Master Photo Restoration in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Come to your photo Restoration master class. In this course, you'll learn everything you need. To bring old photos back to life so that they can be treasured for years to come. Even if your pictures have become damaged, we can use affinity photo to restore them to their former beauty. We'll start off by fixing the lighting of images that have become dull and faded. After that, we'll learn how to fix discoloration, which is actually a lot easier than you might think. We'll also learn plenty of techniques for fixing images that have become scratched and worn down over time. Even if a photo has been completely torn in half, we can still fix it in affinity. No matter what condition your photo is in, you'll have all the skills you need to restore it. But we can do more than fix scratches and lighting issues. We can also add color to old photos, which I think is so much fun. Even if you're starting with a totally black and white image, we can bring new life to it by adding color. Even if you don't know the exact colors of the original photo, I'll show you how to use reference images to add the most realistic colors possible. And finally, we'll finish the course by learning how to fix old color photos which have become faded and discolored over time. This section builds on all of the skills we learned earlier in the course, but adds new tools that are specific for working on color photos. Whether you want to restore old black and white images or color ones, you'll have all the skills you need to bring your photos back to life. I'm super excited to share these tutorials with you. It's going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 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. Preparing Your Photos: In this chapter, we'll learn how to prepare and crop your images. This is the very first step that you'll need to work with old photos. Let's get started. Now, as we go through this course, we'll work with images that have already been scanned onto a computer. This is very convenient for the course, but when you're working with your own photos, you'll need to bring your photos onto your computer. Here are two ways to do that. First, you could scan your photo. Most of the exercise files for this course were scanned onto a computer. This helps us to capture all of the detail that's in the photo and it makes the photo nice and straight. If you're not sure how to scan photographs, you can either buy a scanner or you can use a photo scanning service. There are many online scanning services that you can ship your photos to or you can find a local business that can do it. The other way to bring your photos onto your computer is to take a picture of the photo. This is a less accurate way to bring photos onto your computer. You might lose some detail and your photo will probably be distorted because of the angle of the camera, but it's still an option, and I'll show you how to work with photos like that too. Once you have a digital copy of your photo on your computer, then we can begin our work in affinity. Let's learn how to crop your photos in the next video. 4. Cropping: In this video, we'll learn the basics of the crop tool. We'll use this adorable photo for this video. As I was making this course, I asked our previous students to send in some old photos. So thank you to everyone who sent a picture in. This is a photo of Hans Peter taking with some of his childhood friends in the 1950s. So cute. Okay, so when scanning images, it's pretty common to have some white space surrounding your image that you need to crop out. I've also noticed that a lot of old images will have borders on them. You can choose if you want to keep that or remove it. Either way is fine. To use the crop tool, you can select the tool right here or you can press C on your keyboard to bring it up. Once you have the tool open, you can use the square handles on the edges here, just click and drag on them to bring them in. Right now, we're cropping in unconstrained mode, which means you can make this crop any size or shape that you want. However, you might want to adjust the photo to be specific dimensions. For example, maybe you want to print this photo and put it in a frame. If your frame is a standard eight inch by ten inch, then you can change the mode up here to custom ratio. Then in these boxes, you can type in eight, then press Enter. And in this one, you can type in ten and press Enter. And now, no matter how you change the size, it will always be eight by ten, so it will perfectly fit in that frame. Once you like how your crop box looks, you can go up here and press Apply to complete your cropping. One bonus to using the crop tool is that cropping is non destructive. Nondestructive means that you'll never destroy the original image. You can always select your crop tool, and then you can stretch this out again. I'll just change this back to unconstrained mode. Then you can press Apply to see that the original photo is still there. We didn't lose that information. I'll just select the crop tool again and crop this in getting rid of the white edges. I'll press Apply, and you can see how easy it is to crop your images. This tool is super simple to use, and it's a great place to start with your edits. In the next video, we'll learn how to straighten slanted images. 5. Straightening: Learn all about how to straighten your images. These photos are of Jack and his band in the 1960s. They were a popular local band back then, and Jack actually developed these photos in his own dark room when he was just 16-years-old. Alright, so the Crop tool actually has a hidden feature that allows you to straighten images. It's very useful, especially after scanning in your images. To start, I'll select the crop tool. Then I'm just going to focus on one picture for this video. So I'm going to click and drag inward like this so that we can just focus on this photo. I'll press Apply and now that we have this picture, we can open the crop tool again to straighten it. To use this feature, all you need to do is go right up here and click on the word straighten with straight and selected. You can go ahead and hover over your image and then click and drag a line that should be straight. When you release your mouse, you can see that the image automatically straightens to that line that you drew. I used the edge of this picture to straighten this, but you can also use this to straighten out your photo if it's crooked. So if you wanted to, you could go to part of the image that should be straight and draw a line to straighten it out according to that object. If after using the straighten tool, you're still struggling to get the image just right. You can also manually rotate it. All you need to do is hover over the edges of your photo until you see your cursor change into this double arrow. Then you can just click and drag to rotate your image. And this grid can be helpful as you straighten this out. Once your image is straight, you can go ahead and crop in your edges. So I'll just do that removing all of the white space. And I think that looks pretty good. So I'll press Apply. I can see I actually missed some edges here, so I'll bring the crop tool back out, and I'll just bring this in a little bit more. I have snapping turned on. I'm going to turn that off so that I can smoothly bring this in just the amount that I want. There we go. And then I'll press Apply. Alright. Nice work. We're moving right along. In the next video, we'll learn how to fix the perspective for warped images. 6. Fixing Perspective: This video, we'll learn how to fix the perspective on warp images. This photo was submitted by Rick taken in a peel mill in Acrington, England. Thanks for sending this in. This is the perfect example image for this video. Now, for images to become warped, usually, this means that someone took a picture of the photo instead of using a scanner. This is totally fine, but sometimes you might not be holding the camera exactly parallel to your image, and things might get a little distorted. You can see in this example that this photo was taken at an angle because the edges are slanting inward on this side and down on this side. Fixing this is actually pretty easy, but you will need to use your artistic eye to make sure things look good in the end. To start, I'm going to duplicate our image layer by pressing Command or Control J. This is just to make sure that you can go back to your original image if you accidentally warp it too much. Now to fix the perspective, I like to use the perspective tool. Just click on this little gray triangle to open up your warp tools, and then you can select the perspective tool. From here, you can see that we have these little square handles on the sides, and you can click and drag on these to straighten things out. Since this is slanting inward, I'm going to pull this out. And since this is slanting downward, I'm going to pull this up. You can see this looks like a pretty straight line now, but you may want to adjust this even more. You can look at the subjects faces and see if they look warped at all, and you can go ahead and adjust things here. Maybe you want to drag each side down a little bit. This is where the artistic eye comes in to make sure things look right. I think this looks a lot better, so I'm going to press Apply. Now to finish this off, we can use the crop tool. So I'll select the crop tool. And to start, I'm just going to make sure that this is a straight line. So I'll click on straighten, and I'll just click and drag a line right along this edge. Then I can go ahead and pull this inward to crop out that area. I'll press Apply. And now you can see this image looks a lot better. Once again, I think I left a little bit of the edge right there. That's an easy fix with the crop tool. Alright. And now that that's done, we can go ahead and see what this looked like before. And here's the after with fixing that warping. I think this looks a lot better. Now that we know all about cropping, we're done with this short chapter. In the next chapter, we're going to learn everything you need to know about cleaning up your images. 7. Clean Up Advice: This chapter we'll learn how to clean up your images. Often old images will have wear and tear, and this chapter will show you so many techniques that you can use to easily clean up any blemishes that your image may have. So let's go ahead and get started in this video where we'll go over a couple of quick tips for cleanup. First off, thank you to Doug, who submitted this photo of Mary. This photo was taken in St. Louis in the early 1940s. Doug believes that this is an engagement portrait. So after your photo is cropped, the next edit that I always do when restoring photos is cleaning up the image. Scratches, tears, and folds like these can be very distracting when working with the colors and the lighting later on. So it's best to remove them as soon as you can. For cleanup edits, it's important to always use a new flank pixel layer. That way, you're not painting directly on top of your photo layer, destroying that information by working on a separate layer, you can quickly go through and clean up any blemishes that you see. And if you accidentally mess up and paint way too much and make it look strange, you can always delete this layer and start over at any time. As another piece of advice, you should always have this cleanup layer underneath your adjustment layers. Let me show you why. As an example, let's say, I start off this edit by applying a black and white adjustment. Then I make the wrong move and add a pixel layer on top of that. Now, look what happens as I do my cleanup. Everything looks just fine right now. I'm cleaning up all of these tears and little folds here. Everything seems okay. But look what happens when I turn off the black and white adjustment layer. You see all of these spots. These are here because as I was cleaning up, the painting brush that I was using used this black and white layer as a reference. This is a big problem. If I ever want to delete this black and white adjustment or even just adjust the adjustment, these spots will cause big problems. So what I should have done was start with my pixel layer, make these little cleanup edits. And then after that, add a black and white adjustment on top. Since this adjustment is on top, we don't have those strange spots as we turn this on and off. And you can see these changes are nice and blended into the original image. So to conclude, make sure you always use a new pixel layer so that you could always turn it on and off and delete it as needed and make sure that all of your adjustments are on top of your pixel layer. That way, this pixel layer isn't being affected by these adjustments. That's just a little bit of advice for cleanup. Of course, I'll remind you to do all of these things as we go. But I thought this would be a helpful video if you run into any issues as you're cleaning up. In the next video, we're going to learn about the magical tool that I used in this video, the Inpainting Brush tool. 8. Inpainting: Let's learn all about the Inpainting brush tool. Thanks so much to Lori for sending in this photo. This photo was taken in 1942 of a soldier named Lou during World War two. We have a few tools for cleaning up, but the easiest tool, and the one you should always start with is the Inpainting brush. You can find this tool right here. And if you're not seeing it here, go ahead and click on the little gray triangle, and you should be able to find it right here. Before you begin painting, make sure that you have a new pixel layer to paint on and make sure up here in the Context tool bar, this setting is changed to current layer and below. This will make it so that your tool can sample from the main image layer since it's beneath the pixel layer. Current layer and below, current layer below. If you're ever in painting and nothing seems to be happening, it's probably because this setting is set to current layer, just make sure to change that. With that all set up, we can go ahead and begin. To use this tool, all you need to do is paint over an area. It's super simple. You can adjust the size of this brush by using the bracket keys on your keyboard. And I like to do this as I go because I like my brush to be just about the same size as the blemish I'm painting on. The painting brush works by taking information from the surrounding area and filling it in where you paint. So that's why I like the brush to be about the same size as the blemish. So only the blemish gets removed, not any other information. Sometimes you might need to paint over an area a few times in order for it to look right. Over the face, we have some tricky areas because we don't want to lose too much detail around his eyes. So I'm just using a very small brush and very slowly painting it away. If you ever paint and it doesn't look right at all, you can always undo your painting by pressing Command or Control Z on your keyboard to undo. So, as you can see, the end painting brush is super easy to use. It does a really good job taking care of blemishes. And I find it usually can take care of just about every blemish. So this is why I always start with the end painting brush. It just makes things so easy. So I'm just going to continue to paint so that I can show you how good this brush is, how big of a difference it can make when you're all done. So just going over all of these little blemishes, adjusting my brush size as I go. Now, down here, this is a much trickier area. The inpainting brush has one weakness and it's edges. Affinity doesn't know how to handle edges like this. It's not able to fill this in very well. For that, we actually need to use a different brush called the clone brush, and I'll teach you about that in the next video. But for now, we can go ahead and see the cleanup work that I did in this video. Here's the before and after of the inpainting. I mostly worked on the top, so I'll zoom in here before and after. So that's about it. It's a pretty simple tool to use, and it has pretty great results. Go ahead and try out this tool for yourself. And in the next video, we'll learn all about another great tool for cleanup the Clone brush tool. 9. Cloning: Let's learn about the clone brush tool. Thank you to Clive for sending in this picture. It's such a happy picture, and I love their sweaters. So when cleaning up a picture, if the painting brush isn't working, it's time to use a more powerful and precise option, the clone brush. I personally love to use the clone brush, but it does take a little bit of getting used to to use the tool. Let's go ahead and add a new pixel layer. And then we can find the tool right here. It looks like a stamp. With that selected, make sure the setting is changed to current layer and below in the Context tool bar. So this tool is similar to the end painting brush. But instead of affinity filling the area with surrounding information, you get to tell Affinity exactly what information you want it to fill in. So just to show you this, let's zoom in here. So before you paint, you need to sample an area by holding Alt or option on your keyboard and then clicking on an area. This area is now a reference point. So I'm just going to show you this over here. You can see where I clicked. That point is sampled. And now, wherever I paint, we can put that sampled area in so how is this useful? Well, sometimes the painting brush can't fix certain areas. If you remember in the last video, the endpainting brush really struggles with edges. So for this image, if we grab the painting brush and try to use it over his hair right here, you can see that it kind of worked, but it looks pretty smudgy right in here. I'll undo that. And this time, I'll use the clone brush. For this, I'm going to sample right here outside. Then I'm going to paint to bring that background into this area. Then for his hair, I'm going to sample a little bit of hair right here on the edge, and I can bring that up. I can do the same sampling up here and bringing this part of the hair down. So now you can see how much better that looks. We were able to directly sample the edge of his hair and fill in that area. Now, because with the clone brush, you need to adjust your sample area frequently. I personally like to keep my hand hovered over the Alt or option key so that I can sample areas as I go. So hold Alt or option and click to sample, and then paint. A lot of the time when you're using the clone brush, a good tip is to use a lower flow on your paint brush. Flow is something that you can use to control the amount of paint that you're adding to your photo. Just to show you this easier, I'll grab the paintbrush tool. Let's just lower the hardness. And lower the flow. Now that we have a lower flow, you can see as I paint, I'm gradually adding paint into the painting, and the more I go over this, the more solid the paint becomes. I'll just undo that and go back to the clone brush. Now, if I lower the flow on the clone brush, you can see as I paint, I can gradually remove these areas to help things blend in better. This can be helpful on areas like edges where you just want to gradually add in the background. I think this flow is actually still pretty high. I'll lower it to around 20%, and I'll continue here. Now, you can see we're just softly changing that edge. And I think this looks a lot better. So generally, I like to keep a low flow just so things can blend in nicely as I'm painting. While, I generally stick to keeping a low flow on my paintbrush. You might not want to have a low flow on areas with repeating patterns. You can see the sweater has repeating patterns. And if I sample one part of this pattern and try to bring it over here, you can see that you need to paint over it quite a few times in order for it to fully appear. In this case, you might want to raise the flow so that you can get a better stamping effect as you're painting this end. Another tricky place on this image is the eye. You can see this spot is covering up quite a bit of his eye. So I'm going to show you how I would fix this. First, I'm going to sample the iris of the other eye. Then with a larger brush, I'm going to hover it over this eye and just try to match it up to where his existing iris is. I'll click and drag just a little bit to fill in that iris. And then with a smaller brush, now I'm going to fill in the rest of the area. So you can see this eyelid has a little bit of a line going over it. I want to fix that. So I'm going to sample a similar color and with a lower flow, I'm just going to blend this out a little bit, just to remove that line. Down here, you can see this line should continue. So I'll sample that line and bring it up. I'll sample below the line and fill in this area. And for any areas I'm unsure about, I'm just going to look over here at this eye so you can see this inner eyelid area goes in like that, sort of a V shape. So I'm going to try to replicate that over here. I'll sample this dark color, and I'll just gradually paint it out like that. I'll do the same going downward. I think that's a bit too much darkness, so I'll grab a lighter color. Just to bring some light back into that area. Okay, I think I need a medium toned gray for the rest of this. So I'm just going to sample that here and bring it down here. By using a low flow and sampling lots of areas as I go, I'm able to recreate this area pretty nicely. I think this white area looks a bit too dark, so I'll sample a darker color, and I'll just softly painted over it. It still is a little bit too light. Alright, I think we're almost done. I'm just going to sample an even darker color, and I'll just fill in this area. That was a little bit tricky, but here you go. Here's the before and after of fixing his eye. I know this isn't perfect, but I do think it's pretty amazing that we were able to use the clone brush to fix his eye that was being blocked by so much of that yellow. To finish this video, I'm just going to continue to clone over a few more of these yellow spots just to clean up the picture. Feel free to do this as well, practicing, sampling and painting over the different areas of this picture. There's a lot to clean up, so take your time, have fun, and feel free to also use the painting brush on a few of these. You might not need to use the clone brush for every single one of these spots, so feel free to use whichever tool you're more comfortable with. But I definitely encourage you to try using the clone brush because it really is such a powerful brush. I'm not going to completely finish this, but I just wanted to show you the before and after of cleaning up quite a few spots with the clone brush. Now that you know how the clone brush works, in the next video, we'll go over one last tool that can really come in handy when cleaning up images. 10. Painting: This video, I'll show you how to use the paintbrush to clean up images. Thank you to Leslie for sending this in. This is a photo of Leslie's father in law taken in the early 1940s. Throughout this chapter, we've seen that affinity gives us a lot of fancy tools, but sometimes all you really need is a simple paint brush to fix a tricky spot. So to start working on this image, let's use the painting brush tool to clean up some of the larger blemishes. For this example, I'm mostly going to be focusing on the background. Alright, so I just finished cleaning up the background. Here's the before and after taking care of that big rip through the top there. So a lot of old images like this are set on plain backdrops, but sometimes there tends to be strange light spots and dark spots throughout that background. We can use the paint brush to even out these areas. To do this, I'm going to add another new pixel layer just to keep our painting and our in painting separate. Then I'll grab the paintbrush tool. Remember that you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to adjust the size of your brush. And as another reminder, in the last video, we talked about using flow to blend areas together. So using a nice low flow for this technique will really help everything to blend together in the background. Because I want to paint this using similar colors to the background, I'm going to show you a shortcut you can use similar to the clone brush. If you hold Alt or option and then click on an area, you'll sample its color. So with that color sampled, I'm just going to lightly begin painting over this light area. As I go, I'll sample other areas of color just to make sure we're using similar colors that are right next to the area that we're trying to clean up. So as you can see, by painting with a low flow paint brush, we were able to even out this background so that those light spots didn't stand out quite so much. If there's any areas where you painted over your subject, feel free to grab the eraser tool and then erase over that area to remove the paint. I may have also painted over that outside border a little bit in some areas. So I'm just going to erase over that. To finish, I just want to zoom in so that I can show you that the original picture had a lot more texture in it. By painting with our soft paint brush, we've removed a lot of this noise that's in most of the picture. We can actually bring that noise back by going to our filters and then using the add noise filter. This is only being applied to our painted layer. So as we bring this up, only our painted areas will have noise added to them. Here's the before and after. We took that smooth painted area and added noise back in to make it look more natural. If the noise looks a little bit too sharp, you can also add a Gaussian blur to soften this up. So I'm actually going to raise this a little bit more to create more of an intense noise. Then I'm going to go to the top of our filters to add a Gaussian blur. I'll just raise the radius, and you can see how this softens the area so that it looks like it matches with the original noise. This is being applied to the whole picture. So I'm going to bring it as a child layer to our painted layer, making sure it's above the add noise filter. So here's the before and after of adding this gaussian blur to soften that effect. And now you can see the before and after of the soft paint and now the texture. I think this technique did a great job of helping with that background. And now I'm just going to hold Shift to select both of these layers so you can see the complete before and after of all of the work that we did in this video. Now that we know how to use the inpainting, cloning and paintbrush tools, we're ready to take on some tricky projects. These projects will really help you to practice your new skills. I think you'll be surprised at how much you can already do. We'll start the first project in the next video. 