up her face. And while I do think it looks nice to have her face be brighter, I think it did take away a little bit of her color. So I'll press Command or Control. And in the master color channel, we can just increase the saturation a little bit to bring the color back. Now that we've added that saturation, you can see that her skin looks a little bit red. Skin is pretty tricky. So let's take a closer look at how to fix light skin color issues. In this example, you can see the color range that skin is normally found in. As you can see, it's mostly orange, but it can also have a little bit of red and green. In our practice photo, her skin is looking a little red. To fix this, our only options are to move the wheel to add more red or move the wheel to add more green. So since her skin is already red, we don't want to add more red, we actually need to add green. It might sound strange to make the skin more green, but doing this will help to shift our colors more toward the natural orangy color that skin has. Okay, so to add green to her skin, I'm going to go to the red color channel. Then I need to bring the greens up here to the reds. This would be moving the car tire in reverse, moving counterclockwise. I need to shift the hue in reverse and move it over to the left. So you can see this is adding green to her skin, and this is adding more red. Since this slider can be pretty sensitive, I'm just going to move it a tiny bit over toward the green just to take away a little bit of that redness. I'll invert this with command or control I. That way, we're not affecting her hair. And then I'm just going to paint this over her skin, so I'll paint it over her face and her hands. Here's the before and after of this very subtle skin adjustment. I know it's hard to see, so maybe I'll zoom in. Here's the before, a little bit more red, and here's the after bringing in more orange tones. Okay, and we're almost done. As a finishing touch, I want to add some more contrast back to her face. I'll press Command or Control M to add another curve. Then I'm just going to add some darkness to her face. I'll invert this with command or control I. And then with a nice small paint brush, I'm going to add contrast to some key areas around her face. So I'm going to paint this darkness over her eyebrows. Well, I guess just this eyebrow. You can't see the other one. I'll paint it over her eyelashes to make them nice and dark. I'll also paint this with a nice low flow around the outer edge of her face. And if you want, you can also apply this darkness to her lips to make them stand out a little bit more by making her lips darker against her light skin. I think this just makes them stand out nicely. Maybe I painted a little bit too much there. So I'm going to change my color to black, and I'll just swipe over the lips to remove a little bit of that. Okay, we're done adding contrast, so you can see the before and after, and what a difference that makes. I'll just zoom out with Command or Control zero, and I'm going to select all of our layers, so you can see the complete before and after. Can you believe all of that was only done with two of Affinity's adjustments? That is amazing. I think this turned out really nice. So as you can tell from this chapter, I really love curves and HSL, but there's so many more adjustments in affinity photo, and in the next chapter, we're going to take a deep dive into all of the ways that you can edit a photo's lighting. 13. Levels : This chapter we'll learn all about affinities lighting adjustments, starting with the levels adjustment layer. Okay. To get started, let's apply the levels adjustment. So this adjustment is pretty simple. We only have sliders to adjust. So let's go ahead and start with the black level slider. This is similar to the black point from curves. As you move it up, the dark parts of your photo get even darker. So you can see what that's doing. Next, we have the white level, which is similar to the white point from curves. With this one, you move it downward, and more and more of the photo will become bright white. Next, we have Gamma. This is for the mid tones. So as you move it, you can see that everything in the middle gets brighter. And as you raise it, everything gets darker in the mid tones. So this is a little bit confusing because as you move it down, things get brighter. And as you move it up, things get darker, you would think it'd be the opposite. But when you move this, you can think about it like an extension of these two sliders. So you move this one up to darken things, and you move this one down to brighten things. And it's the same here. Move it down to brighten, up to darken. Okay, and last down here, we have the output sliders. The output black level will make the darkest parts of your photo even brighter. So as you raise this, you can see that gets brighter. So this is sort of like the vintage effect that we did with curves, and the output white level will make the white parts of your photo darker. So again, that vintage look, and that's pretty much it. That's the levels adjustment. Now that you know what all these sliders do in the next video, we'll answer the important question. Is levels better, worse or the same as using the curves adjustment? Oh 14. Does Ally Use Levels? : So do I use the levels adjustment? As we saw in the last video, levels is very similar to curves, allowing you to edit your lighting in similar ways. But as similar as they are, I still prefer curves, and there are two reasons for that. The first reason is that curves is more flexible. Unlike levels, which only has five sliders you can effect, you can use the curves line to affect any shade of light in your image. But as great as that is, that's actually not the main reason I prefer curves. The main reason I use curves is because it's faster to use. So to see this, let's quickly jump into affinity. All right, to brighten up this wedding photo, we're going to use curves, and then we're going to try to use levels. Let's press Command or Control M. We can go ahead and brighten up the midtones and as you can see, that was super fast and it looks super good. Alright. Now, let's try using levels. And just so it's a fair comparison, I'll use the levels shortcut, which is command or Control L. So so far, it's just as fast. And now, to brighten things up in the same way, I'm going to shift the Gamma slider over so you can see that was just as fast, but this just looks so bad. The bright parts of the image have gotten really bright and the dark parts look too bright as well. It just brightened everything and looks really bad. You can fiddle around with levels to try to make it look as good as curves by adjusting the black level to make sure your shadows stay dark. You can also adjust the output white level so that the bright parts don't get too bright. And now you can see this looks a bit better. But let's take a look at the curves one again. The reason curves looks better right away is that the black and white points are locked into place. So it only is brightening the mid tones without overly affecting the shadows and highlights. So this allows you to very quickly and naturally brighten a photo in one swift motion. So even though you technically can get levels to look pretty similar to curves, you have to fiddle around with all the different sliders to get it to look just right. So I find it's just faster to use curves from the get go. If you've watched my other courses, you might have seen me teach using the levels adjustment, and that's just because I think levels is easier to understand for beginners, since it's only working with sliders. But if you're willing to put in the time to learn it, I do think the curves adjustment is much better for adjusting the lighting. 15. Brightness & Contrast : This video we'll take a look at the brightness and contrast adjustment. Let's go ahead and get started by applying the brightness and contrast adjustment. This adjustment is pretty simple. We just have two sliders to work with. Brightness works the same as brightening and darkening the mid tone and curves. You can see as we brighten this, the shadows still stay nice and dark and the highlights aren't getting overly brightened, which is nice. As you darken it, the same thing. This is a very nice even way to add brightness or darken a photo. Then we have the contrast lighter, which is the same as applying an S curve with the curves adjustment, like what we did with that nighttime city photo. So as I raise this up, the shadows get darker and the highlights get brighter, and as I lower this, everything becomes more vintage looking because we're taking away that contrast. And that's it. It's a very simple adjustment to use. So now that we know how it works, we'll talk a little more about how this compares to curves in the next video. 16. Does Ally Use Brightness & Contrast? : So do I use the brightness and contrast adjustment? As we saw in the last video, brightness and contrast and curves can edit lighting in very similar ways. If you increase the brightness to 50%, your photo will actually get brightened in the exact same way as raising the curves mid tone like this. Or if you raised the contrast to 50%, then your photo would look the exact same as if you made an S curve like this. Actually, brightness and contrast does a pretty good job, especially considering how simple it is to use. But as good as it is, brightness and contrast can only get you so far. With curves, you can just do so much more. For example, maybe you want to brighten the highlights without affecting the shadows, or maybe you want to darken the black point, like how we did with the giraffe photo. Or maybe you want to make an S curve but customize it. The highlights are much more effective than the shadows. All of these things can easily be done with curves but are impossible to do with brightness and contrast. And because of that, I never use brightness and contrast. Curves can do everything that brightness and contrast can do plus so much more. So if you're willing to put in the time to learn it, curves really is the better adjustment. 17. Shadows Highlights : Let's learn about the shadows and highlights adjustment. To get started, let's apply shadows and highlights. So just like our last adjustment, this one is very simple with just two sliders. Using these sliders, you can brighten or darken the shadows in your photo. And using the highlights slider, you can brighten or darken the highlights. It's nice that we can adjust the shadows and the highlights separately. And that's all I have to show you for this one. It's very simple to use. 18. Does Ally Use Shadows Highlights? : So do I use the shadows and highlights adjustment? We saw in the last video that you can use shadows and highlights to brighten or darken your shadows and highlights. But as we saw earlier in the course, you can do this exact same thing with curves. For example, if you darkened your shadows by 200%, then your photo would look the exact same as if you made a curves adjustment that darkened the shadows, while putting the highlights back onto the original curve. Or if you brightened your highlights by 50%, then your photo would look the exact same as if you made a curve that brightened the highlights while putting the shadows back to the original curve. But as you already know, curves can do so much more than this. I never feel a need to use the shadows and highlights adjustment because curves can do all of the same things and more. Curves really is amazing. In the next couple of videos, we'll see how it compares to affinities final lighting adjustment, the exposure adjustment. 