11. Practice 1: Let's practice using the cleanup tools. This photo was taken around 1915. This man served in World War I as a member of the British Royal Flying Corps. Now, you might look at this picture and get a little nervous. There are so many tears and folds, but believe it or not, we can clean this up just using the tools that we learned about. I know you can do this. It's gonna be amazing. Let's go ahead and start by adding a new pixel layer. And then we can go ahead and start by using the painting brush. Using the painting brush, we can go ahead and start in the middle, and then we can work our way out to the bigger blemishes. I'm going to go ahead and start by taking care of the blemishes that I see on our subject. After that, we can go ahead and work our way outward. I think the inpainting brush is so amazing. We don't need to sample anything, just paint, paint, paint, and the blemishes will disappear. There are so many blemishes on this image, so this is going to take some time. Feel free to listen to some music and just relax as you paint these troubles away. Okay, now it's my favorite part. Let's see what this looked like before. And here's the after of all of that in painting. Pretty amazing. Alright, let's do the next step. I want to fix these tears in the corner that are huge, and we could try using the painting brush, but I think just to practice our other tools, I'll use the clone brush for this. So I'll grab the clone brush. I'll zoom in here. And luckily, we did a really good job with painting these areas, so we can sample by holding Alt or option. And then we can bring it up here to blend it in. I can see a little bit of repetition in these areas. So I'm going to sample another area, and I'm just going to blend over those areas a little bit to break that up. In this area, we have a lighter background, so I'll sample the lighter background and bring it up. Now, this is a tricky transition area, and I think the best way to blend this would be to lower the flow quite a bit and then sample the color on one side and bring it over by lightly painting it in. You can do the same thing, sampling from the other side and bringing this color over. And I think that helped the transition area to blend better continuing on. I'll sample some colors, raising the flow a little bit for this area. Okay. I think this looks so good. Here's the before and after of everything we've done so far. Now, as a last step, I do think I want to smooth out the background even more. We have a lot of variation with dark and light spots all throughout this. And I think using the clone brush to soften these areas would make it look a lot better. To do this, I'm just going to continue with what I was doing before, using a very low flow and painting to help smooth out these areas. Did the best I could up here. And down here, there's just so many light areas that it's hard to find a good dark area to sample from. So I think we could use our other strategy of using the paint brush to continue to smooth this out. I'm going to add a new pixel layer to keep our painting separate. Then I'll grab the paint brush. It has a very low flow. That's perfect. And now just focusing on the background, I'm going to sample colors and paint to smooth things out. So I'll hold Alt or Option to sample the color, and then I'll begin my painting. Now that the background looks a lot smoother, I'm just going to do our trick to add texture back into this. So I'll zoom in here. You can see how smooth this painted area is. So going to our filters, I'm going to add the add noise filter, and I'll just bring this up. Then I'll add a Gaussian blur to that, making sure it's set as a child layer right above the ad noise filter. And I will just erase this to blur it. So now you can see we have some nice variation in color. I think that looks a lot better than how it looked before. Here's the before and after. Okay, I think this picture has had a huge improvement. I'm going to hold Shift to select both of these layers, so you can see the complete before and after of all of our work. Great job. If you were able to follow along, I think this is some great practice to help you master these tools. Let's do one more project together in the next video. 12. Practice 2: Let's do one more example to practice using the cleanup tools. Thank you to Lou for sending in this image. This photo was taken in the 19 twentyties and it's of Lou's dad and uncle. This picture, similar to our last one, has quite a few blemishes, and I think this will be a very good practice. Let's go ahead and start with the in painting brush. I'll add a new pixel layer, and then I'll come over here to select the painting brush so that we can get started. Now, the main blemishes here are these dots. I think I can get rid of most of them with the end painting brush. But if there are any tricky areas like dots that are on edges, I think that would be better to wait to use the clone brush later. So I'll just paint a little at a time to remove these dots. I'm really not sure why so many images end up with these dots flattered on them, but luckily, this is a pretty easy fix. Useful shortcut to keep in mind as you're doing this is Command or Control Z to undo your painting. I used this quite a bit as I went through this, so feel free to keep that one in mind. Okay, so far, here's what we have before and after. There were so many little dots, but I think this looks a lot better. Now, there are still some little dots that are left behind because I thought the clone brush would do a better job on them. So I'm going to select the clone brush, and I'll just zoom in here to the tricky areas where I left some of the spots behind. I'll just raise the flow a little bit, and then I'll hold Alt or Option to sample and paint to remove. Now, this is an especially tricky area. You can see that this part of his neck should be in shadow, but we only have a little bit of shadow to sample from. So I'm going to sample that little bit of shadow, and I'm just going to gradually paint this over. Then I'll sample again and continue to bring this over. Luckily, I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. I think the dark area looks really good, but this part of his face has become too bright. If you look at the original, that area is supposed to be shadow. So I'm just going to sample some of this darkness to bring it up. And now I'll just continue to sample and paint away those spots that are on the edges. Now that that's finished, I also want to clean up this bottom area right here. Now, we could use the crop tool to bring up this edge to hide all of this fading. But I think it's a good idea to continue to practice with these tools and to keep all of the detail that we can for this old photo. So I'll just zoom in here, and I'll take some of this better color, and I'll bring it downward. As you go, make sure to lift up your brush so the sampling area resets. If I don't lift up, here's what happens. Eventually, you start to sample the light area again. But if you lift up as you go, it will forget that light area was ever there. So that's what I usually do. Paint a little, lift up my cursor, and then continue to paint. Now, I could continue this across, but you can see his knees are creating some folds in the fabric that would be really hard to fix. But I think this already looks really good on this side and this side actually looks pretty natural. I don't see any sharp lines like there were before. So I think I'll leave the rest of that as is. Similar to the bottom, we have this part over here, this edge right here. I think this might be a little piece of tape or something like that. So I'm just going to remove this using the same technique. Okay, so you could be finished here if you'd like, but I'm going to show you how to remove this arch in the background. I do think the arch is kind of cute, but I want to show you how to remove it if that's something you want to do. I'll just put this on a new pixel layer to keep it separate. And then we can go ahead and take this nice part of the background and bring it up just like we did on the bottom and the sides. With that done, now we can see the before and after with the arch. You can choose whether you want to keep the arch or not. I think I like it better without the arch because it helps you to focus on the subjects of the image. With all of that done, we can go ahead and see the results. Here's the before and after. This is such a huge difference. After just a couple of chapters in this course, you've already learned so much. Great job. Now, there's still a lot more to learn, and in the next chapter, we're going to take a look at how to fix lighting. 13. Curves Overview: This chapter we'll fix the lighting in our images. With old images, it seems like they all fade over time. That's called compression. The blacks in the image are getting lighter and the whites are getting darker. It's all becoming a gray mush, so we need to uncompress it to fix it. And that's what we'll learn how to do in this chapter. To start in this video, we're going to learn all about the best lighting adjustment, the curves adjustment. This photo was sent in by Don Don, his younger brother and cousin, dressed up as the characters from the Beverly Hill Bilies TV show for a parade in 1962. Let's begin by applying the curves adjustment. The curves adjustment is very powerful. It allows us to adjust the lighting of an image in so many ways. To understand this, let's take a closer look at this dialogue box. This white line is called the spline. We can click and drag to pull the spine up to brighten our image, or we can pull the spline down to darken our image. That's just about the simplest way to use the curves adjustment. For this course, we're going to get a little bit fancier. Since most images are faded, they need the black areas to become darker and the white areas to become brighter. Here's the trick to do this. First, we can adjust this bottom left side right over here. This is the shadow side. If we pull this point over to the right, then all of the shadows in our image will get darker, so much better. Now, why did that happen? Well, as you know, when you lower the line, things get darker. And you can see that this line is now so much lower than the original line. So by pulling this over, the photo gets darker. And this point that we pulled over is actually called the black point because it controls the very darkest parts of the image. We can do the same thing for the top right side, which is the highlight side. If we pull this point over to the left, all of our highlights will get brighter. And you can see that this is because when you raise the line, things get brighter. This part of the line is higher than the original line. So the white parts of the photo became even brighter. And this point is called the white point, since it controls the brightest white parts of an image. So basically, as we move the black point inward and the white point inward toward the center, you can see that we've uncompressed this image. Here's the before and after. So much better. To give you another example, you can also make the lighting look more faded. This is less common to do, especially in old photos. But sometimes you might want to do this technique if the lighting is too intense. To do this, you could move the black point up to brighten it, and you could move the white point down to darken it. Now the picture is extra faded, but in some cases, this might work for your picture. Now, in this picture, we already saw that pulling these points inward looks really nice. This is a really simple trick that we'll use a lot throughout the course. Now, I want to mention that we can make this adjustment by eye just moving the points inward until they look good on the picture. But I actually want to show you that if you'd like a bit more guidance, one way to do this is to pull the points inward until they touch the edges of this histogram that you see here. So I'm going to pull the black point in until we get to the edge there. And for this one, you can see this is about halfway into this square right here. So I'll pull this in about halfway into this square. This one's a little harder to line up, but you can see the lighting actually looks really good with this adjustment. Here's the before and after. I think this looks really good, but I do think the overall image is pretty dark. So I'm going to click and drag on the center of this line to raise it just a little bit. This just brings a little more light into the overall image. So those are the basics of using the curves adjustment. You can use it to simply make your photos a bit brighter or darker, and you can use it to adjust the contrast of the black point and white point. And just so you know, once you close out of an adjustment, you can go back and change it at any time by clicking on the layer icon right here. Now that you know how the curves adjustment works in the next video, we're going to learn about masking adjustments. 14. Masking Adjustments: Let's learn about masking. Thank you, Ken, for sending in this image. This photo is of Ken's wife and her sister taken in the late 1950s. In the last video, we learned all about the curves adjustment. There are so many great adjustments in affinity photo. Did you know that you could actually paint these adjustments? That means you could change one area of your photo without affecting other parts of the photo. That's what masking is. Masking is a super powerful way to customize parts of your photo. In this video, I want to give you a basic overview of how masking works because we'll use it quite a bit throughout this course. It's sort of a superpower in photo editing. Just to show you how masking works, let's apply the recolor adjustment. The recolor adjustment lets you change the colors to anything. You could move this hue slider to change the hue and the saturation slider to change how saturated the color is. To show you how masking works, I'll begin by adding a mask to this layer by clicking right here. Now you can see this mask has appeared on this layer. Every mask has two colors, white and black. White means the adjustment is visible. That's why the layer looks white right now. This green color is all over this entire picture, the layer is appearing as white. Now, if there was black painted on this layer, that would mean the black areas are making the adjustment layer invisible. If you paint in black paint on this white mask, you can hide the color in whatever areas you want. So I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool and I'll increase the flow, and I'll paint in black paint over this. So I'll just remove this color from a few areas by painting it over. I roughly painted over the skin, and you can see over here on the layer that everywhere that I painted in black is now appearing as black on this mask. The recolor adjustment is invisible in those areas. A wonderful thing about masks is that they're very adjustable. If you mess up and paint too much black, all you need to do is change your paint color to white, and then you could paint over that area to bring the adjustment back. You could even paint in a low flow to subtly remove or add color to an area. If I subtly paint in black paint with this low flow, you can see that I'm removing just a little bit of the adjustment on the hair. Okay, so that's the basics of how masking works. Now I want to show you something that I do with masks all the time. I'll delete this adjustment, and I'll add a new one. This time, I'll add a mask. And then I want this adjustment to only be applied to the hair. The hair is such a small area of this picture. So I could paint in black on everything except the hair, or I could do this shortcut trick. If you hold down command or control, I, you'll invert the mask layer. You can see that the mask is now black. So now all I need to do is paint in white paint to reveal the recolor adjustment. That makes it a lot faster. Now in the Layers panel, you can see that the mask is mostly black, but it's white where the recolor adjustment is revealed over their hair. Now, to finish this video, I want to let you in on a little secret. Every adjustment layer actually has a built in mask. You don't need to add a mask to it. You can't see the mask right at the beginning, but if you start painting on the layer, you can see the mask appear. It was there the whole time. I was just hidden. Every adjustment layer and even every filter layer has a built in mask that you could paint on. We're going to work a lot with masks during this course. So if this is a little confusing, don't worry. We're going to have a lot of practice together so that you'll be confident to use masks on your own images. Just remember that masks have two colors, black and white. Black will always hide whatever the adjustment layer is, and white will reveal the adjustment. Now that we know how to use masks, we'll learn how to use masks to fix lighting in the next video. 15. Masked Curves: This video we'll learn how to use masks to fix lighting. This picture was taken in 1931 of Leo in front of a barbershop. Brightness inconsistencies are very common for old photos. In this photo, you can see that we have some very dark shadows and some very bright highlights, but the picture itself actually seems faded. We can use masks to target certain areas to improve the lighting of this picture. Let's start by fixing the bright areas. I want to make these bright areas a little bit darker so that we can see more of the details. So to start, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. To make the white areas darker, I'm going to take this white point and lower it down to darken it. You can see as I do this if you watch his jacket area, more detail will appear as I darken this. To make the shadows on his jacket even darker. We could also pull over this black point until the shadows look good. So here's the before and after. I think his jacket looks a lot better, but I don't want the whole picture to get this dark. Since I only want this adjustment on his jacket, we need to invert our mask. Remember that every adjustment has a built in mask. So all I need to do is press Command or Control I. You can see our black mask appear, which means that this adjustment is currently completely hidden. Since I want it to appear on his jacket, I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll paint in white paint over his jacket to reveal this curves adjustment. With that painting done, now you can see the before and after of darkening up his bright jacket. If you'd like, now you can reopen your curves adjustment and make any adjustments that you like. I think I might have made it a little bit too dark. So I'll just erase this a little, and you can see the before and after. I think that looks pretty good. I really like that we can see more detail in his jacket. Another place that I think would look nice with more detail is the face. I'm going to show you a fun strategy that I like to use with faces to make his features stand out more. I'm going to begin by adding a curve. And I'll make this curve darker. Then I'll invert this with command or control I so that I can paint this only over a few key areas. To emphasize his face, I'm going to use a small brush with a lower flow. And I'm just going to paint this darkness over the areas that should be dark. So I'll paint it over his eyes and his eyebrows. You can paint it over the bottom of his nose and his lips. And now you can see those areas stand out a lot more. Here's the before and after. Because his face was so bright, adding a little bit of strategic darkness has really helped to bring contrast to his face. At this point, I think the man looks really good. So now I want to focus on the background. A lot of the background seems a little faded like these windows back here. So I'm going to add a curves adjustment. Then I'm going to darken those areas by moving the black point inward. I'll invert this with command or control I, and then I'll paint with white paint and a large brush to darken those areas. Here's the before and after. I think that looks pretty nice. Okay, let's just finish with one more adjustment. I really want the focus to be on the man. So I think it would look nice if we darken to the ground where he stands so that he's the brightest thing in the picture. I'll add another curves adjustment to make the bright ground darker. I'll just darken this spline. Then I'll invert this with Command or Control I. I'll paint in white on this black mask. To darken the ground. Here's the before and after of that. And now I'm just going to hold Shift to select all of these layers so that we can see the complete before and after. All right. With that, I think the lighting looks better for this picture with the power of masking, you can really customize the lighting in your images. Now that we've seen masking light in action, let's do another example in the next video. Right. 16. Masking With Flow: This video we'll use low flow to paint our masks on, to create beautiful lighting. Thank you to Gordon, who submitted this old family photo of his family working on their farm. So this photo has some pretty extreme lighting issues. We have a few very bright spots here that I think we could fix with masking. Let's go ahead and get started by fixing this top corner. This is an interesting area because it gradually becomes brighter as you get closer to the top. So to fix this, let's go ahead and start with a curves adjustment. I'll make this nice and dark. And then I'll close out of this, and we can go ahead and invert this mask with Command or Control I. Now that we have a black mask, I can paint in white paint to reveal it. So I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll make sure I'm painting with a very low flow. I'll switch my paint color to white, and then I'll begin my painting. I think this area looks a lot better, but I may have painted some darkness over this area right here. So I'm going to switch my paint color to black, and I'll just paint to remove that a little bit. Now that harsh line is gone, and you can see this has blended together a lot better. One thing I'm noticing is that up here in the corner, the sky looks a bit darker than it does over here. So I'm also going to paint to remove the darkness from that area. So now you can see the before and after. Because I was using such a low flow, I could really customize how I painted over this faded area. I still think it looks a little bit faded up here. So I think I'm going to repeat this process adding another dark curve. Inverting it with command or control I and then painting in white paint with a low flow on that edge to darken it up. These areas look better now, but I think the shadows are a little bit faded still in comparison to the rest of the picture. So I'm going to open up the curves adjustments by clicking on the layer icon, and then I'll bring the black point over to darken the black areas. I'll do the same with this other one, darkening the black point by bringing it over. You can see especially in this area, it's gotten a lot darker. And I think that looks pretty good. With that finished, we can select both of these layers so that you can see the before and after of fixing up that area. So much better. This area does still look a little bit bright. So I think I'll paint on our second curves adjustment a little bit in that area. But I think that looks pretty good. Now we can go ahead and continue to paint on more light wherever we need it in this picture. I think the man's clothing is a little bit bright compared to the rest of the highlights in the picture. So I'm going to add another curves adjustment just to dull down the whites a little bit. I'll lower the white point just a little bit, and I'll also darken the curve. I'm watching his clothes as I do this, and you can see that before and after. I think that's a good amount. So I'm going to invert this with Command or Control I. And then I'll just paint this in white paint over his clothes. Now I think that level of brightness matches the other white areas in the picture. Here's the before and after, subtly doling down the white Now that the problem areas are taken care of, I think it would be nice if we added a little bit of light to make the people stand out more. To do this, what I first like to look for is what the people are standing against. So you can see this person right here is blending into the hay in the background that's dark. So I think I'm going to make this person brighter. The people wearing white clothes are already standing out pretty nicely. But I think the people that are standing with darker clothing against the dark background would look nicer if they looked brighter. So I'm going to add another curves adjustment. I'll just brighten up this curve. I'll invert it with command or control I, and then I'll paint this over the people with dark clothing. I think I'll also paint this over the faces of the men wearing hats. And I think this brightness looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Let's add one more curve to adjust the overall lighting of the entire picture. I think this picture looks a bit faded, so I'm going to bring the black point over a little bit, and I'll bring the white point over a little bit. Then I'll brighten the overall picture so that it's easier to see. And I think that was a really good change. Here's the before and after. Adding a little more contrast and a little more brightness. I'll hold Shift to select all of the layers that we worked on so that we can see the complete before and after. I think this picture looks so much better. By using a low flow, we can really customize the adjustment gradually adding light wherever it's needed. In the next video, we'll learn how to use gradients to fix lighting. 17. Gradient Masks: Let's learn how to use gradients on our masks. This is a photo of Anne in 1950. It's such a cute picture, and I like that someone is photo bombing in the background. So it's not uncommon for one side of the photo to be more faded than the other side. Lucky for us, there's an easy fix to do this without painting. Sometimes gradually painting is pretty hard. It can take quite a few layers to make the gradual lighting look better. But in this video, you can see how the bottom is more faded than the top, and we'll be able to gradually fix that using the gradient tool. To start, I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to grab the gradient tool. I'll click and drag to add a gradient to this pixel layer. You can see that the gradient tool applies a gradient between two colors. On this side, we have white, and on this side, we have black. You can change the colors by selecting either color stop and changing the color over here. You can also click and drag on the color stops if you want to adjust how the gradient is positioned, or you could even click and drag to create a brand new gradient. So that's the basic overview of the gradient tool. But what does this have to do with lighting? Well, do you remember that masks have two colors, white and black? Well, if we make our gradient white and black, we can reveal an adjustment on the white side and gradually fade it out on the black side. We're going to use the gradient tool to fix the lighting in our picture. I'll begin by deleting the pixel layer. That was just for the demonstration. Now I'm going to add a curves adjustment. Based on the histogram, it seems like we need to move our black point over to add darker shadows. This has darkened the whole photo, but I think the top looks too dark now compared to the bottom. To fix this, we can use the gradient tool. Since the adjustment layer is already selected, if I click and drag, you can see that we're adding a gradient to the layer's mask. The bottom is white, meaning that the curves adjustment is fully revealed, and the top is black, meaning that the adjustment is invisible. So we can adjust how this looks. I think placing it right here looks pretty good. It's landing just about where her coat ends. And you can see the before and after. This has made the lighting a lot more even. While this does look good, I think it would be nice if we could adjust this a little more. So I'll open up our curves adjustment. I think I'll bring the black point over just a little bit more, and I think that looks pretty even and nice. Now that the fading is fixed, we can do a little bit more to make the image pop. First, let's add more contrast to her dark coat. I'll add another curves adjustment. I'll darken the curve. Then I'll invert this with Command or Control I. Now that we have a black mask, I'm just going to grab the paint brush to paint in white paint over her coat. Even though it takes a little bit longer, I like painting with a low flow so that I can really control where the darkness is sitting. Okay. Now we can go ahead and see the before and after of darkening her coat. I think her coat looks nicer now that it's darker, but I don't want to remove the highlights on her coat. Let's see if I can adjust this curve a little bit more. Since I want the highlights to stay bright, I need to adjust this part of the curve. I'm going to click and drag to add a new point. And you can see as I bring this up, the highlights are standing out a little bit more. But we still have a nice dark coat. Here's the before and after of that. With my paint brush, I'm just going to go over a couple areas that need to be fixed. I think the edges were missed a little bit in my painting. That looks better to me. Maybe I'll even brighten the highlights a little bit. With my curve looking something like that, now you can see the before and after darkening the coat, but still keeping some nice highlights in the wrinkles of the coat. I think that looks pretty good. To finish, let's adjust her face a little bit. For her face, I'm going to start by adding a bright curve. So I'll just click and drag to raise this. I'll close out of this, and then I'll invert this layer with command or control I. I'll paint in white paint over her face to brighten it up. She's being surrounded by so much darkness with her dark hair and dark coat. I think brightening her face looks pretty good. And if we want, we could also brighten the face of the photobomer to make him stand out a little bit more. Now that we've brightened, I think the features on her face are looking a little too bright. So I'm going to add another curves adjustment, but this time, I'll make it darker. I'll invert this with command or control I. And now I'll paint this darkness over her facial features that need to be darkened. So I'll paint it over her eyebrows and I I'll paint it over the base of her nose and over her lips. I may have overdone it on her eyes, so I'm going to take some black paint and a larger brush, and I'll just go over it a couple of times. That looks better to me. Okay, taking white paint again. If we want, we can also do this on the photo bomber. Just adding a little bit of darkness. Maybe that's a little too much since they're behind a window. So using black paint, I'll just go for that a little. And to finish with this, I'm going to take some white paint, and I'm just going to darken her hair a little bit more, especially around the hairline. By darkening the edges of her face, it's made her face look brighter and her hair look darker. I think this creates some very nice contrast. Now I can turn this off so you can see the before, and here's the after. And if you pair that with the bright curve we did to brighten their faces, you can really see the difference. I may have overdone it with the brightening layer. So I'm going to open that curve, and I'll just lower it a little bit. And now we can take all of the layers that we worked on, and we can see the completes before and after using multiple adjustments like this is a great way to keep things flexible. If you've done too much on one layer, you can just go back to that layer and adjust the curve until it looks good. If you're working on a document with lots of layers, it might be a good idea to name your layers as you go. To do this, I'll just double click on the name of the layer, and then you can easily type in whatever you want. I find this to be helpful if I'm working on a really big project with lots of layers. So I thought I'd mention it to you in case this is helpful. Alright, we're almost done with the lighting chapter in the next video. I'll show you one last lighting trick that you can use. 18. Lighting Trick: Let's learn one last lighting trick in this video. This photo is of Fran and Dotty, and it was taken in Central Park on Easter in 1945. This is a lovely picture, but it has a big problem. The subjects are standing against a background that's almost the same shade as them. It makes it hard to see right away where the clothing ends and the bushes begin. You'll notice in photography that the best way to make your subject stand out is to place them against a background that contrasts them. For example, the dark clothing in this image looks better on this woman because she's standing against a light background. This contrast really helps to create a nice hard line here. So the subject is standing out a bit better. To fix this issue, we need to create more contrast between this woman's clothing and the background. To start, let's add a curve. I think for this photo, it would look better if we made the bushes brighter, similar to the sidewalk, maybe not quite that bright, but a bit brighter to help contrast with her coat. So I'm going to make this very bright. I'll close out of this, and then I'll press Command or Control I to invert this layer. Now I'm going to grab the paint brush, and I'm going to paint in white paint to reveal the brightness. To begin, I'm going to carefully paint around our subjects anywhere where they're blending into their background. Now that we've created a nice outline, I'm going to use a larger brush to blend this into the rest of the background. So this looks pretty obvious. If you'd like, we can go back and adjust the curve. Maybe I'll just bring it down a little bit. But you can already see how much better this looks. Here's the before and after. We can even darken their clothing a little bit more to help them stand out from the new brighter background. I'll add a curves adjustment. I'll make the curve darker. I'll invert it with Command or Control E, and then I'll paint this over their clothes. Here's the before and after of darkening their coats. And now I'm just going to hold Shift to select both of these. And you can see the complete before and after of helping our subjects to stand out better from their backgrounds. And of course, you could do this trick if the colors are opposite, too. If the subject and background are both too bright, you can darken the background so that the subject stands out more. All we're trying to do is add contrasting lighting, so the subject is the focus and doesn't blend into the background. This is a super simple trick with a big impact. And with that final trick, we're done with the lighting chapter. You've learned all about curves, masks, gradients, and more. I hope all of these lighting tricks were helpful for you. Now that we're done with lighting in the next chapter, we're going to learn all about color correction on old photos. 19. Super Simple Color Correction: This chapter we'll learn how to do color correction. Even with black and white photos, pictures can discolor over time. In this chapter, we'll take photos that have distorted colors, and we'll even out those colors to clean them up to get started in this video, I'm going to show you a super simple color correction technique. Thank you to Lori for sending this in. This photo is of Doreen taken in 1950. If you look closely at this picture, you can see a little bit of splotchiness. These orange hued splotches are pretty distracting for this photo, but it's actually really easy to clean them up. To do that, I'm going to apply the recolor adjustment I love the recolor adjustment because it applies a single color to your entire photo. And this color is very customizable. For example, if you want to keep things simple, you can just lower the saturation slider all the way to create a perfectly black and white photo. All of those splotchy areas are completely gone. Here's the before and after. If you want to, you could add a little tint of color. I'm going to increase the saturation just a little bit. And then I'm going to move the hue more toward orange. You can see this creates more of a sepia look, and I think this looks really nice for this picture. Here's the before and after. If you want, you could also increase the saturation for a stronger look, and you could adjust the tint however you'd like. This adjustment is so powerful that it can be used by itself like this, and the colors will be perfectly even every time. As you can see, this really is a super simple technique, one layer, and you're done. Now that you know about this technique, I want to show you some fun ways that you can customize colors in the next video. 20. Advanced Color Correction: In this video, I'll show you how to color correct and add multiple colors into your photo. This cute image is a photo of Patrick's cousin at a carnival in 1955. Thanks for sending this in. So in the last video, we learned how to use the recolor adjustment to add one beautiful color to your entire image. The recolor adjustment gives the whole photo a very clean, flat look, but you can actually add more than one color to give your images some extra pizzas. To do this, we're going to use a different adjustment, the gradient map adjustment. So by default, this adjustment looks pretty wild to help us visualize what's going on better. I like to simplify things by clicking on the center Color stop and then going down here to press Delete. The gradient map works by adding one color to your shadows. In this case, we have red added to the shadows and one color to the highlights. So let's try adding some different less extreme colors. To start, I'll select the shadow side. Then I'll click on color, and we can change this color to whatever we want. Now, yours probably will be set to the color wheel because that's the default. But if you come up here, you can actually change it to HSL sliders, which is what we'll use throughout this course. Now using these sliders, I'm going to make this a deep brown color. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. With that set, I'll click outside of this box. And we can go ahead and select the highlight side and change that color. I'm going to change this one to a very light orange color. So now you can see, as I turn this on and off that we've been able to completely eliminate the weird splotches of color that we have on this image, and we've been able to replace it with our very own customized gradient. And this is all very customizable. If you ever want to change any of these colors, you can feel free to do that, raising or lowering the saturation, raising or lowering the darkness and the hue. Honestly, the possibilities with this gradient map adjustment are pretty limitless. You can do so many combinations. For example, if you want, you could change the shadows to a blue color. You can see this pretty navy color has been added. And if we make sure the shadows are nice and warm, you can see we have a pretty cool effect with orange highlights and blue shadows. Well, the photo definitely didn't originally come like this. It can be pretty fun to mix up these colors. To finish this off, I just have one more tip for you. You remember how we had a center color stop when we started? Well, you can always add that back in by double clicking on the line, and then you can change that to any color that you want. With that, now you can move this from side to side to adjust how much this is affecting your picture. Feel free to play around with this adjustment to create whatever color combination you want. Now that you understand how gradient maps work in the next video, I'll show you how to make your own presets so that you can quickly add your favorite gradient map colors on any photo. 21. Gradient Map Presets: Let's learn how to turn your gradient map adjustment into a preset. A preset is basically a pre loaded adjustment layer. If you have a preset of the gradient map adjustment, this means that the colors will already be added to the gradient map. So all you need to do is click on a button to apply it to your photo very easy. Now the exercise file for this lesson already has three different gradient map adjustments added to the layers panel. First, we have a subtle sepia, then we have a warmer more saturated Sepia last, we have a fun color combination of blue shadows and warm highlights. I'm going to walk you through how you can add each one of these as a preset so that each time you open up affinity, you can access these colors the first thing you need is the adjustment panel. Go to the top of the screen to window and then go down to where it says adjustment. You can click and drag on the word adjustment to tuck it right here next to your Layers panel. To return to the Layers panel, click on the word layers and you're back to normal. But right now I want to focus on the adjustment panel, so I'll click on that. You can see as you scroll through this list that this has the name of every adjustment if you go to the gradient map adjustment and click on its name, you can see that these are the presets that affinity has added by default. To use these presets, you can just click on them to add them to your photo. So now you know where you can find your presets. Saving your adjustments as a preset is very easy. So let's go back to the Layers panel. I'll just delete this gradient map adjustment. And we can go ahead and start by saving these adjustments as presets. I'll start by turning on our subtle CEPIA. I'll open it up by clicking on the layer icon. Now, these are the colors that I chose. Feel free to click on the colors to adjust them however you want. You already know how you can refine and choose colors. Once you like the adjustment, to save it as a preset, go ahead and click on Add preset. You can name this whatever you want. And then press Okay. Now in the adjustments panel, you can see that you have that subtle SEPA adjustment saved, super easy. For the other two, feel free to adjust these colors however you want. Then you can go ahead and add these as a preset. You can even make your own gradient map adjustments and save them as presets, too. I'm going to delete all of these layers now so that you can see how easy it is to add these adjustments. So go ahead and click through these. And you can see that with the click of a button, you can easily go through these and see which one fits your picture better. These presets are permanently installed now. So even if you close out of the program and open a new photo, these presets will still be here. If I'm honest, I really don't use presets all that often. For most adjustments, I would rather adjust the curves or the recolor adjustment, depending on the picture. But with the gradient map adjustment, I honestly love presets. Gradient maps take so long to set up, especially with these weird default colors. It takes a lot of work to fix all the colors up. And if you already know that you always like the same Sepia tones, then just make it a preset. It's way easier. At this point, you have two powerful adjustments that you can use to do color correction on most pictures. You even know about presets. But to turn you into a color correction pro, to really take it to the next level, we're going to work on a special challenge photo in the next video. 22. Matching the Original Colors: This video, we'll learn how to match the original colors of a photo. Thank you to Jonathan for submitting this old family photo. As we've seen, we can use adjustment layers to add beautiful colors to a photo. But with just a little more effort, we can actually match the photo to its original color. We'll do that in this video by taking this blue color from the top of the photo and bringing it down to cover the entire photo. Now, before we do that, I just want to fix a few things. First, you can see that this yellow area has a pretty harsh transition line in a few areas. Before we do anything, I want to soften up that transition area to make it easier for us later on. So to start, I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to grab the clone brush. I'll zoom in here. And using a nice low flow on this clone brush, I'm going to sample some of the blue area with alt or option. Then I'm going to gradually paint this in to break up this transition line. The less harsh we can make this transition line, the easier it will be when we add color later on. This area is pretty tricky. I'm going to take some of this gray color, and below the collar, I'm just going to add this in now you can see the before and after so far. The harsh line is now very soft, and this will make it a lot easier. As I go through here, I'm not seeing any harsh transition lines. Until we get to here, his sock has a very harsh transition line. Most of his sock is in this yellow color. So I think I'm going to sample the yellow color and bring it over onto the rest of his sock. Okay. I also softened a little bit in this area. And we could probably soften this area, too. So just go through, and if you see any really harsh lines, now would be a great time to break those up. Now that that looks a lot softer, I think our next step will be fixing the lighting up on the blue part of the picture, you can see these deep, nice shadows here. But as you go down here, we're not really seeing any of that deep, nice shadow. It's all very faded. So I'm going to add a curves adjustment. And I'm going to darken this so that the bottom part of the picture can have similar shadows. I'll pull this over. And I think that's a pretty good start. I'll close out of this and invert the layer with Command or Control I. Using the paint brush, I'm going to paint in white paint with a nice low flow to add this darkness into these areas. I'm painting with a low flow and a really soft brush in order to keep the areas from getting those harsh transition lines again. We just want to keep everything very soft. With the transition areas looking pretty good, I think I'm going to raise the flow to apply more of this darkness to the rest of the photo. We can go back and adjust this more after we add the color. But right now, I think we're in a pretty good starting place. So now we're going to add color. In order to add color, we're going to get a little bit fancy. I'm going to select the background layer, and then I'm going to make a selection with the selection Marquee tool. I'll click and drag out a square so that it's halfway on the blue and halfway on the yellow. Then I'm going to add the gradient map adjustment You can see this adjustment has only been applied to our selection area. That way, we can see the blue color as we work, and we can make this color match. So let's go ahead and do that. First, I'm just going to make all of the colors a blue color. So I'll make this dark blue. I'll make the midpoint a nice blue color, and I'll make the highlights area a very light blue color. With that good starting point, now I'm just going to go through each individual color to adjust it, and I'll be watching these colors to try to get them to match. The mid tones need to be a lot less saturated and maybe a little less purple. I think our shadows could also be less saturated and maybe a little darker. This looks really good. Let's finish with the highlights. I think this looks really nice. I'm going to deselect with Command or Control D, and you can see that it's actually hard to see where the edge of the square is. So I think we've been able to match the colors pretty well. I'm going to drag this so that it's on top of everything. And then I'm going to apply this gradient map adjustment to everything. To do that, I'm going to paint in white on this black mask all over the picture. So I'll grab my paint brush, and with 100% flow and white paint, I'm going to paint this all over. Wow, this looks so good. Here's the before and after. Turning this on and off, I think the shadows were a bit darker in that floral pattern up there in the original. So I'm just going to click to open up our gradient map adjustment and I'll adjust the shadows a little bit. They're already pretty dark, so maybe I'll just move the midtones over a little bit. That way, we have a little bit more darkness overall. I think this looks so good. So now we just need to fix up the lighting a little bit more. It's pretty clear that we're still faded in this area. So to start, I'm going to adjust the curves adjustment that we have. I'll make it a bit darker. And I'll bring the black point over a little more. This is helping, but the transition area still needs more darkness. So with a very low flow, I'm going to try to subtly add more darkness to this transition area. Now that the transition area looks a lot better, I'm going to add one more curves adjustment. I'm going to move the black point over to add more darkness. Then I'll invert this with Command or Control I. Now I'm going to paint in white paint, and I'm just going to add this darkness away from the transition area. The transition area looks perfect right now. I don't want to mess with it. But I think these areas could use more shadow. I did end up adding a little bit of darkness over the transition areas. Just do whatever looks good for your picture. Alright. At this point, here is the before and after of the lighting. I think that looks so much better. Now that everything looks really nice and even, we can go ahead and add one more curves adjustment on top of everything just to effect the overall lighting. So we can make it a little bit darker. Maybe we'll make the image overall a little bit brighter. And I think that looks pretty nice. I'll hold Shift to select all of these layers so that we can see the complete before and after. This was a huge project, but I think this looks great. You can use this technique on any image that similar to this one has a concentrated area with color and light both faded from it. In the next video, I'll walk you through a common problem with adding color that you might run into. 23. Why Can't I Add Color?: Let's learn about what to do if you can't add color. This photo was taken in 1967 of Mary and Diane. This photo is from their first communion. They look so cute. So sometimes you might run into an image that isn't formatted properly for adding color. You'll see this if you try to add a recolor adjustment, nothing happens. So if this happens, there's actually a really easy solution. If you go to the top of the screen to document, you can go down to where it says Convert format. From here, you can see the color format is set to gray. If you click on this, you can change this to RGB eight. Now when you press Convert, look what happens. Now you can add color again. This really is just a problem that you might have with grayscale images, and it's not very common, but I still want to show you that it's an easy fix if it does happen. Alright, now that we've learned all about evening out the colors in your images in the next chapter, we're going to spend some time working on sharpening your images. 