19. Exposure : Let's learn about the exposure adjustment. To start, let's apply the exposure adjustment. This one is the simplest adjustment so far. There's just one slider to adjust. As you can see, as you move the slider, it makes the photo brighter or darker. If you move the slider to either end, eventually your photo will become all the way white or all the way black. That's it. It's a very simple adjustment. In the next video, we'll talk about how useful this adjustment is. 20. Does Ally Use Exposure? : So do I use the exposure adjustment? We saw in the last video that you can use the exposure adjustment to brighten or darken your photo. But as you're well aware of by now, you can do the same thing with curves. For example, if you brighten your exposure by two, then your photo would look the same as if you brighten the curves white point like this. As you could probably guess, that's why I never use the exposure adjustment layer. Curves can do the exact same thing plus much more. So to summarize this chapter, we've seen that curves is the best adjustment for editing lighting because it can do everything the other lighting adjustments can do and more. So in my opinion, there really isn't a need to use any of the other lighting adjustments. But what about the HSL adjustment? It's my other favorite adjustment. So can it do everything that the other color adjustments can do? Well, not quite. I do love HSL, but in the next chapter of the course, we'll see when and why you might want to use some of Affinity's other color adjustments in addition to HSL. 21. Color Balance : This chapter we'll learn all about affinities adjustments for editing color, starting with color balance. To apply the color balance adjustment. We briefly saw this adjustment in action in the first chapter of the course, but now we can take a deeper look at it. Using the color balance adjustment, we can add colors to the shadows, midtones, and highlights in our image. These colors, as you can see, are CMY and RGV. They're each paired with their opposite color. As you move these sliders, you can see that you're adding the different colors. Because the sliders are color coded, it makes it really easy to know what color is being added. So as you can see, as you bring any of these sliders over, we're in the shadows tonal range right now. The shadows are being affected with that color while the highlights are left alone. This is so nice so that we can really target areas with color. To show you another example, let's go to the highlights and add a color there. So you can see what that looks like. With that color added to the highlights, it gradually fades through the midtones and shadows, but it's affecting the highlights mainly. So that's the basics of how the color balance adjustment works. Let's see this in action on this exercise photo. We use this photo in the curves for color video. And just like in that example, I want to add some nice blue color grading to the shadows without affecting her skin or her dress. So to do this, I'll apply the color balance adjustment. Then I'll change to shadows. And I'm going to add cyan I'll also add some blue. All right. There we go. Now you can see the before and after, you can see that her skin and her dress are unaffected. All right. Now you know how to use the color balance adjustment. In the next video, we'll see how useful this adjustment is. 22. Does Ally Use Color Balance? : So do I use the color balance adjustment? We saw in the last video that you can use color balance to add color grading to the shadows, midtones, and highlights of your photo. But how can you do that with the HSL adjustment? Well, the answer is you can't. The HSL adjustment is meant for enhancing the color that already exists in your photo. It's not for adding new colors. Instead, color balance is actually a lot more similar to the curves adjustment. As we saw in the last video, we can use color balance to add blue to the shadows, just like how we did with curves. Between color balance and curves, which one do I like to use? Well, this might surprise you, but I actually prefer color balance. To see why, let's compare how you would make blue shadows using each adjustment. With color balance, all you need to do is go into the shadow section of the adjustment and then use the sliders to add cyan and blue, simple as that. But to do the exact same thing with curves, we need to go to the blue color range. Then we need to increase the blues in the shadows and then bring the highlight part of the curve back down. Then we need to go into the red color range. And we need to remove red from the shadows to add cyan and bring this part of line back up so this color is not affecting the highlights. Both of these achieve the same result, having beautiful color grading in the shadows of this photo. But in my opinion, color balance is much easier to use. So yes, curves might allow you to achieve color grading that's slightly more precise as you adjust the lines, but I still prefer color balance for its speed and simplicity. Color balance is one of my favorite adjustments to use. 23. Selective Color : Let's learn about the selective color adjustment. Let's start by applying the selective color adjustment. Then we can take a look at how this works. This adjustment has sliders, as you can see, we have CMY sliders, which as we already know means we also have RGB sliders if we go the opposite direction. At the bottom, we also have a black slider which adds black or white to your image. To use this adjustment, all you need to do is adjust the sliders. As I add Cyan to this photo though, you can see nothing happens. That's because with selective color, you can affect different color ranges, just like the HSL adjustment. Since this photo has no color, nothing's happening. But we can open up these colors and select different colors to adjust our image. Since this photo has no color, we'll skip past all of the colors. But down here, you can see we have white, neutral and black categories. This represents the highlights, midtones and shadows in our image. So not only can we adjust all these color ranges, we can also adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights, which is pretty nice. For this photo, I'm going to select the black category and then I'll raise the Sian slider so we can see how this is adding cyan color to the shadows. To see this in action, let's go to a real photo in color and apply the selective color adjustment to it. Let's do the same thing we've been doing with this photo, adding cyan and blue tones to the shadows. To do that with selective color, we just need to make sure we're in the black category, then we can go ahead and raise the cyan and lower this yellow slider to add blue. With this adjustment, it's really nice to have the opposite colors memorized, since it doesn't say what the opposite colors are on these sliders. If you know yellow and blue are opposites, it just makes this a lot easier. Alright, now we've added blue to the shadows, and you can see what this looks like before and after. So adding different colors to the shadows, midtones, and highlights is pretty nice, but there's even more you can do with this adjustment. I'll add this adjustment to this photo and show you that another thing that you can do with this adjustment is you can boost the colors in the different color ranges. In this photo, I see magenta. I see some yellow and some green. If we go to each of those color channels, let's start in Magenta. You can go to that slider and bring it all the way up to boost that color. So in Magenta, I'll boost magenta. In the yellow category, I'll boost the yellow. And then in the green category, I'll boost the green, which means I need to lower the magenta slider. All right. With that, we can go ahead and see what this looks like before and after. This is pretty subtle. So if you want to increase this color boost, you can duplicate this layer with Command or Control J. Now you can see this is a much more intense color boost. So you can always lower the opacity of one of the layers until you get the look that you want. Okay, let's look at one more example. Another way to use selective color is for color correction, especially when working with the skin. So I'll add the selective color adjustment, and then we can take a look at this photo. So as a reminder, all skin types are a mix of red and yellow. So if we go into the red and yellow color ranges, we can adjust the sliders to affect her skin. So let's start in the reds. I'm just going to go through here and see how these different sliders affect the skin. Once I'm done in the red channel, I'll move on to the yellow channel and adjust the sliders. This isn't an exact science adjusting these colors. Just do what you think looks good for your photo. Now with that, we can go ahead and see the before and after. To sum up this video, selective color has a lot of different uses. You can add color to the shadows and highlights. You can boost color ranges, and you can correct skin tones. With all of those abilities in the next video, we'll see how this adjustment compares to our other adjustments. 24. Does Ally Use Selective Color? : So do I use the selective color adjustment? To see how it compares, here's one of the photos that we edited in the last video with one copy of the photo being edited by color balance and the other one being edited by selective color. These two photos look very similar. So let's take a closer look. I'll jump back and forth between the photos, and as I do, I want you to try and see which one you think looks better. You might have a different opinion from me and that's totally fine. But to me, I definitely prefer one of these photos and it's this one. Which one is this? It's the color balance one. So why does color balance look better to me? Well, I think it's easiest to see. If you look at the red pillar in the background, color balance gave it that blue can look that I was going for while the selective color version looks a little muddy. So even though you can color your shadows and highlights with selective color, I find that color balance usually does a better job. But of course, that's not all selective color does. In the last video, we also saw that you can boost colors in your photo. Instead of comparing this to color balance, let's see how it compares to the HSL adjustment for boosting colors. Here's the photo that we edited in the last video. One copy was boosted with the HSL adjustment and the other was boosted with selective color. Once again, the two versions of the photo look pretty similar. So just like before, let's take a closer look. I'll jump back and forth between the two versions of the photo and let you decide. Which one do you think looks better? In this case, I really don't think there's a right or wrong answer. Both versions of the photo look great. Now, even though I like both versions of the photo, they're still one of the adjustments that I prefer using and that's the HSL adjustment. But why is that? Well, take a closer look at these areas as I jump back and forth between the two photos. Notice how these areas look different in each photo. In particular, pay attention to the lighting. If you look closely, you can see in this photo, the areas have deeper shadows, but in this photo, the areas appear brighter. Neither of these photos is objectively better than the other, but I still prefer using the HSL adjustment, which is this photo, the one with deeper shadows. That's because the original photo did have deeper shadows in these areas. The HSL adjustment boosted the colors in the image while keeping the lighting the same. In this photo, the one edited with selective color, the colors were boosted and the shadows were brightened. And in other photos, I've seen that selective color can also reduce the brightness of highlights. In other words, selective color can boost saturation like the HSL adjustment, but it can also flatten your lighting. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I still prefer using the HSL adjustment so that I can only affect my colors. If I want to edit my lighting, I'll use the curves adjustment. Okay, but there's still one more way to use selective color, and that's for color correction. Let's take a look at the photo we edited in the previous video and compare how the skin looks when we edit it with the HSL adjustment and the selective color adjustment. Based on this comparison, I think it's pretty clear that selective color looks the best. The HSL version was able to give her skin an extra pop of saturation, but the color still seems off. This is where selective color really shines in color correction. That's especially true when working with people's skin, which often needs very precise adjustments in order to look right. So in summary, I think color balance does a great job of adding colors to the shadows and highlights. I think HSL is great for boosting colors in an image. But when it comes to color correcting skin, I think selective color is best now, remember, these are just my opinions. It's totally fine if you want to use these adjustments differently than I do. There's a lot of ways to do similar edits and affinity photo, and in the next lesson, we'll take a look at another one of affinities adjustments for Editing color, the gradient map adjustment. 25. Gradient Map : This video, we'll take a look at the gradient map adjustment. Let's start by applying a gradient map. As you can see, this looks a little bit wild right now. So to better see what's going on, I'm going to click here to select this middle point. Then I'll press Delete. Then I'm going to click this button to reverse these colors. This just makes it a little easier to see what's going on. So the gradient map adjustment is applying a gradient of colors ranging from the shadows in your photo all the way up to the highlights in your photo. For this picture, right now, we have red applied to all of the highlights in our photo, and you can see that as I turn this off. Her bright white shirt, the white wall behind her and her light skin all turn red. And the darker areas of the photo like the corner of the wall and her dark skirt all turn blue because right now we have blue for our shadow color. Now that you know what's going on, we can customize these colors to change up the look. To start, I'm going to click right here to select the shadow color. Then I'll click here to change the color. I'm going to make this a nice dark blue for our shadows. Then I'll click anywhere outside of that color wheel, and now I can select the highlight color. I'll click here to change it and we can change it to anything that we want. I think I'll go with a nice lightish orange color like that. As you can see, this is a very strong look just applying these two colors to the photo. So if you want this to blend into your photo better, you can always change the blend mode right down here. I'm going to change this to soft light. Soft Light looks best most of the time, so that's why I'm using this one, and you can see the before and after softly applying those colors to our photo. And you can always lower the opacity if you want the look to be even more subtle. Okay, let's do another practice photo. I'll apply the gradient map to it. And then I'm going to do the same thing we did before. I'll select this middle color point and I'll delete it, and then I'll reverse the colors. For this one, I'm going to select our shadow color, and I'm going to make this black then I'm going to select our highlight color and I'm going to make this white with a gradient ranging from black shadows to white highlights. You can see our photo has turned black and white. We can make this a little bit more fun by adding a tint of color to our black and white photo. To add just a little bit of color, I'll double click right here to add a point in the middle. Then I'm going to change this color to a nice light orange color. You can see that this creates a sepia look. I think this looks pretty nice. Here's the before and after of that one. For extra fun, you can also change the shadow in highlight colors, making the black a really dark blue and the white a really light yellow. This is just another way to tint your photo, and I think it's pretty fun. All right. Let's do one more example with this photo. I'll just turn off this layer and we can apply a new gradient map adjustment. For this one, I'll delete the center color stop and reverse our colors. I always like to reverse the colors, even if it's not completely necessary because I think the photo looks more natural having blue in the shadows and red in the highlights. Now I'm going to change up the colors again. For the shadows, I'll make it a dark blue again. Then for the highlights, I'm going to make this a nice light orange color. And last, I'm going to add a center point. I'll double click, and I'm going to make this a nice orange color. And now that I'm done adding those colors, I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light. Now we can go ahead and take a look. Here's the before and after. By adding these subtle colors, I think this looks really nice for this photo. Since we added a middle color stop, we can actually do a little bit more to refine our editing. If I click and drag this, I can move this down making more and more of the shadows, this orange color. You can see how this lightens up her hair, and I think this looks pretty nice. The shadows are still blue, but now we have a bit more warmth in the photo. I really like how this adjustment turned out. I think it's so pretty. I would love to be able to see what this looks like on other photos. And lucky for us, there's an easy way to do that. We can use something called adjustment presets. Go ahead and keep this photo open with these two gradient map adjustments because we're going to use it in the next video. 26. Adjustment Presets : Learn about adjustment presets. Adjustment presets allow you to save an adjustment that you've worked on and then apply that adjustment to other photos. To see how they work, we can go ahead and turn the gradient map adjustments that we just worked on into presets. To start, I'm going to click right here on the layer icon of the first gradient map adjustment. Then over here in its dialog box, we can click where it says, add preset. Now we can go ahead and name this whatever we want. I'll call it blue orange, then I'll press Okay. We can do the same thing for the other one. I'll turn on its layer. I'll click on its layer icon, and now you can see those colors are correct, and we can add this as a preset. Again, we can call this whatever we want. I'll call mine warm, black and white. Then I'll press Okay. With those two adjustments saved, we can apply them to any other photo. But in order to do that, we actually need to add another one of these panels over here. So let's go to the top of the screen to window. Then we can go down to where it says adjustment. I'm just going to click and drag on its name to tuck it right here next to the Layers panel for easy access. Then we can go ahead and scroll through all of these different adjustments until we find the gradient map adjustment. Once you click on that, you can see there's a few default gradient map adjustments here, and we also have the two that we created the blue orange, and the warm black and white. You can click on these to quickly apply them to your photo. Here's that first one and here's the warm black and white. You can actually turn any adjustment into a preset, as you can see by this long list of adjustments here. Adjustment presets are really good to know about, but they aren't always that useful. For example, a curves preset doesn't really make as much sense since every photo will need a different curve. But some adjustments can work really well with presets, like the gradient map adjustment, since the same gradient map can look good on lots of different photos. Now that you know all about the gradient map adjustment and presets, in the next video, we'll talk about how useful this adjustment can be. 27. Does Ally Use Gradient Map? : So do I use the gradient map adjustment? Let's take a look at all of the pros and cons of using a gradient map. First, let's look at the pros of the gradient map adjustment. By turning the gradient map adjustment into a preset, you can apply it to lots of photos. The gradient map works on lots of photos because the color and the lighting of the image are affected in a very natural way. And here's a quick fun fact. Gradient maps are how a lot of Instagram filters work. Another pro of the gradient map is that it can help you to keep a consistent style. Lots of photographers use gradient maps to quickly edit a bunch of their photos in their own personal style. Now let's look at the cons of the gradient map adjustment. This adjustment can be a little bit heavy handed. I find myself needing to lower the opacity every time because the colors are so intense, even with the blend mode changed. Another con is that this adjustment gives you less control than using separate adjustments for light and color. Since both light and color are affected at the same time, it can be harder to make the photo a little bit brighter or darker because that means you'll also need to change the colors. To sum this up, I usually don't use gradient maps because I like to do more subtle editing, and I also enjoy crafting each photo as a unique piece of art without using presets. So personally, I like to use adjustments like color balance, HSL, and curves to craft each image exactly how I want it. But I totally see the appeal to gradient maps. Lots of people love using them. So if you want to make some gradient map presets and use them on lots of your photos, that is a totally great thing to do. 28. Channel Mixer : Let's learn about the channel mixer adjustment. To start, we can go ahead and apply the channel mixer. And then we can take a look at how this works. The channel mixer adjustment is probably one of the most confusing adjustments. So as I explained this, don't worry if it's confusing for you because it is a confusing concept. So to start up here, we have the output channel. Whatever the color is set to for the output channel, that's the color that we'll be adding or removing from these different colors in your photo. So to see how this works, right now, we're adding or removing red from these three colors. If I add red to red, in this case, nothing happens as I raise this and try to add more red because the red in our photo is already fully red. But if I want to remove red from this red color, you can see that it becomes black. Next, we have green. So as I raise this, I'll be adding red to green. And as I raise this, you can see that that makes yellow. So that's an interesting combination. Red plus green equals yellow, and as I lower this down, it just returns back to green. Since we are removing red and there's no red and green, it will just stay green. Next, we'll be adding red to the blue in our photo. As I raise this up, you can see that red plus blue equals magenta, and as I lower this, it goes back to being blue. So you can see we had some interesting color combinations, and these color combinations will be