24. Denoising: Final step in restoring old photos is noise reduction and sharpening. These steps are always done last because they can slow things down and take a lot of computer power. Now, as I teach you this, you'll notice that we reduce noise. We don't fully remove it. Removing noise will make your photo a blurry, mushy mess. You'll lose all of the nice textures and details within the photo. Now, sharpening is the other side of the coin. A sharper photo usually looks nicer. But by increasing the contrast like this, the noise becomes a lot more noticeable. So throughout this chapter, we'll learn how to reduce noise, how to sharpen, and how to balance this trade off. We'll get started with learning about denoising in this video. Thank you to Peter for submitting this lovely portrait. I think this picture is a perfect example to remind you of what noise is because there's so much. You see all of these little dots adding texture. This is what noise is. Noise usually appears in images when there isn't enough light. So usually, you'll notice noise in the shadows. And in this case, the image is so dark that we have a little noise everywhere. Most old images don't have enough light, so you'll notice noise in just about every old image that you'll restore. You can reduce noise using the denise filter. So I'll go to our filters. And then I'll add the denise filter. I'll zoom in so we can see the difference as I adjust these sliders. Now, there are a lot of sliders here. Let's go ahead and start with the luminant slider. The luminant slider is for pixels that aren't the right brightness. In this case, you can see that a lot of the spots are too dark or too light. So as you increase this, you can see those dots start to disappear. The luminance detail slider is for preserving details in the photo. You can see that as I decrease this slider, more of the details get smoothed over like her eyes. But as I raise this up, you can see more noise appears around her eyes and her eyes get more detail added back to them. So with this denise filter, usually I just try to balance these two sliders to get the look that I want for my photo. The color sliders down here are four win pixels are the wrong color, like if some pixels have turned green or purple, this hasn't happened in this photo, but if you do see strange colors in the noise, then adjusting the color slider could help with that. Now we can go ahead and see the difference that this has made in this picture. Here's the before and after. Once you've reduced noise, you might notice that the softening of this filter has decreased the overall contrast. So to fix that, I'm going to add a little bit of contrast back using the curves adjustment. I'll just bring the black point over to darken the shadows, and I'll bring the white point over to brighten the highlights. With this added contrast, here's the before and after. You can see that this picture looks really nice. Here's the complete before and after. And there we have it. Now you know how to reduce noise. It's not perfectly gone, but this filter did a great job with reducing it. In the next video, we'll learn how to target areas to reduce the noise. 25. Masking Noise: In this video, we'll mask the Denis filter onto whatever areas we want. This photo was submitted by Scott. This is a photo from his dad's side of the family. In the last video, we learned about using the denoise filter on the whole image. But masking can really help us to preserve detail on our subject. So let's begin by zooming in and applying the denoise filter. This time, I'm going to try to fully reduce the noise. I'm going to increase the luminant slider all the way, and then I'll decrease the luminance detail slider all the way to get a very smooth look. You can see the background is a lot smoother and so is our subject's face. Here's the before and after. Things have gotten a lot softer, but we might not necessarily want things to get so soft on our subject. So I'm going to invert this with Command or Control I so that we can paint this softness just where we want it. I'm going to grab the paint brush, and I'm going to paint in white paint with about 50% flow to reduce the noise in the background. So I'll just begin by painting in the background, trying to avoid painting on our subject. And you can see this is really helping to reduce the noise and make the background look a lot softer. So now you can see the background looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. What a huge difference. Now, to reduce the noise on our subject, I'm going to lower the flow to around 20%. And then I'm going to paint this over the areas that have not as much detail. So her hair right here is just a black shape. So removing the noise here really won't make too much of a difference to the detail. But as I come up here to where her hair has a lot more detail, I'm going to leave the noise in that area so that there's more detail there. This part of her hair also has a bit more detail, so I'm just going to soften the noise where there isn't detail. Then using a larger brush, I'll soften the noise across her forehead. And using a smaller brush, I'm going to go in here and reduce the noise on other parts of her skin, avoiding the eyes and her ears. Areas where there's more detail really should stay nice and sharp. Her clothes have so much detail that I'm going to leave them as is so now zooming in here, you can see the before and after of reducing the noise on her face. Maybe you still want to reduce the noise a little bit. In that case, you can use a very large brush, and with this low flow, you can paint once over the entire subject. So here is the before and after. We still have plenty of detail, but now the background is a lot softer, and I think our subject looks really good. Just like in the last video, if we want, we can add a little bit of contrast back into the photo using a curves adjustment. So I'll bring the black point inward and the white point inward, just to add a little bit of contrast back. And now you can see the complete before and after the image is nice and sharp. The noise is reduced, and I think this looks really good. Now, if you want, you can always select the denise filter, and you can reduce the opacity a little bit to bring some noise back. I think all of us are pretty used to seeing noise on old pictures. So bringing back a little bit of noise, I think, looks pretty good. Alright, great job. Now you know how to reduce the noise using masking. In the next video, we're going to learn how to target dust and scratches to remove them. 26. Dust & Scratches: Let's learn about the dust and scratches filter. This is a photo of Lori and Fran taken in 1968. I love this cute picture. Let's go ahead and start by going to our filters and then applying the dust and scratches filter. This filter is meant for dust and scratches. A lot of old images might have some blemishes like this after you've scanned the pictures onto your computer. And this filter does a really good job of removing that. Let's go ahead and start by increasing the radius slider. This slider will tell affinity the size of the blemish that you want removed. So you can see with it raised just a little bit, a lot of the smaller dust particles have been removed. The larger I make it, the larger the blemishes will be that are removed. So you can see, at this point, all of the dusty blemishes are removed from the background, but a lot of the detail on our subjects' faces have been blurred. That's where the tolerant slider is supposed to come in. I'll raise this. So you can see that some of the detail is brought back, but some dust is also brought back. And you can see the details on the face look really strange. So, unfortunately, I don't really like using the tolerant slider. I like it in theory, but in practice, it really doesn't look very good. So I'll lower that down. And instead, I'll show you how I like to use this filter, and you may have guessed it, but we're going to do some masking so that we can only apply this over the background. I'll press Command or Control I to invert this filter. Now that we have a black mask, I'm going to grab the paint brush tool and with 100% flow, I'm going to paint in white paint over just the background. Now, we already know that we can use the inpainting tool for this thing. But I think this filter is really good to know about. Generally, I prefer to use the inpainting brush. But if you like this technique, this can be a lot faster. One thing that I like about this filter is that it's targeting the dust specifically. It looks a lot like the blur filters, but it's not actually blurring what we paint over. So we can paint right over the hard edges of the photo, and those edges stay sharp. Now you can see the before and after of removing the dust and scratches from the background. Now, using this filter over our subjects would look way too smooth. We would reduce way too much of the detail. So instead, we can apply a new pixel layer and then in paint over our subjects. So I'll just quickly go through here to remove the dust that I see over our subjects. And now with that finished, you can see the before and after of removing all of those dust and scratches that were on this picture. Now that we know how to use this filter, in the next video, I want to show you another use for it, which is removing textures. 27. Reducing Textures: Let's learn about reducing textures in this video. This photo is of Joel from 1964. So another great use for the dust and scratches filter is reducing textures. A lot of old pictures have been printed on textured paper, and we can actually reduce this to soften the look. So let's start by adding the dust and scratches filter. As we raise the radius, you can see that the texture gets softer until it eventually disappears. Now we're having the same problem as before, where we're losing detail. So I like to just reduce the texture, not fully remove it. So I'm just going to soften it a little bit like this. Now that things are softer, you can see the difference. Here's the before and after. Now, you might notice as I turn this on and off that we've started to lose a few details. There are beautiful light spots in his eyes that are almost completely gone with this filter. We're also losing some of the shine in his hair and eyebrows. The shine on his lips is reduced. So I want to bring that back a little bit. To do that, we can paint on this filter layer with our paint brush. I'm just going to lower the flow. And now we can paint in black paint to remove the filter from a few areas. I definitely want those light spots again. So I'll paint this over his eyes and eyelashes. I'll also paint this over his eyebrows so that we can see his hairs again. I'll paint this over his lips to bring back some of that shine. And I'll paint this over his hair. You can see his hairline looks pretty strange right now. So I'm going to paint to bring back some of that detail. Now that I've brought back all of that detail, I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Some of the texture is pretty obvious in a few areas. So with white paint, I'm just going to paint once over his face to reduce the texture again. Now I think we have a pretty good balance of having texture and detail. Here's the before and after. I'll just zoom out so you can see this from back here. Here's the before and after. Alright, so now you know how to reduce texture. I think this is a nice trick to know, and it makes a really good difference. Now, throughout this chapter, we've been learning a lot of ways to soften up images. So in the last video of the chapter, we're going to finish things off by learning the opposite, how to sharpen things up and bring back some detail. 28. Sharpening: Let's learn how to sharpen images in this video. This family photo from Jamie was taken in Scotland somewhere 1950-1970. Before we sharpen up this image, I'm just going to zoom in here to show you that this image was printed on textured paper. So let's go ahead and start by reducing that texture. I'll add the dust and scratches filter, and I'll raise the radius. I think that looks pretty good, but we've lost a lot of detail on his face. Here's the before and after. So I'm going to paint in black paint with a low flow to bring back some of the detail. To do this, I'll paint over his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and his hair. This has brought back a lot of the detail. So I'm going to paint in white paint once over his entire face to reduce it again. Here's the before and after. I think this has reduced the texture a little bit too much. So I'll open up the filter by clicking on the layer icon, and I'll just lower the radius a little bit to bring back a little bit more of the texture so that his face doesn't look too strange. Now you can see the before and after. We've been able to reduce the texture quite a bit, but his face still has good detail. So after removing noise or reducing texture, sometimes the image needs a little bit of sharpening added. You can do this by adding contrast with the curves adjustment. But in this video, I want to show you how to use a sharpening filter. So let's go to our filters and apply the high pass filter this filter lets you raise the radius until you start to see the details in the photo that you want to sharpen. So you can start to see his eyes and his mouth, the little details that are important to bring attention to. So in this case, I'll raise the radius until we can see the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. And now that we have it in a good place, I'm going to change the blend mode. Blend modes allow you to adjust how layers blend together. The blend mode that I always use with the high pass filter is the soft light blend mode. It fully removes that gray barrier that was there, and it does a good job of keeping things nice and sharp. So now that we've done that, you can see the before and after. This is a very subtle difference. So just look at one area of the photo like his eyes. Here's the before and after. The high pass filter subtly adds sharpness. If we want to increase this effect, we can duplicate the layer with command or control J. The more we duplicate it, the sharper these small areas will become so now you can see the before and after of adding this sharpness. And I'll just zoom out here so that we can see the complete before and after. These are subtle changes, but now the picture has less texture and more sharpness. And with that, we've wrapped up this chapter. All of these techniques are good to know, and you won't need all of them for every photo. But if you're struggling with noise, dust, or texture issues, come on back to this chapter and try out some of these techniques. In the next chapter, we're going to take everything that we've learned so far, and we'll complete two start to finish projects together. 29. Make a Plan: This chapter, we'll bring together everything that we've learned so far to complete two projects together. The images that we'll work with have some major issues, but we've learned everything that you need to know to fix them up. This will be a lot of fun. To get started in this video, we'll make a plan for cleaning up our first image. This is a wedding photo submitted by Lenny, and it will be the perfect practice image for us. To make a plan, I'll add a new pixel layer so that I can draw on top of it. Then I'll grab the paint brush. I'll increase the flow and the hardness, and I'll choose a color so that we can begin the first thing that we'll do for this image is we will crop it. I can see some space down here that we can crop out. In addition to that, there's a lot of tape covering the image. So I think we could bring in the sides to eliminate those areas. Once the image is cropped in, it's time to begin our cleanup. There's quite a bit to clean up here. We'll have some leftover tape to clean up, some folds here and there, and quite a few little dots to clean up. We'll definitely spend some time with the painting brush, and then where we have some bigger problem areas, we'll probably need to use the clone brush. Once we've cleaned everything up, we'll move on to fixing the lighting. This is a pretty simple step. We're just going to add more contrast with the curves adjustment. After the lighting, we'll adjust the colors. I think for this image, we'll use warm tones for the highlights and cool tones for the shadows. We'll use the gradient map adjustment to do that. And once that's done, our finishing step will be to take care of any noise that's left behind. Okay, now that we have our plan, I'm just going to double click on this layer and I'll rename it plan. To finish off this video, since it's a really quick edit, let's do the first item on our list. We're going to crop this image, so I'll turn off our plan layer, and then I'll select the crop tool. I'll bring up this bottom edge. And I'll bring this side over. Now, normally, I like to preserve as much of the image as I can. But behind the tape, it really does just look like a blink background. So I'll bring that in. And to keep our subject centered, I'm going to bring this edge in a little bit so that the space that she has from the edge matches up to the space he has. And I'll bring the top edge down a little bit to help us with our cleanup later. With that done, I'll press Apply, and our first step is already done. Since we just finished cropping in the next video, we'll do our next step, which is cleanup. 30. Clean Up: Let's clean up this image in this video. So to begin, let's take a look at our plan. We already can see some really big blemishes that we'll clean up, as well as all of these little dots. We'll make sure to take care of all of that as we zoom in and clean this up. I'm going to keep the plan layer on top of everything. So I'll select the background, and I'll place the new pixel layer on top of that. Okay, now we're ready to begin inpainting. For this image in particular, we have a lot to do. But personally, I really enjoy the cleanup phase of editing. I find it easy, relaxing, and it's super fun to see the end result. Especially for this image, we'll have quite a difference when we're done, and knowing that makes the process way more exciting. As you go, remember to paint a little bit at a time and check your work as you go. If you need to paint over an area more than once, do it. That's totally normal. Affinity will not do a perfect job every time. So that's where you come in with your artistic eye to decide if the area looks good or not. Because this image has so many issues, don't be too hard on yourself if you don't have a perfect image in the end. I think that if you can make the image just a little bit better, cleaner and easier to see, then you've done your job. There's no need to remove every little blemish and piece of noise if it's going to take you hours and hours, All right. With that, we're done in painting. Here's the before and after of all of that work. That took me about 10 minutes. So if it took you quite a while as well, no worries. These things do take time. Before we finish this video, I do want to clean up a little bit using the clone brush for any strange spots that are left behind. So I'm going to grab the clone brush, and I'm going to begin by cleaning up the transition areas that were left behind by this tape. We might not be able to fully remove the yellow color, but if we could just clean up that transition area, it will make it a lot easier for us later on when we need to fix up the lighting and colors. So I'm just going to go in here and hold Alt or option to sample and paint away all of these transition areas. Remember that sampling multiple areas is a good idea. You don't want too much repetition because you kept using the same area over and over. Once you have the backgrounds looking good, make sure both of their faces look nice and smooth since that's a major focal point for this picture. And with that, we're done cleaning up this image. Here's the before and the after. That was a lot of work, and it made a really huge impact. I'm just going to double click to rename this layer. And then we'll move on to our next step in our plan, which is the lighting in the next video. 31. Lighting: This video, we'll fix the lighting. To fix the lighting, let's use a curves adjustment. By looking at the histogram, I can see that we need to move the black point over quite a bit, and we need to move the white point over quite a bit. This looks like a pretty good start for our picture. I do think the picture still looks overall, a little bit dark. So I'll click and drag on the center of this line to raise it just a little bit. So now we can go ahead and see the before and after. This has made a really good difference for this picture. Now that we've done the overall lighting, we can do a little bit of targeted lighting. For example, maybe we want to make the shadows darker in a few areas. So to do this, I'm going to add another curves adjustment, and then I'll darken the curve. I'll invert this layer with Command or Control I. Then using the paint brush, I'm going to paint with 0% hardness and a lower flow. Right now, my colors are green and white. I'm going to change the green to black, so we're back to our normal black and white. For this, I'll paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal the darkness. I want to add darkness to his coat, as well as both of their hair and facial features. So to begin, I'll just paint this over his coat to darken it. Then we can work on their hair. For the man, his hair is darker on one side, and it's more light over here. So I'm going to focus my painting on the lighter side. And now you can see it all matches a lot better. I'll also paint over his mustache. I'll paint this over his eyebrows lightly and his eyes. You can see how much more striking this looks when I turn this off and back on. Let's work on the woman next. Her hair also has some darker areas while most of it's faded. So I'm going to try to even this out. And while I'm here, I'll just darken her eyebrows, her eyes. And we can also darken the line of her mouth and her nose a little bit. And now you can see the before and after of her face. I'll zoom out, and you can see the before and after of all of that painting. If I hold shift, I can select both of our lighting layers so that we can see the complete before and after of fixing up the lighting. So that was pretty easy. I think this looks a lot better now. I'm just going to rename this layer overall lighting, and I'll rename this layer targeted lighting. All right. With that done, we'll move on to the next step, which is colors in the next video. 32. Color: Let's fix the colors in this video. So you can see that we already have some color in this photo, and I think it would look nice to use similar colors as we clean it up. So in the background, I can see some yellow tones, and in the shadows here, I can see some blue tones. So let's go ahead and start by adding a gradient map adjustment. And then we can adjust these colors. I'll just delete this center node here. Then I'm going to make the shadow node, a nice dark blue color. Then also like the highlights node, and we'll make this one a nice warm color. So now you can see that this is a pretty faded color scheme. Here's the before and after. And it doesn't really capture the spirit of the original photo. So to fix the saturation, I'm going to double click on the middle, and we can add a nice warm color to the midtones. So now you can see the before and after. And I think this looks pretty good. It might be a little bit too yellow, so I'll just bump this over more toward orange. And I think the blue shadows could use some work, as well, making them a little bit more saturated so that we can see that blue color. And I think this looks pretty nice. Here's the before and the after. Now that I've done this, I think the shadows are looking a little bit more faded. That might be okay, but if you'd like, you can click and drag the targeted lighting layer above this to darken the shadows a little bit more. With that sitting above the gradient map adjustment, you can see the before and after. And I think this looks pretty good. However, I'm seeing some strange areas right here and right here. These are spots that we didn't previously paint on with the targeted lighting. So if we want, we can grab our paint brush and paint in white paint over those areas just to even them out a little bit, I painted a little too much, so I'll switch my color to black. And you can see his hair looks better now. I'll do the same over here with her hair, darkening that middle area a little bit. Sometimes when you add color, the lighting will change a little bit. So it's a good idea to double check how everything's looking and go back and repaint as needed. Okay, I think this looks really good now. Here's the before and the after of fixing up the colors. I think I'm just going to open up our gradient map again, and I'll bump the mid tones over a little bit to add more light. It was over here before, and things were just looking a little dark. By bumping it over, you can see we've brought more light into our photo. Okay, with that, I think the colors look really nice now. We're done with this video, so we'll move on to fixing the noise in the next video. 33. Noise: Let's fix the noise in this video. Let's zoom in here and take a look at the noise. You can especially see the noise clearly in our shadows. To fix the noise, we're going to use the dust and scratches filter. Now, before filming this, I tried to use the denise filter, and I'll show you what that looks like because I didn't really like the effect as much. I'll add the denise filter, and I'll drag it on top of all of our layers. As I increase the luminance, you can see that because the image has so much contrast, it really isn't taking care of some of the main issues that we have here. It is softening things a little bit, but there's clearly still some noise issues. So because of that, we're going to use the more powerful filter, the dust and scratches filter. It will soften everything up, even these highly contrasted areas. I'll just delete this denise filter, and I'll add the dust and scratches filter. Now as I raise the radius, you can see this soften things a lot more. Now, I don't want things to become too soft, and I'm okay with there still being a little bit of noise. So I think I'll bring the radius to four pixels for this picture. Because I want to see the details clearly, I'm going to remove this filter from a few areas. So with my paint brush, I'll paint in black paint with a nice low flow to bring back our details. So in this case, I'm actually going to remove this from the people, not just their faces, just to bring back some of the nice detail we have in their clothing. So now I've painted this off of the people. I'll just zoom in so that you can see the before and the after because we removed the filter off of the people very lightly. You can see their detail is still there, but the noise is reduced quite a bit. Okay, with that final step done, I'm just going to rename our last layer. So this was noise, and I forgot to rename the gradient map. This was colors. I'll select the top layer. Then I'll hold Shift to select the cleanup layer. And now we can see the complete before and after. This looks so much better. Great work. We've learned so much together in the course so far. Before we finish this chapter, we're going to do one more project together in the next video. Okay. 34. Example 2 - Make a Plan: This video we'll make a plan for cleaning up this image. Frank submitted this picture of his mother in law's parents. This picture is from around 18 95. It's sad that it got split in two because it's a really beautiful picture. So we'll make sure to fix that and a few other things as we go through this cleanup. To start, let's make a plan on a new pixel layer. I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll paint with full flow and hardness and nice bright color to write out our plan. We'll follow the same workflow that we used on the last image. I suggest that you use this same workflow for your own photos. So this workflow starts with cropping. Then we do cleanup. Then we fix the lighting, the colors, and the noise. So looking back at this list, the first thing we'll do is crop the image. We'll crop it in. So we don't see this border anymore. Once the image is cropped in, we'll clean up our image. This image doesn't have as many small blemishes as the last one we worked on, but it does have this major rip going through the center. So we'll make sure to take care of that and any other little scratches and issues that we see. Once we've cleaned everything up, we're going to fix the lighting. I think this image could be brighter, so we'll make sure to do that with the curves adjustment. After lighting, we can adjust the colors. I think this image already looks nice. I'm not seeing any discoloration, but if we want to, we can add a little bit of warmth to the highlights and cool tones to the shadows like we did for our last project. Once all of that's done, our finishing touch will be cleaning up any noise that's left behind. So now that we have our plan, I'm just going to double click on our layer so that we can rename it. And now that we have this plan, I'll just turn this layer off so that we can do our first step, which is cropping. I'll grab the crop tool, and I'll just pull in the edges so that we can't see this border going around the outside. I'll press Apply. And I think that crop looks really nice. Since we just finished our cropping, we'll move on to the next step, which is cleanup in the next video. 35. Example 2 - Clean Up: Let's clean up this image. This is an exciting video because we'll clean up this huge rip from our image. It's going to be amazing to see how much you can do. But before we do that, let's start off easy and do some painting around the outside of the rip. I'll add a new pixel layer. I'll grab the painting brush, and we can go ahead and get started. This image doesn't have as many issues as our last image, but we can still clean up any little scratches and marks that we see. For this image, it's especially important to clean up as much as you can around the outside edges of the rip. We're going to use the clone brush to fix the rip, and that process will be a lot easier if we have a good, clean, blemish free area to sample from. If we leave all of these little folds behind, that will be all we have to sample from later on, and that's no good. So take your time to make this look nice and you'll have a much easier time later. All right, with all of that finished, here's the before and the after cleaning up all of the blemishes that I saw, especially the ones around this rip. So now that that's finished, it's the moment we've all been waiting for. Let's add a new pixel layer and the clone brush tool so that we can take care of the rip. Let's start off on the left side. Over here, you can see we have a window in this backdrop. So to help us take care of this part of the rip, I'm going to increase the flow a little bit. I'll sample right here on the edge, and then I'll bring that edge down right here where I have some smudginess I can see I didn't line that up perfectly. So I'll just increase the flow so that we can see this better. With a larger brush now, you can see we can line up the edge so that it's perfectly straight. Again, I messed up. Alright, I'm going to try that one last time. Maybe I'll do it from up here. Try to line up the best you can and paint. I'm going to do that one more time, sampling up here and bringing it down here. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now I'll just sample and paint away this area. And now that that's perfectly sampled, I'm going to lower my hardness again so that I can blend things better. You can see we have some dark spots, some light spots. I just want all of that to be blended nicely. And there we go. That edge is now perfectly blended. I think that looks a lot better. I'm going to continue this sampling on the outside and bringing this down to cover up the rib. We can also do it from the bottom going up to make sure everything's blending. Now we're getting to his arm. I'm going to sample a little bit here on the edge, and I'll bring that down. Then I'm just going to sample the color of his coat. And I'll bring that up. I'll do it from the top, as well. Sampling and bringing that down. And this is looking pretty good. So I'm just going to continue that across his coat. Okay, let's go ahead and stop here. For this tricky collar area, we sort of need to guess what this collar looked like because it's cutting right across where we should have more detail. Feel free to give yours a different shaped collar if you'd like. But for my painting, I can see that the collar looks like it has a frilly edge here, and I think this top white part is part of the collar. So I'm just going to try to connect these two. I'll sample this white color from up here, and with a smaller brush, I'm just going to begin to bring that downward. I can see this end here. So maybe the collar curves in a little bit. So now I've created this collar shape. And I'm just going to continue to bring this down to get rid of all of this discoloration from the tear. Now to continue this edge of the collar, I'm just going to start by tracing out where I think this ends by taking the background and bringing it in. I'm looking at her shoulder from over here, and I think her shoulder over here would probably follow a similar slope. So I'm just going to trace that in so now that I have that shape done, I'm just going to take her dark clothing to give the collar an edge. It had some frills, so I'm going to continue that maybe using a smaller brush to really get that detail. Okay, and I think that looks pretty good. Now I'm just going to take her dark clothing to fill in the rest here. I'm just going to check in by turning this layer off and back on. I think this is looking pretty good. So now that this part of the collar is done, I'm going to try to recreate whatever detail was in this area. Now, it's pretty hard to tell what's going on here, but I think I'm just going to try to trace it across. So to begin, I'm just going to add her dark clothing in this area. I'll also trace her neck downward. It looks like we have some shadowing right here, but I don't really have enough to sample for that area. So I'm going to sample the dark color of her clothing just to give us that nice shadow over there. Since her collar should come around like that, I'm going to sample this lighter color, and with a smaller brush, I'm just going to trace a little bit of this light color over here. Then I'm going to connect the collar a little bit. I have no idea if this is historically accurate. But I think this looks pretty good. And to finish, I can see her collar right here. So I'm going to take this color, and I'm just going to bring it up to add some of this darker color. Maybe this color is too bright if it originally is supposed to be in shadow. Maybe I'll take some of the background color, and I'll just lightly paint it over with a lower flow to doll down that white color. I can't really tell. I think this might be part of the design. Feel free to get rid of that if you'd like. But I think this color looks pretty good. So now I'm just going to continue cloning across. This last part of the window is pretty tricky because it's covering so much. So I'm just going to go a little bit at a time to sample and bring down the parts of the window that I think should be in this area. Okay. With that, I think I'm done with our cleanup. So now you can see the before and after. That was so much work, but this looks so much better. Great job. Now that we're done with that, we can move on to our next step, which is fixing the lighting in the next video. 36. Example 2 - Lighting: This video, we'll fix the lighting. Now, from here on out, this is a pretty easy project. The main issues weren't the lighting or colors, but that huge rip. So go ahead and take a deep breath and enjoy this super easy next few videos. To begin, let's add a curves adjustment. I'm going to pull the black and white points inward to add more contrast. Then we can go ahead and pull the spline upward to add more light. This looks really beautiful already. We could do some targeted lighting, but honestly, I think this looks really nice. With that, we are done. Told you this would be easy. Let's go ahead and move on to adjusting the colors in the next video. 37. Example 2 - Color: This video will adjust the colors. Now, I want to make it clear that this step, especially for this image is completely optional. I don't see any weird coloring that needs to be fixed. So this is purely for artistic purposes. To begin, I'm going to add a gradient map adjustment. Then we can go ahead and adjust these. To speed things up this time, I think it would be nice to use one of our gradient presets. So in the adjustment panel, I'll go to the gradient map presets and I'll click through these to see how they look. This one actually looks pretty nice for this picture. Here's the before and the after. We can go through and adjust these colors however we want. Maybe we can pull the midpoint around a little bit. But I think this looks pretty nice. Now, one last thing I want to mention, since this picture didn't have any discoloration to begin with, we could also play around with the opacity of this layer. Normally, I wouldn't do this if we had splotches underneath because those would begin to show through. But with this one, we could pull the opacity up and down to decide what balance we want for these colors. And I think this looks pretty nice. All right. We're almost done. In the next video, we're going to do a quick fix for the noise. 38. Example 2 - Noise: Let's soften up the noise in this video. So if we zoom in, we can see that this picture does have some subtle noise. It's not very intense or contrasted noise. So I think we could use the denise filter for this one. I'll just increase the luminance. And you can see, as I do this, the noise gets quite a bit softer. I think I'll just bring it up a little bit, and I'll zoom out so that we can see our subjects' faces. Here's the before and the after. This has softened things up nicely without losing detail. So I think we could end it right here. I'm just going to hold Shift to select all of these layers so that we can see the complete before and after Great work on this project. I know that the rip was a tricky thing to fix, but what a great difference. This looks so beautiful. So we've spent the whole course working on images that don't have color. In the next chapter, I'm going to show you how you can colorize these colorless photos. It's a really cool process, and I'm excited to show it to you. So I'll see you in the next chapter. 39. Make a Plan: This chapter we'll learn all about colorizing photos. Up until this point, we've been restoring photos to their former glory, but we can go beyond that. If you want, you can turn a black and white photo into a color picture. This is not restoring the photo to how it originally looked, but it's still a lot of fun. In this video, we're going to make a plan for colorizing this first image. This beautiful image was taken of Dotty in 1940. Before colorizing a photo, it's a good idea to clean it up by cropping it and in painting. To save time for this chapter, we'll use photos that have already been cleaned up. But for your own pictures, I recommend that you clean it up first, then export it. Then use that cleaned up image for recoloring so it's a good idea to have a bit of a plan for the colors that you're going to use. You want the colors to coordinate nicely and look like they belong on the person you're putting the colors on. For this image, I'm just going to use a new pixel layer and the paint brush tool to swatch colors over our model. Based on what I can see, I think I'm going to give her a light skin tone, since it looks pretty bright in this picture. For her hair, I think I'm going to give her a dark brown color since her hair looks pretty dark in this picture. Now, keep in mind when you colorize images that your colors will never be 100% accurate if you happen to know this person and know for a fact that she had black hair or red hair, then I would definitely try to use the most accurate colors. But since I don't know her, I'm just going to give her brown hair. Now, for the other colors, I can see she's wearing lipstick. So I think I'm going to choose a muted red color for this. For her clothes, we really can use any color we want. I'm going to give her a purple top, but feel free to use any color that you want when we get to this point in the process. Now that we have her colors all done, I think for the background, I'm just going to use a nice warm sepia color. Okay, so that's my rough plan for the colors. I want to keep the colors a bit muted, especially for her lips and her clothing, because I don't think neon colors were very common back then. It's important for your colors to make sense. Now that we have our rough plan, I'll show you how to use a reference image in the next video. 40. Using a Reference Image: Let's learn about using reference images in this video. When recoloring images, it's a good idea to have a reference image. So what I look for in a reference image is a similar lighting situation and colors that I'm planning on using. Mainly, I'm focused on finding good skin colors because I find that to be the hardest part of this whole process. So a couple of places that you can find reference images include Pexels, Pixabay and On Splash. These are all free image websites, and I'll leave links to all of them below this video. So once you know what you're looking for, you can go into any one of these websites and type in the specifics of what you're looking for. In this case, I typed portrait, brown hair woman. You can type these words in whatever order you want. But I used these words specifically because I want a close up picture. So I typed portrait, and I hope to find someone with brown hair. I want to use a woman so that I can sample the colors of her blush or lips so that I can use these colors on my model. So after searching for that, I just scrolled through and found an image that had the colors I wanted. So I went ahead and downloaded it. Jumping back into affinity, I'm going to use the picture that I included in the exercise files. So go to File and then down to Place. Go ahead and open that image and then click and drag to add it on top of our model. I like this photo because she has brown hair, a light skin tone, and the lighting is very soft. There aren't any harsh shadows. So now that we have this image added, I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and using this layer, I'm going to paint a palette based on our reference image. To begin, let's sample the colors of her skin. I'm going to shrink my brush down to a smaller size, and then I'm going to go to a dark area on her skin. I'll press Alt or Option, and then I'll click on an area. This will allow us to sample that color. I'll make my brush larger, and I'll paint that color over here. So now we have the darkest color. Let's go ahead and sample a few more colors. So I can see this is a medium color. I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click right there, and I'll paint this medium color right here. And to finish, I'm going to go to the lightest area on her skin, and I'll sample that. And then I'll paint it in over here. Now you can see we have shadows, mid tones, and highlights for her skin in a convenient palette right here. We're going to use this later on. But for now, I'm going to continue to sample colors on the other parts of our model. So I'm going to go ahead and sample the colors of her hair. I'll also sample the colors of her shirt because this is actually a nice purple color. I think the pink color of her fan is also nice, so I'll just sample that color. And last, I think the lips are a nice color, so I'll sample that. All of these colors are nice options to have later on. So I like collecting all of the colors that I like. We don't have to use all of them, though. With that finished, I'm just going to turn off our reference image and I'll rename this layer color palette. So with this palette made, we're ready to start coloring the skin in the next video. 41. Gradient Map: In this video, we'll use a gradient map to color the skin. We have already seen that the gradient map adjustment is a super powerful adjustment. As a reminder, this adjustment allows you to apply a color to the shadows, midtones and highlights in your image. I'm going to place this gradient map adjustment underneath our color palette so that we can see those colors. We sampled some great colors for our skin. So let's start by changing the shadow color. I'll click and drag on this color picker, and I'll release it over the darkest color. Now that color is being applied to the shadows. I'll repeat this for the midtones and the highlights. Now that we have these great colors added to the picture, it's time to paint them so that they only appear on the skin. I'll just turn off our color palette. Then I'm going to invert this layer with Command or Control I using the paint brush, I'm going to paint in white and black paint to reveal this. Since it's a black mask, I'll paint in white with 0% hardness and 100% flow. My strategy for this is to outline the skin first. I make sure to have a nice solid border. Remember that you can always paint in black paint to remove the adjustment if you paint too much. Once you have a nice border, here's a fun trick you can use. If you hold down Alt or option and then click on the mask, you can isolate that layer. So now you can see exactly where you've painted your white paint. And if you painted a nice solid border, all you have to do now is fill in everything else with white. That way you won't miss any spots. With that finished, you can return to your normal view by holding Alt or Option and clicking on the mask again. So now we have some pretty nice colors over the skin. I'm going to click on the gradient map layer icon to open it up again. And now we can go ahead and adjust these colors. Now that I'm seeing the colors on the skin, I think the shadows should be a bit darker. So I'll click on that color, and I'm just going to lower the luminosity to darken it. I think I'll also raise the saturation a little bit. Now we can adjust the middle color a little bit. I think I'll move it slightly over to the right. I think I want to raise this color saturation just a little bit. With our base layer of the skin complete, we're ready to add a few more refinements in the next video. 