the same no matter what color we're adding to the different colors. To see this, let's go to the green output channel. So we'll be adding or removing green from these different colors. If I add green to the red in our photo, it will turn yellow since green plus red equals yellow in this case. If I add green to green, nothing happens because the green in this picture is already fully green. But as I remove it, it will turn black. If I add green to blue in this picture, it will turn cyan. Green plus blue is cyan. We have one last output channel to look at blue, blue plus red makes magenta as I raise this. Blue plus green makes cyan as I raise this and blue plus blue doesn't change anything unless you remove it and it will turn black. I know this is very confusing, but let's see if it makes a little more sense when we use it on a real picture. So here we have a beautiful picture of a ladybug, and I'd like to change up some of the colors with the channel mixer. To start, I'd like to add more green to the green in our photo to make it look more vibrant. That's pretty easy. We'll start in the green output channel to add green. Then we'll go to the green slider and raise it up to increase the green. I think it would also look nice if these plants looked a little bit more warm. To add more warmth to this green color, I'm going to go to the red channel and I'll add red to green to make them look a little bit more yellow. Now they're starting to look a little bit too yellow. So to counteract that, I'm going to go to the blue channel, and I'm going to add blue to the green just to cool it down a little bit and add a little bit of cyan. Now you can see the greens look quite different. Here's the before and after, and I think that looks pretty nice. And finally, just to finish this off, I think we should add more red to our red ladybug. So I'll go to the red channel, and using the red slider, I'll raise this up, and you can see the ladybug becomes more red. Now, you might have noticed as I was making all of these adjustments that the sky is starting to look a little strange. Originally, the sky was a more neutral color, and now it's glowing reddish yellow. That can happen because white is made of red, green, and blue all put together. So that means as we raise or lower any of these colors, it will always affect the highlights. Luckily, the channel mixer has a way to counteract that. If you go to the bottom where it says, offset, you can lower this down so that the highlights aren't as affected. Okay, so that's the channel mixer adjustment. I know that I adjusted this ladybug photo pretty quickly, adding colors and switching the color channels. I probably looked pretty confident as I did that, but I just want to let you know that I did practice editing this picture beforehand, and I carefully wrote down how I wanted to change everything. Why did I have to do that? Well, it's because I think this adjustment is very strange and confusing. I never get the sliders right the first time around. So knowing that, let's see if I ever use this adjustment in the next video. Oh 29. Does Ally Use Channel Mixer? : So do I ever use the channel mixer adjustment? We can keep this video short and sweet. No, I do not use the channel mixer. But that's just because I personally find it confusing. I have seen people who have mastered this adjustment and do great editing with it, but it's honestly just not for me. I can't really keep the colors straight, and I would rather just adjust colors using the HSL adjustment. That's just what I do. But if you play around with this and like the results, then I say, go for it. But for me, I don't use this adjustment. 30. Vibrance : Let's learn about the vibrance adjustment. To start, I'll apply the vibrance adjustment. So as you can see, this adjustment has two different sliders here. We have vibrance and saturation. So what's the difference between these two? Saturation boost the saturation of all of the colors in your photo. Vibrance, boost the saturation of the muted colors in your photo while leaving colors that are already saturated alone. In addition, it also avoids saturating colors that are found in people's skin. So to see this in action, let's go ahead and start by raising the vibrant slider. You can see that this is pretty subtle. I'm just going to press Command or Control J to duplicate this layer. Now as I turn this on and off, you can see that this is boosting the more muted colors of our photo. We have a lot more yellow once we've applied this adjustment, and you can see that that yellow was very subtle before. Also, as I go back and forth, take note of how her skin is not affected by the vibrant slider. All right. I'll just delete the duplicate copy by pressing delete on my keyboard. Now we can go ahead and see what it looks like when we change the saturation slider. I'm going to raise this and I really don't need to raise it very far before her skin starts to be affected. Here's the before and after, you can see her skin looks a lot more red and saturated. This adjustment is basically just two different ways to boost the colors. In the next video, we'll see how it compares to the HSL adjustment. 31. Does Ally Use Vibrance? : So do I use the vibrance adjustment? So between the vibrance adjustment and the HSL adjustment, I prefer using the HSL adjustment, and here's why. In the last video, I mentioned that the vibrance adjustment protects the skin tones. It won't boost their color. Even though this can be considered a benefit, I actually find this benefit to be a curse because usually I want to affect the skin tones, whether that be boosting the color or shifting the color. HSL lets me boost the yellows and the red separately. So I can choose how little or how much to boost the skin tones. HSL also allows me to shift the hue by a degree or two, whether that be adding a little bit more red or green to the skin, and the vibrant adjustment can't do that. So because the HSL adjustment has more flexibility, I prefer to use it, and I don't use the vibrant adjustment. 32. Recolor : Let's learn about the recolor adjustment. The exercise files for this video, all have the recolor adjustment and the HSL adjustment already applied because I made selections of different parts of the picture to demonstrate. So to go ahead and start, turn on the recolor adjustment and then click on its layer icon to open up the dialog box. The recolor adjustment is a pretty fun adjustment. It allows you to apply a solid wash of color over your entire image, or in this case, over your entire selected area. Using these sliders, you can adjust what the hue looks like. You can adjust the saturation, and you can adjust how light or dark the color is. Okay, so now you know the basics of the recolor adjustment, and I want to show you how this is different from the HSL adjustment because these two adjustments actually look quite a bit different. So to go ahead and start, I'll just turn off the recolor adjustment. So we can take a closer look at our original image. The rose petals are all pink, but if you look a little bit more closely, you can see that there's variations to this pink hue. Some areas look a little bit more purple than others, and some areas look a little bit more red. So there's quite a bit of variety here. When you apply the HSL adjustment to change the color of these petals, you can see all of the colors are shifted. Now with the recolor adjustment, the colors are also shifted to blue, but it looks different somehow. So here's the technical explanation for why this is happening. The goal of the recolor adjustment is to change all parts of the picture to the exact same hue. There are still light parts and dark parts present, but they're all the exact same hue. This is different from the HSL adjustment. The HSL adjustment shifts the colors while taking into account their original hue, saturation, and luminosity. So if part of the flower was a little bit more purple looking and a different part of the flower looked more red, as you shift all those colors, those colors will continue to look different from each other. Because things naturally have color variations like this, HSL tends to make things look more natural because it takes into account those variations. The recolor adjustment makes things look a little bit more flat in comparison. Okay, so if the HSL adjustment looks better, you should always use HSL, right? Well, there are some limitations to HSL, so that's why we have a few more exercise files up here because I want to show you a few more examples. In this example, I made a selection of the sweater and then I added a recolor adjustment and an HSL adjustment to turn the sweater blue. Let's take a look at what the HSL adjustment does. Here's the before and after. Well, the sweater might be slightly more blue. It really isn't making the sweater a nice blue that I was looking for. Let's see what the recolor adjustment can do. There we go. Now that's a blue sweater. The reason why the recolor adjustment works better is because the HSL adjustment actually doesn't work very well on white objects because white objects don't really have color present to shift. The recolor adjustment, on the other hand, does a beautiful job because it doesn't care what the original color in the photo was. I'll cover your photo with the color that you want every time. Because the HSL adjustment can't add new colors, the recolor adjustment is much better for adding a new color to your photo. And the HSL adjustment has some other limitations too. In this example, I made a selection of her dress, and then I added the HSL adjustment and the recolor adjustment to recolor the dress into a yellow dress. Let's see the HSL. Okay. With this one, there are a few problems I can see. The natural color variation of this dress actually looks pretty bad in this case. Instead of yellow sunshine over here, it shifted it into a ghostly blue color and it looks pretty strange. In addition, the colors are very splotchy here. This can happen when colors are a little bit too saturated next to unsaturated colors. It just doesn't look quite right. Okay, so we know HSL looks bad. Let's see how the recolor looks. Ah, so much better. Because recolor doesn't care about natural color variation or how saturated the original colors were, this still looks great. It's applied a very beautiful even wash of color over the whole dress, no splotchiness, and no ghostly glow over here. Okay, I have one last example to show you. In this example, I selected the jacket so that we could change its color. So let's start by looking at the HSL adjustment. You can see in this case, this actually looks pretty good. But there's one problem, and you can see that as you zoom in. We have a bit of fringing on the edges right here. So the original blue color of the jacket is still showing through. Let's see what happens when we apply the recolor adjustment. Now you can see that fringing has mostly disappeared and this looks pretty good. However, we did lose some of the natural color variation on this jacket. The original jacket has different shades of blue throughout it and you can see that especially on her back right here. The color is a bit more faded. But with the recolor adjustment, it flattens that area. In this case, this is actually a pretty unique example. Neither adjustment is ideal on its own, so we can combine both of them for an all new method. So what I like to do is apply an HSL adjustment to the whole jacket to change its color. Then I like to apply a recolor adjustment on top of that to help with the fringing issue. I'm not going to adjust the color quite yet. I'll just close out of this and then invert this layer with Command or Control I. Then using the paint brush, I'll paint to reveal this. I'll increase the flow, and then we can go ahead and paint in white paint over the edges of the jacket to fix the fringing issue. I'm just going to paint a little bit to save time. There we go. And then I'll show you how I like to adjust this. So I'll just click on the recolor adjustment to open it up, and then we can go ahead and change this to make it match the jacket better. So first, I'll just desaturate it, and maybe I'll shift the hue just a little bit. Okay. Here we go. Now you can go ahead and see the before and after of that area. It's really helped to clean that up and you can continue painting and white paint all around the jacket to eliminate that blue fringing. That's how I would combine the HSL adjustment and the recolor adjustment if I'm having fringing issues. Now you know all about the recolor adjustment. For such a simple adjustment, I had a lot to show you in this video. Now in the next video, we'll do a quick summary of what we learned. 