42. Skin Refinements: Let's refine the skin in this video. So far, we've added a bit of color to the face. Now it's time to add in some redness, some saturation, and some variation to make the skin look less flat. Everyone naturally has redness on their face. It's usually the most red on the ears, the cheeks, and the nose, and a little under the eyes. If we add redness to these areas, I think this image will look a lot more alive. To do this. I'm going to add a recolor adjustment This is already a great red color. So I'm just going to close out of this. I'll invert this layer with Command or Control I, and then I'll paint this on. This is a very bright saturated red. So I'm going to lower the flow very low so that I can paint this on. So I painted this over the ears, cheeks, and nose, and under the eyes. I think this looks pretty good in most of these areas, but on this side of the nose, it looks a little strange. So I'll switch my color to black, and I'll just remove that a little bit. Now you can see the before and the after. Adding just a little bit of variation looks really nice. I really like this trick of adding red, and I think I want to add a little bit more to this picture. So I'm going to add another recolor adjustment. This time, I'll lower the saturation down to around 50%. I'll invert this layer with command or control I. And now I'm just going to add a little bit of extra redness on some other areas. So with a larger brush, I'm going to paint a little bit in white paint over her forehead. I'll paint a little bit extra over her nose and under eyes. And looking at the rest of her body, I think I'm going to add a little bit of redness over her chest. If her hands were showing, I would definitely add this redness on her hands. But I think this looks really nice for the skin that we have showing here. Now that that's finished, I'm just going to organize these layers. I'll hold Shift to select all of these skin layers, and I'll press Command or Control G to group them together. I'll call all of these layers skin. I'm going to delete our plan layer and the reference image because we don't need those anymore, but I'll keep the color palette as a reference for our next steps. Now that that's all organized, I can show you the before and the after for recoloring her skin in the next video. We're going to add color to the little details that we have on her face. 43. Face Details: Let's fix up the face details. So what I mean by face details is I want to recolor the mouth and the eyes. These shouldn't be skin colored, so now's the time to fix that. Let's go ahead and start with the lips, just to add a fun pop of color. To do this, I'm going to add a recolor adjustment. Now, you might have noticed that I used a gradient map for the skin, but now I'm using a recolor adjustment for the lips. The reason for this is that I think the recolor adjustment does a great job to add one nice flat color to areas that don't need as much detail and variation. So for the lips, I think the recolor adjustment is perfect. But for areas like the skin and the hair, the gradient map does a much better job at having multiple colors. So for the lips, I want to color this a nice, dull red color. So I'll just adjust these sliders until I like the look. I think this is a very nice muted color. So I'll close this and invert this layer with Command or Control I. Then with white paint and a bit higher of a flow. I'll paint this over the lips. I'm just going to go back around the edges in black to clean things up a little bit. Okay, I think the lips are a nice color. Here's the before and the after. So now we can go ahead and move on to fixing everything that is supposed to be white on the face. For this, we're going to fix the teeth and the whites of the eyes. So here's a fun fact for you. No one has pure white teeth or eyes. Because the teeth and eyes are surrounded by skin, they actually have some of those colors reflecting on them. So the color we have now actually isn't too bad, but it might be a little bit more intense than it should be. To fix this, I'm going to use a recolor adjustment. I'm going to slide the hue over into the orange colors and I'll lower the saturation down. Now you can see we have a sort of sepia color, and this will be perfect for the teeth and the eyes. I invert this with command or control I and I'll paint this in white paint over the teeth and the eyes. I know that it's a little strange to paint the teeth a color that's not white, but trust me, this works. We've made tutorials in the past on whitening teeth, and it always looks really strange to have the teeth be pure white. I always like to add a little bit of orange or yellow just to give it a bit of another color. It doesn't need to be super bright yellow or orange, just a slight tint. As I was painting on the whites of her eyes, I decided to leave some of the original skin color over a few areas because eyes naturally have a little bit more redness in those areas. Now I'll just zoom out a little so that you can see the before and the after of whitening up those areas. Okay, so now the mouth is done. Let's move on to our eyes. To begin, I want to add a little bit more redness around the eyes. If you look at your own eyes, you'll see a rim of brownish red color around the eyes. So let's go ahead and add another recolor adjustment. I'll just raise this. So it's somewhere between red and orange and I'll lower the saturation. I'll invert this with command or control I. And using a lower flow, I'm just going to paint this around the rims of the eye. This is pretty subtle. Here's the before and the after before and after. All right, our last step is to color the iris of the eye. Her eyes already look pretty dark, so I'm just going to add a brown color to them. I'll add another recolor adjustment. And I'll adjust these sliders to make a nice brown color. I'll invert this with Command or Control E, and I'll paint this over her iris. With that painted on, I'm just adjusting the color a little bit. And I think that looks pretty good. That was a lot of layers. I'll just select them so you can see the before and the after. I think these details look a lot better. I'll group these layers together with Command or Control G, and I'll rename the group face details. All right. Great work on this video. In the next video, we're going to finish recoloring the head by recoloring her hair. 44. Hair: Let's recolor the hair in this video. So similar to the skin, we're going to use multiple layers for her hair to add multiple colors. We'll start by adding a nice brown color to her whole hair, and then we'll add a little bit more. So because hair is pretty complex, I'm going to use the gradient map adjustment. I'll turn on our color palette colors, and we can go ahead and sample some of these. I think the midtones color is too dark. I'm going to sample the highlights color instead for the highlights, I'm going to sample the highlight color from the skin. I'm not sure if I like these colors, but we can always go back and change them later on. So now I'll just turn off this color palette, and I'll invert our gradient map adjustment with Command or Control I. Now I'll just use my paint brush to paint white paint in an outline all around the hair. Remember to use black paint to clean up your painting as you go. Once you have the outline done, you can hold down Alt or option and click on the mask. Then you can fill in the rest of this with white paint. I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click on the mask to return to our normal view. Now that this is painted on, I can see I really don't like this color. So I'm going to open the gradient map adjustment again so that I can adjust these colors. I think this looks a lot better just having a lighter color here. So now that we can see the color, I'm just going to zoom in so that we can make some adjustments. First, I'd like to adjust the hairline a little bit. It looks a little harsh in a few areas. To do this, I'm just going to lower my flow quite a bit. And then I'm going to subtly paint this over the baby hairs that I can see on her forehead. By using a low flow, we'll still be able to see the skin color through these hairs. And I think this looks pretty nice, softening the hairline. In a few areas, I can see gray in the transition area. So I'm just going in and painting a little bit extra brown to cover that up. Next, I'm going to paint this a little bit over the eyebrows. The eyebrows actually already have a pretty nice color, but it's a little more saturated than her hair. So using a smallish brush and a low flow, I'm just going to paint this into her eyebrows. I'm just painting this lightly so that you can still see the skin color through her eyebrows. And last for refining her hair, I'm going to keep a nice low flow, and I'm going to paint with a large brush over the flyaway hairs. This isn't super accurate. I'm just trying to paint a little bit over all of the flyaways. Since she'll be on a Sepia background, I think this will blend in just fine. Okay, her hair looks really nice right now. To finish this off, I have a really weird trick. So as you already know, hair has a lot of different colors in it. It's not usually a flat color like this. To add variety into her hair, I'm going to re use this layer by duplicating it. I'll press Command or Control J to do that. With this duplicate copy, I'm going to make this mid tone a warmer, more saturated color. I'll also adjust the other colors, maybe pulling this over a little bit. So now we have a totally different set of colors on top of our original ones. The original colors look better. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint in black paint with a flow around 30%, and I'm going to remove this top color to reveal the color underneath it. So I'm just going to randomly paint this in a few areas. I want some of this redness to be in her hair, but I do want to remove it in most of the areas. Okay, with that, now you can see the before and the after. We've removed most of that redness, but you can see how it adds just a little bit more color into the hair. I think that looks pretty good. Okay, before we finish, I think this area looks really strange. It was really hard to see where her hair starts and stops, so I just guessed. I think I'd like to make this a little bit softer looking. I'll click on our original layer. And using a nice low flow, I'm just going to soften the edge. Okay, that looks better to me. Now that we're done with these hair layers, I'll just group them with Command or Control G, and I'll rename them hair. We've come a long way so far in our project. I think all of these details look so good. In the next video, we're going to continue colorizing by recoloring her clothes. 45. Clothes: Let's recolor the clothes in this video. If you remember back to our plan, I wanted to make her clothing a purple color. So let's start there in this video. Feel free to use the pink colors that we sampled earlier on, if you want, or any other color. I'm going to add a gradient map adjustment for the clothing. Since the clothing is such a large area in this picture, I think it would be nice to have more variation between the shadows, midtones, and highlights. I'm going to click and drag the adjustment so that it's sitting just above our hair group and the color palette is above it. Now I'm going to sample this purple color. I'll do that for the mid tones. I think that's a pretty nice color. For the shadows, I'm also going to sample this purple color, but I'll make it darker. I'll come back to adjust this more later. I'll just change the highlights now to that purple color, but I'll make it lighter. I'm not sure if I like this color exactly, but this is a pretty good starting point. I'll close out of this. And then I'll invert this layer with Command or Control I. Then I'll just grab the paint brush, and I'm going to paint with full flow in white paint to reveal this on her clothing. So I'm just going to quickly do this. Just like before, I'm making an outline around her entire top. Then I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click on the mask and then I'll fill in the rest. To finish with this painting, I'm going to zoom into this area, and I'm going to paint with a lower flow in black paint to soften the area. I over painted a little bit onto the brown hair. So now with a low flow, I can soften this area. And we should have a nice blend between this brown color and the purple. That looks pretty good. But later on, we're going to darken this area a little bit more to help this blend better. For now, I think it's time we adjust the color a little bit. I'll open our gradient map adjustment, and I'm just going to adjust our colors. Okay, I think that color looks a lot better. Before we wrap up this video, there is one more clothing type item that I want to recolor, and that's the gemstones that we have. Similar to the teeth and the eyes, I want the gems to reflect the color that's around them. So I'm going to add a bit of reddish purple to them. Let's use the recolor adjustment to do this. I'll lower the saturation down. And now you can see the gems look white, but they have a little bit of color reflecting on them. In this case, it's a red color. I'll invert this with Command or Control eye so that I can paint this over the gems. I'll paint in white paint with full flow. Now we can see what this looks like. Here's the before and the after. Feel free to adjust the color however you want. Maybe you want a little more or less saturation. I think this looks pretty nice. All right. With that finished, I'm just going to group these layers by holding Shift to select them all, and then I'll press Command or Control G to group them. Okay. We're almost done. This looks so good. To finish off with the colors, we're going to recolor the background of the image in the next video. 46. Background: Let's recolor the background. This will be a nice quick video, since all we need to do is apply a recolor adjustment and then paint it onto our background. So let's go ahead and start by applying the recolor adjustment and choosing a nice sepia color for the background. Now, normally, we would invert this layer and paint it on the background. But I have a surprise for you. We can actually do a shortcut this time. Instead of painting, we can just drag this down underneath our skin group and you can see that it now appears on the background, super easy. As I turned this on and off, you can see this is applied perfectly to our background. That was very easy and we're almost done. We're just going to add some beautiful final touches in the next video. 47. Final Enhancements: This video, we'll put the final touches on our project. At this point, we've changed all of the colors. All hold shift to select all of these so that you can see the before and after. This looks so good. But just so you know, after you're done colorizing a photo, you can still apply curves and boost colors and reduce noise. In this case, I'm going to start off by applying a curves adjustment just to make sure that the lighting looks the best that it can. To begin, I'll delete the color palette layer. And now with our top layer selected, I'll add a curves adjustment. Et's move the black point in to darken our shadows. This looks pretty good for the shadows. Now I'm just going to raise the spline to make sure the picture stays nice and bright. Here's the before and after of that. That's already a really big improvement. Next, I want to add some targeted darkness to a few areas. So I'll apply another curves adjustment. I'll make this adjustment nice and dark. I'll invert it with Command or Control I. And then I'm going to paint this over a few areas. A couple of videos ago, we talked about how strange this area looks. So now we can add extra darkness here to help to cover it up. I'm just going to lower the flow. And with a larger brush, I'm going to paint this darkness over this area. Now, you can see that this conceals that strange area. I think this looks pretty nice. It might be a little strong, so I'm going to lower my flow, and I'll just paint over it and black paint once to soften it. Okay, back to white paint. I'm going to add a little bit more darkness over her face to add contrast. So I'll do this over her eyebrows, over her eyelashes and irises. I'll add a little bit of darkness to her nose. And I think that looks pretty good. To finish with painting this darkness, I'm just going to quickly paint over a few other shadowy areas to enhance them. In her hair, I'm going to look for areas that are shadowed, and I'm going to paint over them to darken them even more. On her clothing, I can do the same to add a little bit more shadow. With that finished now you can see the before and after. This added darkness looks so good. Now, the next adjustment is a fun adjustment to use for color photos. Because this is the very first color photo that we've worked with for the course, we've never used this adjustment, so I'll walk you through it nice and slow. So this adjustment is called the color balance adjustment. It lets you add subtle color tints to the shadows, midtones and highlights of your image. You can think about it like a weaker, more subtle version of the gradient map adjustment. Because I like to add cool tones into the shadows and warm tones into the highlights, we'll keep that in mind as we adjust the sliders. So I'll start in the shadows. And to keep the colors nice and cool, I'm going to add a little can by moving this slider down to the left then I'll add a little bit of green by raising this slider and last, I'll raise the blue slider to add a little bit of blue. Now the shadow areas are cool down. So we can move on to the midtones. For this, I'm going to add warmer colors. So red, magenta, and yellow. And then for the highlights, I'll do the same adding a little bit of red. In this case, I don't really like how this magenta green slider looks, so I'll leave it alone. And then I'll add a little yellow. Alright, so that's the color balance adjustment. It makes very subtle changes, and now you can see the before and the after. This step is completely optional, but I do really like the subtle warmth that it adds to our image. Alright, to finish, let's denise this picture. You can see we have subtle noise, nothing too extreme. So I'm going to add the denise filter. I'll raise the luminans to soften this. And I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before and the after. We still have nice detail, but now the graininess is reduced. Now to really finish this, feel free to go back into any of our adjustments and adjust how things look. How's your skin looking? Is it too saturated, not saturated enough? What about the hair and the clothing? Now would be the time to fix that up. With that finished, we're finally done with this project. Here is the complete before and after. Great work on this project. Recoloring can definitely take a lot of time, but I think you can create some beautiful results. Now that we know what we're doing, we're going to do one more recolor project together to really help you solidify what you've learned so far. We'll get started with our last recolor project in the next video. 48. Example 2 - Make a Plan: Let's start off this project by making a plan. This image is of Lou in 1942 during World War two. You might remember him from the cleanup chapter. But this time, instead of focusing on cleaning him up, we'll get to see what this looks like in color. We're going to use the same steps that we did for our last project to bring this photo back to life. Our first step will be looking at reference images. Of course, we want to find an image that has skin colors that we can reference. But in addition to that, I'm excited to show you how we'll use other reference photos to recolor his uniform. After that, we'll recolor his skin. Similar to our last photo, we have a lighter skin tone. So we'll make sure to find a reference image with similar skin tones. Next, we'll work on the details of the face, focusing on recoloring the eyes and the mouth. This time, he won't be wearing lipstick, so we don't need to worry about that with our reference image. So this should be pretty simple. We're also going to take some time to recolor his hair. We can make his hair any color we want. I think I'm going to stick to brown because that's what it looks like to me. But feel free to use any color that you want. The next part will be pretty fun. We're going to try to recolor this uniform the most accurately that we can because we know that this is an American soldier during World War two, we should be able to find images of this uniform and then give him similar colors. To finish this off, we'll do any final adjustments, including adjusting the lighting and the color. We'll also make sure to reduce the noise before we finish. With our plan in place, let's find some reference images in the next video. 49. Example 2 - Using a Reference Image: This video, we'll take a look at some reference images that we'll use. So to start off, let's take a look at our skin color reference. You can use any of the previously mentioned websites to find free stock images. I'll leave those websites linked below again. This is the skin reference that I'll use. Similar to the man in our black and white image, I like that this man has soft lighting on his face. We don't have very harsh shadows. So as we sample the dark and light colors on his skin, we can apply those same colors to our gradient map adjustment. I also like that he has brown hair, so we can use that as well. Okay, now it's time for the fun part. We get to act like detectives. For this next part, I typed in key words into Google images to find images of the uniform. So to start off, we know that this was taken during World War two, because the picture was taken in 1942. If you want to double check the dates of wars, a quick Google search will show you to find a uniform similar to his, I need to look at clues that we see in this picture. Our biggest clue is the AA badge on his arm. So I typed in World War I AA badge to see what comes up. Going through the images, I found out that this is a World War two anti aircraft badge. As I was looking through the pictures, I saw that this badge has a dark blue rim with a white background and red letters. So I think we have our colors for the badge. I went ahead and saved one of these images by right clicking on it, and then pressing Save Image as we were super lucky that we had that great clue on his arm. Next, I want to know what color the uniform should be. I changed my search to World War two anti aircraft uniform. I found quite a few uniform images, but I wanted to find one that had our type of badge on it. Keep in mind that in our image, it looks like he's wearing a matching coat and hat with a light colored shirt and tie I found quite a few different images, but here are the two that I decided to save. I liked this first one because we can clearly see all of the metals and the badge are the exact same. However, I saved an additional reference because I think this color green is a bit more accurate. Now we have quite a few reference images, and we should be able to piece together the most accurate colors for our image. So now in affinity, I'm going to go to the top of our screen to file, and then down to place. All of the images that I found are included in the exercise files. So I'll just select all of these, and I'll open them up. I'll click and drag to add these images into our document. Then I'll hold Shift to select them all so that I can group them together with Command or Control G. I'll rename this group references. And now that we have all of these, we can use them for references as we paint. We're going to start off with recoloring the skin in the next video. 50. Example 2 - Skin: Let's recolor the skin. To start this off, I'm going to go into our reference images group, and I'll turn off all of the reference images other than our man. I'll add a new pixel layer on top of this group. And to start off, I'm going to create a color palette using his skin as a reference. To do this, I'll grab the paint brush tool, and using a nice small brush, I'm going to sample the different areas that I can see. Now, there aren't many shadows on his skin. This is a little bit tricky, but we can see a little bit of shadow here and a little bit in his ear. We can use either one of those. I'll just hold Alt or Option and I'll click to sample that color. Then I'll paint it over here. Next, I'll find a medium toned color. I think this color looks pretty good. I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click to sample that, and I'll paint that over here. To finish, I'll go to the brightest spot I can see on his skin, and I'll sample that. While I have this image open, I'm also going to sample the colors of his hair. So I'll start off with the darkest color I can see, and I'll paint that, and I'll continue with the midtones and the highlights. With that color palette prepared, we can go ahead and turn off our reference image. And now we can add a gradient map adjustment on top of our background layer. I'll zoom in so we can sample these colors better. And I'll just sample these colors for the shadows, midtones and highlights. Now that we have those colors sampled, we can go ahead and turn off the pixel layer and paint this gradient map adjustment so that it only shows up on his skin. I'll press Command or Control I to invert this. Then I'll make sure our colors up here are set to black and white. That way, we can paint white and black paint to add or remove this skin color. I'll make sure my hardness is set to 0% and my flow is 100%. And then I can go ahead and begin painting this on so I'll make an outline. I'll hold Alt or option, and I'll click on the mask, and I'll fill the rest in. Now that I finished painting, I just want to show you that I painted a little bit extra in his hairline and under the hat. It's a little hard to tell where his skin ends and the hat begins. So I figure we can paint a little bit extra now. And when we get to the point that we're recoloring the hair and his hat, this will make it easier to blend the two colors together. Now that we're done painting, I want to adjust these colors a little bit. I think the shadows color should be a bit darker, so I'll start there. I also think the skin color looks a little bit too pink. So I'll adjust this by sliding the hue more over toward orange. I'll also darken this midtone color. All right. I think that's pretty good for now. We can always go back and adjust this later as we see how it relates to the other colors. Next, we can go ahead and add some red to the face to add more color. I'll do that by adding a recolor adjustment. I'll slide the hue over a little bit more toward orange because he's not going to be wearing as much blush as our last model. I'll also reduce the saturation a little bit. So now we have a nice orangy red tone so that we can add some blood flow to his face. I'll invert this with Command or Control I. And then I can paint this on. I'll just lower my flow. And I'll gradually paint this over his ears, his nose and cheeks, around his eyes, and I'll paint a little bit on his neck. Now that I've added this redness, I think this looks better, but I think his skin still looks a little bit too pink. So I'll go back into our gradient map, and we can continue to adjust this as we go. Alright. For now, I think this is a really good start. Here's the before and after of that redness, and here is the before and after of recoloring his skin. Let's group these layers with Command or Control G, and I'll rename this group skin. In the next video, we'll finish the face by recoloring a few small details. 