33. Does Ally Use Recolor? : So do I use the recolor adjustment? In general, I think the HSL adjustment looks better in the Rose example. The natural color variation looked a lot better than the flat colors of the recolor adjustment. But in the last video, we saw that HSL has limitations, and the recolor adjustment is a great backup for those situations. So personally, here's what I do. First, I start with the HSL adjustment. It usually works best. But if you see that the picture needs color added or is splotchy, like the splotchy dress, use the recolor adjustment. And if you have fringing, use them together. The recolor adjustment is a great adjustment to have in your toolkit. 34. Black & White : In this video, we'll learn about the black and white adjustment. To start, let's apply the black and white adjustment to this photo. This adjustment is pretty easy to use. It automatically makes your photo black and white, and by using these sliders, we can adjust how bright or dark the different colors will look in the photo. Now, not every photo has every color. So as you shift these sliders, you might not see a change, but I think it's good to go through all of them just to see how it affects the photo. Now, this is all really easy and nice to use, but there's actually a hidden problem with the black and white adjustment. Before we can fully understand this problem, we need to learn a little bit of color theory, and it's actually really interesting to help us learn. I have this color card pulled up here. And I'm also going to make one change over here to the color panel. I'm going to change this from the wheel to sliders, and then from grayscale to HSL. These HSL sliders allow us to see the hue, saturation, and luminosity percentages for all of the different colors in this photo. To start, I'm just going to have the move tool selected and I'll select the black rectangle. You can see that the HSL values are all 0% for black. On the right, we have white, and as I click here, you can see the H and the S are zero, but the L is 100. For all of the colors in between, they all have the same saturation and luminosity values. Saturation is 100 and luminosity is 50, but they all have different hues. So as I click through these, you can see that hue number change. But the saturation and luminosity stays the same. Okay, so now we've gotten to know our document. Let's go ahead and apply a black and white adjustment on top of everything. Okay, so that's interesting. Did that surprise you? I know the first time I saw this, I was pretty surprised. So what's going on here? Why did affinity turn all of these colors white? Well, remember what I showed you earlier? All of these colors have the exact same saturation and luminosity. As far as affinity is concerned, it doesn't matter that their hues are different, since the black and white adjustment just removes the hue. But with one of these rectangles selected, you can see as soon as I change the saturation or the luminosity slider, the colors start to look different. Okay, so it's starting to make sense. But when I turn off the black and white adjustment, look at these colors. Doesn't this dark blue look so much darker than this green or this yellow? Why are they all the exact same brightness level? Well, the answer to this question is actually pretty simple. We have weak human eyes. Scientifically, these colors all have the exact same level of brightness. But as far as our eyes are concerned, the blue will appear darker. That's because the human eye is actually really sensitive to greens but not as sensitive to blues. Even though these are technically the same, they look a lot different. As another example, we can come back to our portrait photo. I'm going to delete this black and white adjustment and I'll apply a brand new one. Right off the bat, you can see her skin looks way too bright with this default setting. That's why earlier I lowered this down quite a bit to make it look more natural. Technically, affinity isn't doing anything wrong with its default settings, but it sure looks wrong. That's the problem we need to address. The question is, what can we do about it? Lucky for us, there were some really smart people that ran into this same problem and they already found the solution. During the 1950s, the world was beginning to switch from black and white TV to color TV. Obviously, color TVs are great. But during this transition, there was a hurdle to overcome. How could TV stations play a show in color, but also play that same show on a black and white TV without distorting the colors brightnesses. As we've seen, turning colors into black and white is not as straightforward as it might seem. Well, to solve this problem, they came up with a formula to calculate the perceived brightness of color based on RGB values. The formula is this. Perceived brightness equals 30% red plus 59% green plus 11% blue. These percentages take into account that we see green as a very bright color, red as a fairly bright color and blue as a dark color. Using this color code, they could easily convert their shows into black and white so that the shows could be broadcasted on all types of TVs. So now that we know this magic formula, how can we use our new knowledge and affinity? Well, first, let's apply a brand new black and white adjustment. We know the default values that we have here aren't right, so we can use the magic formula to fix it. I'll put it up on the screen so that we can reference it. So first, red should be 30%, so I'll type that in and then press Enter. Next, we have yellow, which isn't in the formula. But as far as computers are concerned, yellow is just red and green put together. So if we add 30% red to 59% green, we get 89% for yellow. Next, we have green. So I'll just type in 59. Then for Cyan, this is just green and blue added together. So we can take 59% green and add that to 11% blue, and we get 70 for cyan. For blue, I'll just type in 11. And last, magenta is just red and blue. So I'll add 30% red to 11% blue, to get 41% for magenta. All right, take a look at this now. Now the colors look the way that they should for a black and white photo. Of course, this formula will look perfect on regular photos too. I'll copy this with Command or Control C, and then I'll paste it onto our other photo Command or Control V. As you can see, this does a perfect job. Now, as great as this formula is, you're probably not going to remember all of the different numbers that we use. So to keep life simple, we can turn this adjustment into a preset. Just open up the adjustment layers dialog box and then click Add preset. Then you can go ahead and call this whatever you want. I'll call mine accurate black and white, and I'll press Okay. To access this preset, you can just go to this adjustment panel, then go to black and white, and as you can see, you can now access the accurate black and white preset whenever you want. Just to make things simpler for you, I also added this to the color card exercise file. If you go to the layers, we have the accurate formula right here. So you could just open this up. All the percentages are correct, and you can add this as a preset to save you a little bit of time. And I just wanted to tell you that for artistic reasons, if you ever have a photo and you want to make parts of it lighter or darker using the sliders, that's totally fine to do. Maybe you want the red to look even deeper for a moodier look. You can go ahead and use the preset as a starting point and then adjust from there. Alright, now you know all about the black and white adjustment. So I'll answer the question in the next video. Do I ever use the Black and White adjustment? 35. Does Ally Use Black & White? : So, do I ever use the black and white adjustment? Well, it depends. If I just want to remove the color from a photo, I actually just use HSL. Since I haven't memorized, I'll just press the shortcut Command or Control U to add an HSL adjustment, and then I'll lower the saturation all the way. It's super fast, and honestly, it's almost as accurate as our preset. But if I want to craft a beautiful black and white photo, then I'll use the black and white preset and then I'll adjust the colors from there if I want things to be a little bit more artistic or less realistic. The answer is, sometimes I do use the black and white adjustment. 36. White Balance : Let's learn about the white balance adjustment. To start, we can go ahead and apply the adjustment. The white balance adjustment is used to adjust the temperature and the tint of your photos. Most of the time, you'll just need to make your photo a little bit warmer or cooler by moving this first slider around. But sometimes if you've used artificial lighting to take your photo, you might need to adjust the tint as well. So that's why this slider is here. And you might be wondering how to find the right balance. And the answer is just move the slider around and see what looks right. For this particular photo, as I warm it up, it doesn't look right. But as I cool it down, you can see the white walls in this image look more correct. So I'm going to bring it down for this photo. And now you can go ahead and see the before and after of the white balance adjustment. In the next video, we'll talk about how useful this adjustment is. 37. Does Ally Use White Balance? : So do I use the white balance adjustment? To answer this question. Yes, all the time. This adjustment is so simple to use, and the white balance is a very common thing to correct in photos. I find myself using this, especially after adding lots of different brightening and saturation adjustments because after using a lot of adjustments, the white balance can get thrown off. In the first chapter, we did this practice project together, and after looking back at it, I can see that this photo could look better with the white balance adjustment. We really warm things up with all of our editing, and now when we cool things back down with adding a little bit of blue, this picture looks a lot better. The white balance adjustment is a very useful adjustment. 38. Lens Filter : In this video, we'll learn all about the lens filter adjustment. To start, we can go ahead and apply the lens filter. This filter lets you add a subtle wash of color over your image. You can increase or decrease the optical density to make this effect more or less intense and you can change the color of the tint by clicking right here. For this picture, we can go ahead and change it to see what it looks like. Maybe we'll make a nice light red color. And we can increase the optical density. And now you can see what this looks like. Here's the before and after. That's it. That's how you use the lens filter adjustment. Let's talk more about it in the next video. 39. Does Ally Use Lens Filter? : So do I use the lens filter adjustment? To be honest, no, I don't. Because yellow and blue are by far the most common lens filters to add to a picture, I'd rather just use the white balance adjustment. Instead of applying one color at a time, by using white balance, you can quickly move between those colors to see what it looks like. Sometimes it's hard to tell which one your photo needs. And if I want to color grade a photo with more creative colors, I like to use color balance. Color balance strikes a really good balance between simplicity and control. Simplicity, with all of the color sliders clearly visible, making it easy to try different colors out and control with choosing what colors to apply to the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Well, I don't use the lens filter adjustment anymore. I used to use it as a beginner. Now I just prefer other options. Feel free to play around with it to see if it would be useful to you. But for me, I don't use this adjustment. 40. Split Toning : Let's learn about the split toning adjustment. To get started, I'll apply the split toning adjustment. This adjustment is very similar to the lens filter adjustment, but it has the added ability to add colors to the highlights and to the shadows separately. I think contrasting colors look pretty good. So I'm going to change the color to orange and the highlights and then I'll raise the saturation to make it more apparent. I might have to raise this quite a bit to be able to see this. Then in the shadows, I'm going to make this a blue color, and I'll raise the shadow saturation. Now, I found that the shadow saturation slider is a lot more sensitive than the highlights one, so I definitely should not raise it as high as I did that one. I'll just raise it a little bit. And last, we have a slider called balance. This can be a useful slider. If you increase it or move it to the right, it will make more of the photo considered a shadow. So in this case, more of the photo will turn blue, or if you decrease it or move it over to the left, it will make more of the photo considered a highlight. So in this case, more of the photo will appear orange. And that split toning, here's the before and after for this image. Now that you know all about split toning, we'll talk more about it in the next video. 41. Does Ally Use Split Toning? : So do I use the split toning adjustment? No, I really don't use it. I like color balance much better. I find it easier to use, and I like that you can add colors to the shadows, mid tones and highlights instead of just the shadows and highlights like the split toning adjustment. So because color balance is a more powerful adjustment, it's the one I choose to use. And now we're done with the color chapter. Great job. I know that was a lot to get through. We just have one chapter left, and this last chapter is pretty interesting. We're going to cover all of the rest of the adjustments, and some of these are for pretty specific situations, but you might find one that's useful to you. I'll show you how to use each one. 42. LUT : This chapter, we'll learn about a few miscellaneous adjustments that are included in affinity photo, starting with the t adjustment. Lut stands for Look Up table, and it essentially is a preset for editing the color and light in your image. Lutz are used in all sorts of programs even beyond the Affinity Suite, and because of that, there are a ton of louts that you can find online. Some of them cost money, but there are also lots of free louts online. In this video, I'm going to show you how to make your own ts and how to get free luts from online. Let's go ahead and start with this photo. When making a lot, affinity will take into account what changes you've made to the color and the lighting in a photo. So to make a lot, we first need to change the color and lighting in this photo. So to start, I want to make the shadows blue, and maybe we'll warm up the highlights and brighten the image. So to achieve that, first, we're going to add a color balance adjustment. I'm going to go to the shadows so that we can make the shadows blue. I'll raise the blue. It's also nice to add a little bit of cyan. All right, very blue. Let's also go to the highlights, and we can warm these up by adding yellow and adding a little bit of red. While we're in here, we can also go to our mid tones, and I usually like to apply the same effects that I did to the highlights, warming up the mid tones. I'll just add some yellow. And maybe for this one, I'll add a little bit of magenta. We have some nice color grading. Next, we can go ahead and brighten up the image with a curves adjustment. To brighten up the image, first, I'm going to raise the black point, so the shadows aren't quite so dark. I'll bring this line back down to meet the line a little bit there, and then I'll raise the highlights. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now I'll just select both of these layers so that we can see the before and after of our changes. Okay, so with those changes made, now we can export these changes as a ut. To do that, go to the top of the screen to file, then down to where it says, Export ut. You can call this whatever you want, and then you can click Export, choose where you want to save it, and then press Save. Now we can go ahead and see if that ut worked. So I'll just select both of these and delete them. And now we can finally apply the ut adjustment. With this adjustment, we can load the lot that we just made by clicking here. I'll just select that and press open. You can see that that worked. Here's the before and after. Very nice. Let's see how this lot that we created looks on other photos. I'll go to this one and then I'll apply the ut adjustment. I'll load the ut that we made. And there we go. Now it's been applied. Here's the before and after of that one. I think this looks pretty good, but I want to see it on one more photo. To speed things up, we can just copy and paste this adjustment with our lot already loaded into it. I'll press Command or Control C to copy this. Then I'll go to our last exercise file and I'll paste it in Command or Control V. Okay, so with this loaded in, I don't think this one looks very good for this photo. It's turning her hair blue, and I just don't really like how it looks. Not every lot will look good on every photo. Usually, certain lots look good on certain types of photos. Some lots might be designed to look good when applied to very dark photos. While other lots might be designed for bright photos. Okay, now that you know how to make your own Lutz, I want to show you how you can find free Luts online. This is a great website for free Lutz. It's called freshlts.com. You can go ahead and browse different Luts. I'll click up here on Popular Luts for this video. And then I'll show you it's very easy. Just go to one that you think looks good for your picture, and then you can go ahead and download it. I think this lot should look better on this photo. I'm going to delete this one. I'll apply a new adjustment, and then I'll load the new one. That looks so much better for this picture. Here's the before and after. Now, to save you time, you can turn any lot into a preset. That way you don't need to keep the file on your computer and you can access it very easily at any time. Now that you know all about the lot adjustment in the next video, we'll talk about how useful it is. 43. Does Ally Use LUT? : So, do I use the ut adjustment? No, I don't use adjustment. I find the effectiveness to be extremely hit or miss with Lutz, depending on the photo that they're applied to, and I think I can edit a photo much better than a ut can. Also, Luts are way more limited than a similar feature that affinity has called macros. For any automated work like this that I want to do, I'd rather use macros. We're not going to cover macros in this course, since they're not an adjustment. They're actually a special feature of affinity that lets you apply multiple adjustments and effects to your photo with the click of a button. After you click that button, you can still access all of the different layers, so you can make any fine tuning adjustments that you want. You can't do that with a lot that's only applied as a single layer. If you want to learn more about macros, I actually made an entire course about them, and I'll leave that linked below this video. 44. Soft Proof : This video, we'll learn about the soft proof adjustment layer. The soft proof adjustment allows us to see a preview of what our photo will look like after it's been printed. To see this, we can go ahead and apply the soft proof adjustment. As you can see, once our photo is printed, it looks a lot brighter and less saturated. We'll get back to the settings in a moment. But for now, this is how I would use the soft proof adjustment. Since this is what our photo will look like after it's been printed, I'm going to apply layers underneath this adjustment to counteract its defects. To start, I'm going to press Command or Control M to apply a curves adjustment layer. One of the main things I can see here is that the white areas of our photo are way too bright. So I'm going to take the white point node right here and I'll just lower this down that way you can get more detail in the highlights again. I'm just going to bring this back up to match the line. That looks pretty good. And now you can see the before and after. This already looks a lot better. Now that we're done with that, we can go ahead and adjust the colors. I'll press Command or Control you. And in the master color channel, I'm just going to raise the saturation to bring the color back into this photo. I'll just select both of these so that we can see the before and after. I think this is a big improvement. I do think our photo still looks a bit bright, so I'll click on this curves adjustment and maybe I'll darken the shadows. There we go. That looks better to me. With all of that taken care of, now our printed photo will look a lot better. So if we're ready to export this for printing, first, we actually need to turn off this soft proof adjustment. This is just a preview of what your photo will look like after it's done printing, so you can see the final product. But we need to make sure to turn this off. That way, the photo is now prepared for printing. If we were to keep this on and then send it to the printers, our photo would become bright again. So it's important to turn that off. So that's how the soft proof adjustment works. But before we finish this video, I need to give you a very important disclaimer. I mentioned at the beginning of this video that the soft proof adjustment gives a preview of how your photo will look when it's printed. And while that's true, it's not the whole story. The truth is the soft proof adjustment is actually designed to give you a preview of how your photo will look if it's commercially printed. But what does that mean? Well, it means if you're printing your photo at a place where people normally print photos, like Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Walgreens, Shutterfly, or even a home printer, then you do not need to worry about the soft proof adjustment layer. Instead, this adjustment is useful for people that are printing thousands of brochures or magazines and are working with a large scale printing company. But