51. Example 2 - Face Details: This video we'll recolor the details on his face. So for this next part, we're going to recolor his mouth and his eyes. But before we do that, I think I still want to adjust his skin. Skin is so tricky, so I'm just going to take a little bit of time to make the shadows deeper. And then I think I'm going to add another color stop. This should help us to get a little bit more variety in the tones on the face. I'll also move this color stop over. I think his skin is starting to look better. Now that his skin is a better color, I think I need to reduce this recolor adjustment a little bit. So I'm just going to lower the opacity so that his skin doesn't have quite so much redness on it. Okay. I should have done that in the last video, but I needed to take a minute to think about what I needed to do. And I do think this looks better, adding a little bit more darkness to the shadow areas. And now we can go ahead and adjust his face details. I'll select the skin group, and I'll put a recolor adjustment on top of that. This recolor adjustment will be for recoloring his lips. So I'm going to shift the hue slider over more into the oranges and then I'll lower the saturation. I think this looks like a pretty good color. So I'm just going to invert this with Command or Control I, and then I'll raise the flow back to 100% so that I can paint this in Alright, I think that looks pretty good. So next, since I can see his gums, I think it would be nice to add another recolor adjustment for that. I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and then I'll paint this in. The color looks a little strange right here, so I'm just going to go back and raise the saturation and adjust this a little bit. All right. To finish off his mouth, let's do his teeth next. Remember that teeth shouldn't be purely white. So for this recolor adjustment, I'm going to make it an orange color to match his skin a little bit, and then I'll desaturate it. I'll invert this with command or control I, and I'll paint it in white paint over his teeth. These look really white, and I might want to adjust the color. But before I do that, I'm going to paint this over the whites of his eyes. So now that we can see both of those surrounded by his skin, I do think it's way too white. So I'm going to increase the saturation until I think this looks about how it should to be surrounded by his skin like this. All right. So now his mouth is done, so we can focus on his eyes. Let's recolor the iris next. I'll add a recolor adjustment, and I think his eyes would look nice as a brown color. So I'll choose a good brown color. I'll invert this layer with command or control eye, and I'll paint this over the iris of his eyes. With that painted on, we can adjust the color a little bit. And I think that looks pretty nice. To finish, let's add a little bit more redness around his eyes. I'll add another recolor adjustment. And I'll make it a nice red toned color. I'll invert this with Command or Control E, and I'll paint this in right around his eye. Now that it's painted in place, we can adjust the color a little bit. Okay, with all of that finished, I'll select all of our layers so that we can see the before and after of all of the face details. I'll group these layers together, and I'll rename the group. In the next video, we'll recolor his hair. 52. Example 2 - Hair: Video, we'll recolor the hair. So even though we have just a little bit of hair showing, we still need to carefully color this area so that it looks as realistic as possible. Let's go ahead and start by adding a gradient map adjustment. Then I'll turn on my layer that has the colors that I sampled from the man's hair. I'll zoom in and apply these colors to the gradient map adjustment. With that finished, I'll turn off this layer and I'll invert our gradient map adjustment with Command or Control E. Now using the paint brush, I'm just going to paint this in white paint to reveal it on his hair and his eyebrows. Now, as I do this, I really want to make sure that this blends into the areas, especially his hairline and his eyebrows. So I'm going to make sure to use a low flow in those areas. The colors that I chose for this look very gray and strange. So I'm going to open the gradient map adjustment to adjust these colors. I think this color looks better, but I think I want to add a little bit more saturation. So let's do our trick duplicating this adjustment with Command or Control J. And then we can go ahead and adjust these colors for the midtone. I'm going to make it more saturated and I'll shift it over toward red. You can see this is very saturated now. So I'm going to dilute this by painting in black paint with a low flow to gradually reduce this. Now you can see the before and the after. Maybe I'll remove a little bit more before and after. This has given us some really nice depth for the hair. Here's the before and the after of all of our hair layers. I'll group these together with Command or Control G, and I'll rename this group hair. That was pretty quick and easy. In the next video, we're going to take on a little bit of a project by recoloring all of his clothing. And 53. Example 2 - Clothes: This video will recolor the clothing. We have a lot of work to do because there's a lot of different colors that we'll need to change for his clothing. Let's go ahead and start by opening up the references group, and we can turn this group on. I'll turn off the man, and I'll turn on the badge. We can go ahead and start by applying these colors. I'm going to use a gradient map adjustment for each one of these colors so that we can sample the colors accurately. So I'll add a gradient map adjustment. And then we can go ahead and start with the white for the white. I'm going to look for the darkest color of white that I can see on here, and I'll try to sample that. Of course, we can edit these later. I'll look for a midtone and sample that, and I'll try to find the brightest spot that I can find for the highlights. So now we have a very strange gradient of white shades, but that's perfect for our purposes. I'll invert this with Command or Control I and now I'll paint in white paint with a full flow over the background. To save time, I'm going to paint this over the A's, and we'll recolor the A's next. With that done, I'm going to do the A's. So I'll add another gradient map adjustment. And this time, I'll sample the colors of our A's. So for the shadows, I'll look for the darkest color I can find. Then I'll do the midtones color, and we'll finish with the brightest part of the A. All right. I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and I'll paint this over the As. And last, we'll do this one more time for the blue part of the badge. Now that this is painted on, I'm going to go through each layer to make sure we have darker shadows and brighter highlights so that these colors look good for this picture. Here's what I did for the blue part of the badge. The original picture looked pretty bright. Even though our reference image is a darker blue, I think lighting it up looks pretty good for this picture. Here's what I did for the A's. I added a lot more darkness so that we could have some shadowing because it all looked like the same level of brightness. But now I think this looks better. The white part of the badge is tricky, but I think this looks pretty good, and it's showing through on the A's to give it a little bit more shadow. So I think this looks pretty nice. Now that we're done with the badge, we can go ahead and move on to the rest of the uniform. I'll turn off this reference image so that we can look at our other reference images. Since there's so much of it, let's work on the green part of the uniform next. I'll select our top gradient map adjustment so that I can put another one on top of it. Then we can go ahead and sample the green colors that we can see in our reference image. I'll turn this off, and I'll invert this layer with command or Control I. Now I'll paint with full flow to create an outline around his coat and his hat. I'll try to avoid the metal details that are on his coat and on his hat because we'll recolor those separately later. Now that that's painted, I'm just going to open the gradient map adjustment so that we can adjust these colors. I think these colors look good for the uniform, but I'll turn on the reference image just so we can double check. The uniform here looks a lot darker, but his has a lot of highlights on it naturally. So I think these colors are pretty similar, and I think I'm going to leave it as is. Next, let's do the shirt and tie. Now, we have two reference images here. You can see in this one. The man has the same uniform, but he has a white shirt and a black tie. So I'm going to instead use this as a reference, even though we can barely see the color right here. So I'm going to have to do some guessing as we adjust our gradient map for this one. But I'll go ahead and start by applying this tan color to the shadows midtones and highlights. This is a pretty good start for this tan color. I'm just going to adjust the shadows to make them darker. I'll adjust this one to be a little bit darker as well. I'll make sure the highlights are a nice bright color. Okay, I think this looks pretty good. I'll just move the mid tones over so we have a little bit more darkness and I'll invert this layer with Command or Control eye so that we can paint it in white paint over the shirt and tie. All right. I think that color looks pretty good. We're almost done. We just have a few more little details to take care of. For the hat strap right here in these metal areas, I'm going to use our other reference image. I know these colors might not be perfectly accurate, but based on this reference, it looks like we have a brown leather for the strap and visor of his hat. And then for the metal pieces, it looks like they're more of a brass color. So I'm going to try to use colors like that. Since I know these colors aren't exact, I'm not going to sample the colors from that reference image. Instead, I'm just going to use the recolor adjustment to try to get the areas looking about, right? Let's start with the leather areas. I'm going to increase the hue, so it's more of an orange color. And then I'll lower the saturation to make it appear brown. I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and I'll paint this on next, we can do the metals. I'll use another recolor adjustment, and I'll make them a brass color. I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and I'll paint this on. Alright, his clothing is all done. At this point, we could recolor the background, but I actually think it looks good already, so I'll leave it alone. I'm just going to hold Shift to select all of these clothing layers and I'll group them with Command or Control G. Now you can see the before and the after of all of that work that we just did. That was a lot of painting in this video, and now our recoloring is officially done. In the next video, we're going to finish this project with some final enhancements. 54. Example 2 - Final Enhancements: Add some finishing touches to this recoloring project. To begin, let's adjust the overall lighting. I'll add a curves adjustment. And to begin, I really want to darken the shadows. I think they look way too light right now. So I'll just bring that over to make them darker, and then I'll raise the spline to keep our picture bright. Okay. This looks really nice. Here's the before and after of that. Next, I'm going to add even more darkness with some strategic painting. I'll add another curves adjustment. I'll darken this. I'll invert this layer with command or control I and then using a low flow, I'm just going to paint this over a few strategic areas. So to begin, I'm going to paint this on his face. So I'll paint this over his eyebrows. I'll paint this over his eyes. Focusing on his pupil, you can see this looks a little too bright right now. That looks better. And then with a larger brush, I'll paint it over his whole eyes and his eyelashes. I think some of the shadows on his face could use darkening like under his nose, the inside of his mouth right here. That looks better. We can also darken under the hat a little bit to help us with this transition area. I'll also darken under his neck a little bit. And I think that looks pretty good. Now you can see the before and the after with our strategic darkening. All right. Next, we're going to adjust the overall colors with the color balance adjustment. Just like last time, I'm going to add cooler colors into the shadows, so I'll add a little bit of cyan. I'll add a little bit of magenta and a little bit of blue. For the midtones, I'm going to add some red. And a little bit of yellow. And last, for our highlights. I think there's plenty of redness. I'm just going to add some yellow. Alright, here's the before and the after before, after. I think the shadows look so much better with all of these changes that we've made. There is one thing that's bothering me. I think his AA badge is a little too saturated, especially the blue. So I'm going to open up the clothing group, and I'm going to find that part of the badge. And I'm just going to desaturate the colors a little bit. Okay. I think that looks a lot better. Now to finish our final touches, I'm just going to reduce the noise. You can see we have some subtle noise, and it might even be texture from the paper this was printed on. Since it looks like texture, instead of using the denise filter, I'm going to use the dust and scratches filter. I'll increase the radius to soften that texture. We don't need to bring it very high. Just enough to soften it. And now that that's softened, I'm just going to paint in a low flow in black paint to remove this from his face details. So I'll paint it over his eyebrows and eyes over his nose and his mouth. And you can look at the other details and see if they need more detail brought back. And we can paint over those areas. All right, zooming in here. Now you can see the before and after. Maybe I'll paint a little bit more over his eyes. All right. Before and after the texture is softened, but we still have good detail. With all of that done, I'm going to select all of our layers so that we can see the complete before and after. Isn't this amazing? Great work on this recoloring chapter. I know you won't recolor every image that you restore, but I hope you still had fun learning about how to do this. To finish off this course, we're going to spend the last chapter learning about restoring pictures that already have color. 55. Red Eye Removal: Throughout this course, we've only worked with black and white photos. But what if you want to restore a photo that's just a few decades old and is a color photo. Fixing up colors is a little bit harder to do, but I'll show you some great techniques that you can use in this chapter. Let's start with a super simple thing to fix. Red eye. This image is from 1978. I love these beanbag chairs in the shag carpet. Very 70s. To fix the red eye. First, I'm going to duplicate this layer with Command or Control J. Using the red eye tool is destructive, so I want to keep a duplicate copy of my original layer. Now I'm going to select the red eye tool, which you can find by clicking on the little gray triangle next to the end painting brush and then going down to the red eye removal tool. To use this tool, all you need to do is click and drag over the red part of the eye. So you can see this is super simple. I'll just do this for all of the eyes in our photo. Now you can see the red eyes gone, but personally, I find that this red eye tool can be a little bit too intense. The eyes look black and unrealistic for this photo. So let's do a little bit more work to fix this. First, I'm going to reduce the opacity of this layer to lighten up this blackness from the red eye tool. This has brought a little bit of the redness back. So next, I'm going to add a recolor adjustment. I'm just going to make this a brown color. I'll close this and invert it with Command or Control I. Using the paint brush, I'm going to paint with full flow in white paint over the eyes. These two people have darker eyes, so I think this recolor adjustment looks pretty good for their eyes. We can always adjust the saturation, though, and the hue a little bit. But I think this looks pretty good. For this girl, her eyes seemed a little bit lighter. So I'm going to use a different color. I'll add another recolor adjustment. And this time, I'm going to change it to a blue colour. Then I'll lower the saturation quite a bit. I'll invert this with command or control eye, and I'll paint this over her eyes. Even though I lowered the saturation a lot, it looks like this is very intense. So I'm going to lower the flow of my paint brush and I'll paint over it in black paint a few times to reduce it. We can also open the recolor adjustment and make any last adjustments. And with that, we are done fixing the red eye. It's pretty easy to fix red eye with a red eye tool. But by using a couple more layers, you can customize the colors to make it look more natural. Here's the before and the after. Go ahead and keep this image open because in the next video, we're going to learn a super simple trick to help you fix a color tint on an image. 56. Fixing Color Tint: In this video, we'll learn a quick way to fix a color tint. So in this photo, we have a bit of an orange color cast on top of it. To get rid of the color cast, here's a great trick that you can use. First, select the rectangle tool. Then click and drag out a rectangle. With this rectangle layer selected, click and drag on the color picker tool to sample a color that should be white. In this case, I'm going to sample his white shirt. That color has now been applied to the rectangle. So as a next step, I'm going to grab the move tool, and I'm going to click and drag to place this rectangle over the entire image. To finish off this trick, we need to change the blend mode to divide. So go right here and then go down to where it says, divide and select that. We haven't really used blend mode much in this course, but this blend mode allows these layers to blend together to make the sampled area look white. If you look at his shirt now, you can see it looks a lot more white. Here's the before and the after. I think this looks great for this picture, but depending on the white color that you sampled, this might be too extreme. So feel free to lower the opacity a little. This trick is a great place to start for fixing any color tint issues. I don't find myself always using this trick, but it is a great trick to know if you have a very extreme color cast on your image. So now you know how to fix two very specific issues, red eye and color tint. These issues don't come up in every photo. If you want a more general workflow for fixing color photos, then you're in luck. In the next few videos, we'll take one image, and I'll walk you through the process of restoring it. We'll start with making a plan in the next video. 57. Make a Plan: In this video, we'll make a plan for how to clean up our first color photo from start to finish. This is a photo of Jana and her sister taken in the Czech Republic. We're going to use this picture to slowly go step by step to improve the colors. The workflow for cleaning up color photos is pretty similar to black and white, but we'll just add a few more steps to fix the colors. Just as we did with black and white photos, we're going to begin with cropping. So we'll make sure to bring in these sides. But in addition, I think this photo is a little bit warped. So we're also going to fix the warping. After that, we're going to do a little bit of cleanup. So we're going to make sure to fix a few areas with blemishes. There aren't many blemishes on this picture, though, which is good. So we'll just take some time to clean up a few areas. After that, we'll work on the lighting. I think this picture needs more contrast, since it's a little faded. So we'll darken the shadow areas and brighten up the highlights. Okay, here's where things get interesting. We're going to work on the colors next. To do this, I'm going to break this up into a few categories. First, we're going to work on the global colors. This is just a general adjustment to fix the overall color tints. After that, we're going to work on specific colors. In this case, we'll be working on fixing colors that we're familiar with. For example, we know what color grass is. It should be a yellow green color. So at this point, we'll make sure the grass is the proper color. We'll also make sure their denim is the right color. Right now, it looks a little bit purple, so we're going to make sure to fix that. And last, we're going to fix any colors that are missing. For example, up in the sky, it looks a little bit brown right now. So we'll make sure to add back a blue color to make the sky look more natural. To finish off our workflow, we'll just make sure to reduce any noise that's left behind. So now you know the workflow. Most of it you already know how to do, but we'll make sure to take our time with the color videos so that you feel comfortable using these techniques. In the next video, we'll get started with the cropping and warping step, as well as the cleanup. Y. 58. Cropping & Clean Up: Let's crop and clean up this image. So to begin, this photo seems a little bit warped. So I'm going to select our photo layer, and then I'm going to use the perspective tool to warp the edges. I'll pull this side out since it's slanting inward right now. And I'll pull this side down like that. So now the edges are gone, but I can see that the people are slanted a little bit. So to fix that, I'll pull this edge out a little bit. And maybe I'll pull these edges downward. Go ahead and mess with the edges until you like how everything is positioned. I think this looks pretty good. Maybe I'll pull this out a little bit more. Once you like how the edges look, go ahead and press Apply. With that done, I just need to get rid of this edge up here. I'm going to select the crop tool and I'll pull that in. I think all of the other edges are taken care of at this point. I'll press Apply and now we have it cropped. Now that that's done, we can begin our cleanup. I'll add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to go to our cleanup tools and using this little gray triangle, I'll select the painting brush so that we can begin our painting. There really isn't too much to clean up in this image. So go ahead and zoom in and take care of any of the little dust and specs that are on this picture. All right. And with that, we're done with the cleanup. I'm just going to rename this layer. And now that we're done with that, in the next video, we'll work on fixing the lighting. 59. Lighting: Let's fix the lighting in this video. So just as we did with black and white photos, the next thing that we'll work on is lighting. Now, I find that with color photos, it can be a little bit harder to adjust the lighting, and one thing that can make it easier is actually temporarily making your photo black and white. That way you can see the light and dark areas easier. I'll go to our adjustments and I'll add the black and white adjustment. I'll close out of this. Now, as we're working with the lighting, we'll make sure that this stays on top. So I'll click on the cleanup layer and I'll add our curves adjustment on top of that. So now we can see that the shadows are pretty faded. So I'm going to begin by pulling in the black point to darken the shadows. I think the white areas look pretty good, but we can pull them in just a little bit to brighten them up. Now I think the overall lighting of this picture looks a lot better. So let's go ahead and do some targeted lighting. Right now, our subjects are blending into their background a little bit. So I think it would look nice if we darkened the background. I'll add another curves adjustment, and I'll darken this. I'll invert this layer with Command or Control I and using the paint brush, I'll paint in white paint with 0% hardness and I'll lower the flow so that I can blend this into the background. I may have painted a little bit too much, so I'm going to change this color to black so that I can remove this from our subjects. All right, here is the before and the after of darkening the background. I think this looks pretty nice. Now that we're done with that, we can turn off the black and white adjustment so that we can see how this looks in color. So here is the before and the after. I think that black and white adjustment was helpful for us to see how much contrast needed to be added. But now that it's turned off, I can see that I want this picture to be a bit brighter. So I'm going to add another curves adjustment. All right. That looks pretty good. Maybe I'll go back to our background darkening layer and I'll just raise this so it's not quite so dark. Now I think we have a pretty good balance. You can see the before and after the picture is less faded and our subjects are standing out nicely. I'll just delete our black and white adjustment. I'll hold shift to select all of these lighting layers and I'll group them together with Command or Control G. All right, with the lighting done, in the next video, we're going to work on fixing the global colors. 60. Global Colors: Let's fix the global colors in this video. When I say global colors, I mean that we're going to focus on the overall colors of the entire image. In the next video, we're going to focus on more specific colors. But for now, I want to focus on the image as a whole. Let's start with a great adjustment that you can use for colors. The color balance adjustment. We've used this adjustment before. It lets you add color tints to the shadows, midtones and highlights. Let's begin with the shadows. Right now, you can look at our shadows and see that there's a little bit of redness in them. If you zoom in here, you can see that this looks a little bit red, little sprinkles of red all throughout this. So I'm going to add some cool colors to this to help even it out. Just shifting the cyan slider, you can really see what a difference this makes. That already looks so much better. I also think there's a little bit of magenta. So I'm going to shift this slider toward green to reduce that. And to finish, I'm just going to add a little bit of blue. And now I think those shadows are looking pretty good. Here's the before and the after. That looks so much better to me in the shadows. But now the picture has lost a lot of warmth. I'm going to bring back some warmth by adjusting the midtones. So I'll add some redness here. I think I'll add a little bit of magenta as well, and I'll add some yellow. This is pretty good, but we can add even more warmth to the highlights. So I'll add a little bit of red, but not too much. You can see this starts to affect the sky, and we don't want that. So I'll just raise that a little bit. I'll add a little bit of magenta and a little bit of yellow. With that finished, now you can see the before and the after. I think this already is a big improvement. The grass looks greener, the denim looks more blue. There's just improvements all around. At this point, I think we're done with our global adjustments. We can always come back and adjust this layer later as needed. But for now, I'm just going to rename this layer, global color. In the next video, we're going to target specific areas to make their colors look even better. 61. Targeted Colors: Let's add some targeted colors. After working on the global colors of a photo, it's time to start zooming into the picture to work on specific areas. In this video, we're going to work on the denim and the grass. Let's go ahead and start with the denim. I'm going to add a color balance adjustment. And this time, I'm going to show you a little trick that I sometimes like to use. You can make your adjustment very extreme like this and then invert it with Command or Control I now you can paint this adjustment over the area that you want to effect. Since the adjustment looks very extreme, it's a lot easier to see where you're painting. Now that it's painted, you can open up the color balance adjustment and make any adjustments that you want. I'll reset these sliders, and then we can go ahead and adjust this. I'll start in the shadows, and I'm just going to add a bit more cyan, and that already looks a lot better to me. I think I'll also add a bit of blue. Here's the before and after. I think by just adjusting the shadows, our denim looks perfect. So I'm not going to mess with any of the other tonal ranges. With that done, we can go ahead and work on the grass. I want to reduce any blue tones that are in the grass and make the grass look more yellow green. So once again, I'm going to add the color balance adjustment, and I'm going to make it an extreme color I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and I'll paint this over the entire grass. All right. I've painted all of the grass in the foreground, as well as some of the grass that I saw in the background. Now I'll just open up this adjustment so that we can adjust our colors. I'll reset these sliders, and we can go ahead and start with the shadows. Sometimes I'm not really sure which direction the slider should go in. So I just move the slider back and forth to see which side looks better. In this case, I think red looks a little bit better. So for the shadows, I ended up adding a little bit of red, a lot of green, and some yellow. This color already looks more like grass to me. Here's the before and after. Let's continue in the midtones and the highlights. For the midtones, I decided not to move the Cyan red slider. I added green, and I added yellow. Let's finish with the highlights. For the highlights, I decided that it looked best to add some red, leave the Magenta green slider alone, and add some yellow. Now you can see this looks so much better. Here's the before and the after. Of course, this grass might look a little bit too perfect for this photo, since this photo still has some more faded colors. So I'm going to lower the opacity of this layer. I didn't want the grass to become overpowering. To finish, let's use one more color adjustment. So far, we've just used the color balance adjustment to fix the colors. But if you want to focus on just one color, the HSL adjustment is also a great one to use. For example, in this picture, I think it'd look nice if the red colors stood out more. So I'm going to add the HSL adjustment. Then within this adjustment, I'm going to go to the red color channel. From here, we can adjust these sliders to only affect the red colors. So you can see, as I adjust the hue slider that the red colors in the pictures are affected. I'll reset this because all I really want to do is increase the saturation. Now you can see the before and after. This might be a little bit too much because her skin is starting to look too saturated. So I'll lower this down and you can see the before and after of boosting the saturation of the reds. All right, before we finish this video, this area has been bothering me this yellow spot right here. To fix this, I'm going to add another HSL adjustment. Then I'm going to go to the yellow channel. I'm going to adjust this area so that it looks more green like the rest of the grass. So with the hue slider, I'm going to shift this until that area becomes green. Then I'll lower the saturation of that area. I'll invert this with command or control I, and I'll paint this in. You can see that's really improved most of the yellow, but we still have some yellow left behind. So I'll just do this one more time with another HSL adjustment to shift this area. I'll invert it with Command or Control I, and I'll paint it over that spot. So now you can see that area is fully integrated. Here's the before and after. Much better. With that, I think we're done for this video. Adjusting the color in specific areas is pretty easy, and it can make a nice difference for your photos. You can use the HSL adjustment or the color balance adjustment to really make a difference. Here's the before and the after. I'll group these layers together and I'll rename them targeted colors. In the next video, we'll talk about adding new colors to specific areas. 62. Adding New Colors: In this video, we'll add new colors from scratch to specific areas. Sometimes in old photos, you need to add your own color because the color palette is very limited to begin with. For example, in this image, the sky isn't blue. It's a faded brown color instead. It would look a lot better if we could just add a brand new blue color all over the sky instead of trying to adjust this faded brown color. So in this video, we'll work on fixing the sky to add some nice blue colors, and we'll work on fixing the blue fringing that you can see on some of these trees. To add new colors, we can use the Trusty recolor adjustment. It's perfect for adding colors from scratch. I'll adjust this so that we have a nice sky blue color. I'll invert this with Command or Control I, and now I'll paint in white paint with full flow all over the sky. I'm going to avoid painting on the trees because the trees have some bright blue fringing that we need to take care of later. So make sure you do not paint on the trees or on that blue fringing. Alright. Now we have that painted on. Here's the before and after. I think this sky color looks really nice. But a big part of the sky is still pretty desaturated. So I want to add a little bit more color. To do this, I'm going to duplicate our recolor adjustment with Command or Control J. With this duplicate copy, I'll open it up and I'll increase the saturation. You can see this looks good on this part of the sky, but now this area is too saturated. So I'm going to change my color to black, and with a low flow, I'm going to remove it from that part of the sky. Now you can see the before and after. I think this guy has great color. All right. The last thing I want to do is fix the fringing that we have around the trees. A quick way to take away color is to use the HSL adjustment. I'll just zoom into this tree so that you can see that fringing. And then I'm going to go to the main color channel right here, and I'm just going to desaturate this. You can see this has taken away most of the color of that fringing. So I'm going to invert this with Command or Control I. And then I'm going to paint in white paint to reveal this desaturation over the fringing. I'll just raise my flow so that we can see this as we paint. You can see as I'm painting that if I paint too much, will begin to desaturate the sky. So you want to be careful with your painting here to make sure you're only removing the fringing. So go ahead and use a very small paint brush as you remove this. I can see I missed some spots as I was painting the blue sky. So I'm going to click on our recolor adjustment layer again so that I can add those areas back in. Alright. With that, you can see the before and after of the fringing before and after. I think the sky looks so much better after those changes. Here's the complete before and after of our sky. All group these layers together and I rename the group. In the next video, we're going to finish this image by reducing the noise. 63. Noise: Let's reduce the noise in this video. So let's go ahead and zoom in to see what we're working with. I can see subtle noise. So I'm going to add the denise filter. I'll increase the luminance so that we can soften this noise. I'll raise this so that it's outside of that group, just to make sure it's affecting everything. Now you can see the before and the after. There wasn't much detail to begin with. I think softening this noise did a great job of softening the image without losing detail. I'll leave this denoise filter applied to the whole image. Great work on this image. I'll hold Shift to select all of these layers so that we can see the final before and after. What a huge difference. I know working with color photos can be pretty tricky, but if you follow this workflow to gradually fix this image layer by layer, you'll be surprised at how much you can do. To finish this chapter and this course, we're going to restore two more color photos from start to finish. We'll start with that in the next video. 64. Practice 1 - Clean Up & Lighting: In this video, we'll restore another color photo. This is a cute family photo taken in 1971. Since you already know how to do the techniques that we'll use, we'll go at a little bit of a faster pace this time. But I'll still make sure to explain what I'm doing so that you can follow along. Here is the workflow that we'll use. It's the same workflow that we did last time. So we could definitely start with cropping our image. But I think this time, I'm going to leave this border because it looks very clean and symmetrical, but feel free to crop it if you'd like. The next step is cleanup. So let's go ahead and do that. I'll add a new pixel layer and I'll select the end painting brush. So I'll go ahead and quickly clean this up. I finished with the end painting, but I did struggle a little bit with this blemish on the boy's face. So I'm going to grab the clone brush so that I can do this manually. I'll hold Alt or option to sample an area close to the blemish, and then I'll paint over it. This isn't looking very good, so I'm going to lower the flow of my paint brush, and I'll try to sample an area that's even closer to the blemish. That looks better. I'll continue to sample nearby areas and paint this away. Alright, that looks so much better. Now that the image is cleaned up, we can go ahead and adjust the lighting. So I'm going to add a curves adjustment. This picture isn't as faded as usual, so I'm just going to move the black point inward just a little bit. And since the water is so bright, I think I'll leave our white point alone. But I will erase this just a little bit to bring more light into our people's faces. Now that the overall lighting looks better, let's do a little bit of targeted lighting. I want our subjects to stand out more. So let's start with brightening our subjects. I'll add another curves adjustment. I'll brighten this up. I'll invert this with Command or Control I and I'll paint this in white paint with 0% hardness and a low flow to put this over our subjects. Using a low flow will help us to gradually add this brightness. I don't want the people to become too bright. So I think this looks pretty good. All right. Now you can see the before and after before, after. They look so much brighter. This is really nice. To contrast their brightness. I think it'd be a good idea to darken the background. So I'll add another curves adjustment. I'll darken this. I'll invert this layer with Command or Control I, and I'll paint this over the background. Alright, here's the darker background before and after. Now you can see what a difference this targeted lighting made before and after. All right, there we have it. Our first steps are done with the cleanup and the lighting done, let's go ahead and group the lighting layers together and rename this group. And I'll rename our cleanup layer. In the next video, we'll finish with this project by adjusting the colors and the noise. 65. Practice 1 - Colors & Finishing Touches: Fix the colors and add some finishing touches in this video. So to start, let's work on the global colors. Right now, I think the image looks very red, especially on their faces. So let's add a color balance adjustment to mess with these colors a little. Let's go ahead and start in the shadows. I want to cool down the shadows. So I'm going to add some cyan. I'll add some green. You can see the trees don't look nearly as green as they should. So by raising this, I think this looks a bit better. I'll also add some blue. Here's the before and after so far with the shadows. You can especially see right here on the ground how much better this looks before and after. Let's continue with adjusting the midtones. I'll move each slider side to side to see what looks better. For the midtones, I added cyan, green, and blue. Let's do the highlights next. For the highlights, I added cyan and blue. Sometimes the smallest adjustments can make a really big difference. Here's the before and the after. The redness is gone. I think these colors look way more accurate. Next, let's focus on the water. The water is a tricky area because right now it looks pure white. Let's try to adjust this a little bit using a color balance adjustment. I don't want to make the water fully blue. I just want to make it look more blue. So to do this, let's go into our highlights since the water is white and adjust these sliders. So I added a bit of cyan, green, and blue. And you can see the before and after. I think the water looks better, but I don't want this to affect the people. So I'm going to invert this layer with Command or Control I and I'll paint this color over the water and the sky. The sky is being blocked by a tree, but since this is only affecting the highlights, I think it's fine to paint it directly over the tree, and now you can see the before and after. It doesn't really affect the colors of the tree, but it does make the water in the sky look a bit more blue before and after. I think most of the colors look better, but I do think that the skin looks a little bit too saturated compared to everything else. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment I'll go to the red channel to only affect the skin. And then I'm going to shift the hue slightly over to the left. You can see this reduces the redness, but I only want to pull this over a little bit. Then I'm going to reduce the saturation a little. Here is the before and after, subtly reducing the redness on their faces. Right now, zooming out, you can see all of the colors look a lot more accurate and even. But now I think I want to affect the overall image again because the whole image looks a little desaturated now to make the colors more vibrant. I'm going to add another HSL adjustment This time, I'll go into our main color channel and I'll increase the saturation. I think this looks really nice. I do think I want to increase the saturation of these yellow green bushes. So I'm going to go into the yellow color channel, and I'm going to adjust this a little. I'll increase the saturation, and I'll shift the hue slider a little bit over to the left to make it look more green. All right. With all of those color changes, I'll hold Shift to select all of these layers so that you can see the before and after. I think this looks really improved from where we started, but I do think we have a slight green tint now. So I'm going to go back into our color balance adjustment, and I'm going to go to the midtones to lower this green slider. There we go. To me, that looks better. I'll just group all of these color layers together, and I'll rename the group. Okay, to finish, let's take a look at the noise. As I zoom in, I can see we have a bit of noise, but we really don't have much detail on the face. So I think this is a situation where I actually don't want to adjust the noise because if I soften this image anymore, we might lose all of the detail that we do have. So I'm going to skip the denoise filter this time. With that, I think that means we're done. I'll select all of the layers we worked on so that we can see the complete before and after. What a huge difference. Great work on this project. It's a good idea to continue practicing the things you learn. So we're going to do one last restoration project in the next video. 66. Practice 2 - Clean Up & Lighting: In this video, we'll start to restore our last image of the course. This final photo was submitted by Jay Brent, and it's from his wife's family photos. We're going to use the same workflow that we've been using throughout the course. This project will have more layers than the last one, and it will take a little bit more time to clean up. But the end result will be so beautiful. This image definitely needs to be cropped, so we'll go ahead and start there. I'll grab the crop tool and I'll pull in the edges. Then I'll press Apply. With that finished, we can begin our cleanup. So I'll add a new pixel layer, and I'll grab the end painting tool so that we can get started. So I'm just going to go a little bit at a time to clean up the background and our subject. This image seems to be a little bit older, so it has a few more blemishes. So go ahead and take your time to clean this up. I'm going to switch my brush to the clone brush to clean up a few tricky areas. Okay, I think this looks a lot better. Here's the before and the after. Let's work on the lighting next. I'll add a curves adjustment so that we can affect the overall lighting. This image is pretty faded. So I'm going to pull in the black point and I'll pull the white point over as well. This looks really different and so much better, I think. I know the colors aren't right yet, but you can see the before and the after. It looks like we've really restored a lot of the detail by darkening the shadows and brightening the highlights. Now that the overall photo looks better, I think I want to make the subject even brighter. So I'll add another curves adjustment. I'll brighten this. I don't want to brighten it so that the shadows become too light. So I'm going to lower the shadow side like this so that our shadows stay nice and dark on our subject. I'll invert this with command or control I, and then I'll grab the paint brush and white paint, and I'll raise my flow a little bit so that I can paint this over our subject. I'm going to paint this over our entire subject, except for her shoes. Her shoes are already overly bright white, so I want to make sure not to brighten those too much. Now you can see the before and after of brightening up our subject. Alright. Next, I want to really refine our lighting by brightening and darkening certain areas on our subject, just to add some extra contrast and really help her to stand out. To begin, I'm going to add another bright curve to brighten some key areas. I'll invert this with Command or Control I. And I'm going to paint this over existing highlight areas to make them even brighter. So in her hair, I'm going to paint this over the highlight areas of her curls. I'll also paint this over the highlight areas on her face. I'll also do this on her clothing, brightening up the buttons and all of the little folds in her dress, and I'll brighten the highlight areas on her arm and legs. Now we can darken a few areas. I'll add another curves adjustment, and I'll darken this one, and I'll invert it. I'm going to repeat this process, painting this over all of the shadows that I see on our subject. Alright, I just finished painting on those targeted lighting areas, and now you can see the difference this has made. Here is the before and after before and after. I think this has made a really nice difference to our model, especially her cute curly hair before and after. It really just makes these areas stand out more by adding this contrast. I'm going to select all of our lighting layers so that you can see the before and after of all of our great work with the lighting. All group these layers together and I'll rename them. I think we've really improved this image so far, but the colors still look pretty bad. So we're going to focus on fixing the colors in the next video. 67. Practice 2 - Colors & Finishing Touches: Let's fix the colors and the noise in this video. Okay, so the colors need a lot of work. We're probably going to need to use quite a few layers to get this right. Now, because we have such an extreme color tint, I think this is the perfect image to try out our color tint trick. So I'm going to grab the rectangle tool. I'll just select our top layer so this goes above everything, and I'll click and drag out our rectangle. Then I'm going to sample an area that should be white. So I'm going to go to the brightest part of the shoes that I can find. You can see this is a pretty dark color. So let's just see how this works. We might need to make some adjustments later. I'll stretch this over our entire image, and then I'll change the blend mode to divide. If you look at the shoes, you can see they look a lot more white. But if this looks too extreme for your picture, go ahead and lower the opacity of this layer. Here is the before and after of reducing the color tint. To adjust these colors even more, let's add a color valent adjustment. I'm going to go through the shadows, midtones and highlights to gradually adjust each of these sliders. For the shadows, I added cyan, magenta, and blue. For the midtones, I did the same adding cyan, magenta, and blue. And for the highlights, I added cyan and magenta. You can see the colors look so much better already. Here's the before and the after. The shadows, especially, look a lot better. Let's fix the colors of a few specific areas next. I think I want to start with the skin. It looks pretty yellow right now, so I want to add some red to it. To do this, I'm going to add another color balance adjustment. And this time, I'm going to go to the midtones and apply an extreme color then I'll invert this with command or control I so that I can carefully paint this over the skin. Make sure that your colors are set to black and white. That way you can fully effect the mask. I'll also raise my flow to 100%. All right. Now that it's fully covering the skin, I'm just going to open this color balance so that we can adjust these colors. I'll reset our sliders and start in the shadows. For the shadows, I added a bit of cyan, green, and blue to cool down the shadows. For the midtones, I really warmed it up with a lot of red and a little bit of yellow. For the highlights, I found a nice balance by adding red, magenta, and a little bit of blue. Here is the before and after. It looks like her skin has a lot more life in it now. Alright. Next, let's work on the dress just to make the color a bit more vibrant. I'll add a color balance adjustment. And once again, I'm going to apply an extreme color. I'll invert this and paint it over the dress. Okay, let's change the colors of the dress now. I'll reset our sliders, and let's begin with the shadows. I want to enhance the natural color. So I added a bit of cyan and blue. For the midtones, I added a lot of cyan, some green, and a lot of blue. And for the highlights, I added some cyan and blue. With that finished, you can really see the difference. Here's the before and after. Not only do I think this looks better. I think this might be a more accurate color of the dress. Now that these colors look so much better, I just want to add one more color balance adjustment to cool down the shadows and warm up the highlights. So let's add one more. For the shadows, I added cyan, magenta, and blue. For the midtones, I added red, green, and blue. And for the highlights, I just added a little bit of cyan. Alright, here is the before and after. These colors look so good. To finish off this project, it's time to zoom into our picture to look at the noise. Now, as I'm looking at this picture, it looks like we have a bit of texture in our picture. There seems to be lines going down this photo. To smooth this out, I'm going to add the dust and scratches filter. I'll raise the radius just a little bit to soften those lines. Then I'll invert this with command or Control I so that I can just paint this over the areas where it really stands out. In this case, I'm just going to paint this over the background and her dress. For her dress, I'm going to lower the flow so that we can still see the nice little folds in the fabric. Even with a lower flow, this still seems a little bit strong. So I'll change my paint colour to black. I'll lower the flow quite a bit, and I'm just going to paint this over her dress to reduce that. Now, as we zoom in, you can see the before and after, and how that's reduced the lines. To finish this project off, I do think the denoise filter could really help here. So I'll apply that and I'll raised luminance. I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. We still have good detail, but the noise is a lot softer. Alright, there we have it. I'll just select all of our layers so that we can see this complete before and after. What a dramatic before and after. This looks so, so good. Great work on finishing this final project of the course. 68. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I'm so proud of you. I know that we learned a lot throughout this course, but now you have everything you need to bring your old photos back to life. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.