why is that? Well, most places that print photos for regular people will assume that you're submitting a photo that has an SRGB color profile. This is by far the most common color profile. So most printing places will tune their printers to make sure that SRGB photos print as well as possible. If you want to make sure the photo that you're using is SRGB, you can go up to the top of your screen to document and then down to convert format slash ICC Profile. Your photo will probably already be in SRGB, just like this. But if it's not, you can change it from here by scrolling through this list to find the SRGB format. You can select it and then press Convert. You can also see your photos color profile from the Context toolbar if you have the view tool out, so you can see right up here, it says SRGB Okay, so with that taken care of, I also want to mention that if you are going to print thousands of brochures or magazines, then the soft proof adjustment might be really useful to you. I'll open this up. Because I want to show you that this list has all of the common printing configurations that commercial print shops use. By default, this US web coded option will be selected because it's the most common option for commercial print shops in America, but it's a good idea to ask the company what profile you should use because they might want you to use something different. In summary, use SRGB so that you don't have to worry about any of this. Or if you are printing thousands of items with a commercial printing company, ask them which printing profile you should use. 45. Does Ally Use Soft Proof? : So, do I use the soft proof adjustment? To be honest, no, I just use the SRGB color profile. I've actually never printed anything commercially on a mass scale. So the default color profile is fine for me. But if you are printing with a fancy print company to print thousands of brochures, then the soft proof adjustment would be helpful for you. 46. Threshold : Let's learn about the threshold adjustment. To begin, we can go ahead and apply this adjustment. So the threshold adjustment turns your photo into two colors, black and white, with all of the bright things in your photo becoming white, and all of the dark things in your photo becoming black. You can move this threshold slider to alter how much of your photo is considered a shadow and how much is considered a highlight. So this looks really interesting, but you might be wondering why you would use this adjustment. Well, there's two reasons. You could be using it for artistic purposes, which we'll explore in a minute. Or you could use it for research purposes to find the brightest and darkest parts of your photo. So first, let's take a look at research purposes. If I bring this threshold up quite a ways, maybe let's bring it up to 90%. This will make most of the photo black, which allows us to see where the brightest highlights are appearing in our photo. You can see these areas are super bright. And you could also lower this down and whatever's leftover in black are the darkest parts of our photo. You might be wondering why this would be important and it's usually not, but it can be useful information if you're editing your black and your white point and you want to know which areas you'll mostly be affecting. Now that you've seen that, let's go to our other exercise file so we can take a look at using the threshold adjustment for artistic effect. I'll apply the threshold adjustment to this photo. And this time, rather than moving the threshold around, we could use targeted adjustments to create a cool effect. So I'm going to close out of this and I'll select this background layer, and then I'll apply a curve underneath that. And now we can go ahead and adjust this, and this will change how our threshold adjustment looks. To start, I'm going to make this curve very dark. Now that it's darker, we can decide which areas we like better. So here's the before and the after. Personally, I like how the lace on the bottom of her shirt looks now that we've darkened the photo. I also like that we can see a better outline of her face, particularly her nose and her chin. So knowing that, we can close out of this and then invert this curves adjustment with command or control I. Then we can take the paintbrush tool. And we can paint with full flow and 100% hardness to bring those areas back into our photo. Just make sure you're painting in white paint since this is a black mask, and now we'll be able to reveal that pretty lace on the bottom of her shirt. The reason I turned up the flow and the hardness is because I wanted to fully be applied. It just makes it a little bit easier in this case. Okay. Now that I've painted those areas, we can go ahead and do the opposite. I'll press Command or Control. And this time, I'm going to make this very bright. Closing out of this, now we can take a look at the before and after to decide if there's any areas we like better, and this is a little bit harder to see, but I like how this wall looks better before there were speckles of black, but now it looks cleaned up. So I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I. Then I'll paint in white paint over this area to remove those speckles. And now you can go ahead and see the before and after of our cleaned up threshold adjustment effect. To finish this artistic effect, we can also apply a gradient map to change the colors in this adjustment. I'm going to apply this above the threshold adjustment so that the colors appear. If we applied it underneath the threshold adjustment, everything would just stay black and white since that's what the threshold adjustment does. So with the threshold selected, I'll apply a gradient map. And now we can choose any colors we want for this photo. All right. And there we have it. The threshold effect is finished. That's how this adjustment works. In the next video, we're going to talk about how common it is to use this adjustment. 47. Does Ally Use Threshold? : So do I use the threshold adjustment? Usually, I don't. This isn't really an adjustment you would use on every photo. But every once in a while there is a really specific use case for when I would want to use it. Like making an artistic effect as seen in the last video. I do think this effect is pretty fun, so feel free to play around with it. It can be fun to see your photos take on a whole new look. 48. Posterize : This video, we'll look at the posterize adjustment. To start, let's apply the adjustment. So this adjustment has a fun effect where it reduces the number of colors that are present in your photo. And this might be a little confusing, but we have a slider down here, and the number does not represent the amount of colors. We currently have more than four colors here. This is more of a strength slider, which can be a little confusing. But basically, as you raise this, more colors will appear in your image, and as you lower it, less colors will appear. So you might be wondering why you would want to use this adjustment, and I would say this is purely for artistic effect. So to play up the artistic effect, let's add a few other layers to really make this look interesting. To start, I'm going to apply a gradient map so that we can play with the colors that we see here. I'll just delete this middle color stop, and I'll reverse the colors, and we can go ahead and make these colors whatever we want. I'll just go with the classic dark blue shadows, and we'll do a nice yellow color for the highlights. And then to add one more color, I'll double click on the line, and I'll go ahead and make this a nice orange color. The gradient map made this look really cool. Here's the before and after. Another way we can adjust this is using the curves adjustment to affect the dark and light parts of this image. One thing I'm noticing is that we have this area down here that's a sort of strange brown color. So I would like this to be the same blue that our shadows have. To do that, I'll use curves to darken our image. I'll select this bottom layer and apply a curves on top of that. And then I'll just lower this down until that turns blue. I'll close out of this and we can go ahead and invert this with Command or Control I so that we can paint this just over that area using white paint. I'll paint over that. Just for fun, I'm also going to paint this over his shirt to give it a little bit more depth. I also like that it's making his shirt have more detail. I think that looks pretty nice. If we want to, we can always click on the curves layer icon to adjust this even more. I think I like how that looks. Another thing we can do with this effect is we can add a blur to make the effect less grainy. I'm just going to zoom in here so you can see that. We have a lot of little spots all over his shirt, which is fine, but if you wanted those to be smoother, you could go to the filters and then apply a Gaussian blur. Then you can bring up the radius to blur this as much as you want to make the colors look smoother. Also, make sure to check on preserve Alpha so that your edges don't become transparent. All right, with his shirt looking good. I'd like that to be over his shirt, but not over his face. I don't really like how that looks. So I'll press Command or Control I. And now using white paint, I'll just paint this over his shirt. So we've been able to keep the detail on his face, but his shirt looks a lot smoother. I think this looks really good. Now, if you want his face to become smoother as well, you can apply a separate Gaussian blur adjustment and then just make it a little bit lower of a strength for the blur. Because we raised it so much for the face and we didn't like how that looked. I think this time, I'll just raise it just a little bit. Remember to check on preserve Alpha. I'll close this and invert this layer with Command or Control I. Now I can paint this over the face. Now, after doing that painting, I don't want to lose all of the detail of his eyes, so I think I'm going to switch my paint to black so that I can undo the painting over his eyes and eyebrows. Maybe I'll also undo it over his mustache and his lips. Did he have a beard? Oh, yes, he had a beard. So I think I'll paint this over his hair as well, so we don't lose those details. He has hair on his head, so I'll just paint to bring that back. There we go. All right. With all of that finished, we can go ahead and take a look at how this adjustment looks. So here's the before and the after. Now you know how to use the posturize adjustment, and you can combine it with other adjustments to customize it however you want. In the next video, we'll talk a little more about when you would want to use this. 49. Does Ally Use Posterize? : So do I ever use the posterize adjustment? As you've seen, posterize is used for artistic effect and the effect looks very similar to what we achieved with the threshold adjustment. Whether you use posterize or threshold is really just a matter of preference. To compare these two adjustments, here's a couple of examples. I made this first picture for a YouTube tutorial a few years ago, and for this one, I use the threshold adjustment. Another example is the Hope poster that was used in Barack Obama's political campaigning. This one used the Posterize effect, which you can see because it has more color. Personally, I find the threshold version of the effect to be easier to create and I like the striking appearance of only using two colors. That being said, posterize is a great option if you want to include more than two colors in your design. I don't use these adjustments all the time, but both of these adjustments are good to have on hand. 50. Invert : Let's learn about the invert adjustment. To begin, we can go ahead and apply this adjustment. This is a very unique adjustment. It doesn't have a dialogue box. All it does is it turns every color into its opposite color. You can see that the red sign that she's leaning against has now turned cyan. We can also see the yellow part underneath the sign right here has turned blue. And her black hair has now turned white. This is even easier to see if we come to our next photo. If I apply invert to this one, you can see this black and white picture has become fully reversed. Why would you want to use this adjustment? Well, in all honesty, before making this course, I'd never used this adjustment before. Why? Because a short cook key already inverts layers. I'll just turn this off and you can see if I have the photoayer selected, I can press Command or Control I, and it achieves the exact same thing. Command or Control I works on photoayers, masks, and adjustments. So again, why would we use this adjustment? Well, we're really getting into the weeds here, but here is the only use case that I could figure out for this adjustment. It's a little tricky, but stick with me. For this example, we have this photo and I want to apply a texture on top of it. To do that, I'm going to go to the top of the screen to file and then down to place. Then we can select the texture for this video. I'll open it up. And then I'll click and drag to apply this texture to our document. Now let's say, I want all of these dark spots to become light spots on the bike photo. A good way to blend layers together is to use blend modes. So let's start with that. If you use the blend mode multiply, you can see the photo again, but the spots are black. I want them to be white. So let's try another one. If you use the blend mode screen, this lightens everything up, but the dark spots are still dark. So it looks like instead of using blend modes, I need to invert the layer to make the dark spots light. I'll press Command or Control I to do this. Up here, you can see that this layer has become rasterized. But what if I don't want the layer to be rasterized? I'll explain more about what rasterizing means later on. But for now, let's just say we didn't want this to happen. I need to undo this with Command or Control Z. Instead of directly inverting our layer, we can use the invert adjustment. I'll turn that on and I'll make it a child layer to our texture. Now that that's inverted, I can go ahead and select the main texture layer and we can use blend modes again. Multiply still doesn't work, but if we go to screen, you can see finally this works. The white spots are still there and we can see the rest of the photo perfectly. Let's quickly talk about rasterizing because I think that was the most confusing part of this. If you're wondering why you wouldn't want to rasterize a layer, well, we're really getting into the weeds with this one, stick with me again. Whenever you use File Place, this allows you to easily change out the photo with a different one. So with this layer selected, you can go to the Context toolbar and click where it says replace Image. Then you can select any other picture, and it's automatically switched with the original one. And once you replace the image, it even keeps all of the blend modes and adjustments that you had originally applied to the photo. I'll undo that with Command or Control Z because I don't think this texture works for this photo. There we go back to normal. That's why we wouldn't want this rasterized if I go back in time by pressing Command or Control Z a few times. You can see if I inverted this with Command or Control I. Then set this to screen. Well, this looks just fine, but now we no longer have the option to replace the image. I know that was a lot to take in, but now you know how to use the invert adjustment. And in the next video, we'll talk about if I ever use this. 51. Does Ally Use Invert? : So do I ever use the invert adjustment? I mentioned before that I had never used this adjustment before this course, and after finally figuring out a way to use this adjustment, I can honestly say that no, I've never used it and I don't think I ever will again. Whenever I need to invert something, I prefer to just press Command or Control I. It works for photos, masks, and adjustments. I use it all the time, and this invert adjustment is just more annoying than that. I would highly recommend that you just learn the invert shortcut. 52. Normals : This video, we'll learn how to use the normals adjustment. The normals adjustment is a very unique adjustment because I don't think you would use it unless you have a very specific use case, and that's three D animation or three D modeling. So this adjustment is used to edit something called a normal map, which is what you see right here. Basically, these maps store different height values that you can apply to a three D object. This is like adding a texture to an object with different raised areas and depressed areas. If that all sounds a little over your head, don't worry, it's over my head too. I'm not a three D animator, so I've never worked with normal maps before, but I wanted to at least give a simple demonstration of this adjustment in case you do want to work with normal maps. So let's go ahead and apply the normals adjustment. So basically this image is using different colors to store height values for your three D object. So by changing the scale, you can adjust how deep these grooves are or how shallow they are. And you can also use this rotation slider to move this around. I know this is all pretty confusing, but if you're a three D animator, then this is the adjustment for you. 53. Does Ally Use Normals? : So do I ever use the normals adjustment? Like I said, this adjustment goes over my head. I wish I was cool enough to have a need for this adjustment. Only three D animators would use this adjustment, and I'm not one, but if you are, maybe you'd like to use this adjustment. 54. OCIO : This video, we'll learn about the OCIO adjustment. So this is a special adjustment that allows you to work with OCIO configurations. OCIO stands for open Color IO, and it's used in professional video production. This allows people working in different pieces of software and on different computers to all view the exact same colors as each other. Similar to the normals adjustment, this is an adjustment I'm also not very familiar with. So I'm just going to give you a simple demonstration of the adjustment to at least give you an idea of how it works. So the first thing you need to do is load an OCO configuration file. To load this up, we first need to go to the assistant at the top of the screen. Then we need to go to the color section. And finally, we can go right here where it says, open Color Io configuration file, press Select. Then go ahead and open this up. All right, so now that's all setup. We can close out of this. And we can go ahead and restart affinity Okay, so I just restarted affinity and reopened our photo. Now we can go ahead and apply the OCIO adjustment. From here, you can go ahead and choose your source color space and you can go ahead and choose your destination color space. After you choose both of those, your photo will be previewed with whatever color spaces you have set. That's how you use the OCIO adjustment. In the next video, we'll talk a little more about it. 55. Does Ally Use OCIO? : So do I use the OCIO adjustment? Like the normals adjustment, I don't use the OCIO adjustment. Again, I wish I was cool enough to have a need for this. Professional video production sounds really interesting. So if you do that, then this is a great adjustment for you. 56. Ally's Favorite Adjustments : To wrap things up in this video, I'll remind you of the best adjustment that I use all the time. To break this down, I have a few categories, and I'm going to award different adjustments for each category. So let's see who's going to come out on top with awards. Okay, the first reward is for the best lighting adjustment. We have all of our lovely contestants here, but you can probably guess the winner Curves. Congratulations to curves. It truly is the best lighting adjustment from simply brightening things up, adding contrast, or creating moody lighting. The curves adjustment is always the best. It's easy to use and works great. Now, for each one of these categories, I'm also going to do an honorable mention. And for this one, we actually have a very shocking first round with honorable mention going to curves. Unfortunately, for the other nominees, I just never use any of them. So I once again need to award curves. It's truly a standout. All right, the next category is for the Best color adjustment. There were quite a few nominees, and this round is a little harder, but there is still a clear winner, and that's HSL. Congrats to HSL. This little adjustment really pulls its weight from boosting existing colors to changing colors. This little powerhouse adjustment is easy to use and gets the job done. For honorable mention, I need to award two different adjustments. First, congratulations to the recolor adjustment. This adjustment does amazing work on its own to create new colors, even on white clothing. And when it works together with the HSL adjustment, it really pulls its weight. And for the other honorable mention, I need to award the selective color adjustment. I may not use this adjustment all the time, but it really does a great job with adjusting skin tones, and that needs to be praised. The next category is a fun one. Best color grading adjustment. As a reminder, color grading is when you add new colors into your photo, usually in a subtle way to change the mood. Now, you can use a few different adjustments for this, but the winner of the color grading category is color balance. With the power to change colors in the shadows, midtones, and highlights, this subtle adjustment seems to always have absolutely beautiful results. Congrats to color balance. For honorable mention, I need to award the white balance adjustment. While this adjustment is meant to make the white parts of a photo look more true to color, I find myself using this adjustment for artistic purposes, warming up or cooling down photos to give them the right look. And this adjustment is just too perfect at that. And now we've made it to our final category of the video. Best special Effect adjustment. I know this is a broad category, but the winner of this one is black and white. Black and White photos are a classic, and the black and white adjustment is just so great. Adjusting the color sliders can really change the look of your photo, and it's so easy to use. And if you made the Black and White preset, your photos will always have a perfect starting point. Okay. And for honorable mention, again, I have two adjustments I need to award, and they're basically friends. The honorable mention goes to threshold and posterize both of these adjustments are really fun for creating a special effect photo, and they're both very easy to use. I think they both deserve a mention here. And with that, now we have all of our top adjustments awarded. I hope this helps you as you look at that long list of adjustments. Not all adjustments are useful for every photo. So if you want to simplify things, you can just master these adjustments, and you will be set for all of your photo edits. 57. Class Conclusion : Congratulations. You finished the course. I know that was a lot to learn, but now you're an adjustment layer master. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.