Master RAW Editing in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Hey, they're affinity fans. Today, I'm excited to share my newest course with you, where we'll learn how to edit raw images in affinity photo. Using raw images is the best way to improve your photography. In this course, I'll show you everything you need to make raw photos look their best. Once you know how to edit raw photos, you'll be able to take an image like this, and turn it into this, or you'll be able to take a photo like this. And turn it into a photo like this. I'll also show you how to do batch processing. With batch processing, you can open multiple raw photos in affinity and instantly edit all of them. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with a few example files that we'll be using throughout the lessons. I encourage you to use these files because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of the new skills that you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson, and then we'll jump right into editing raw photos. 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. Histogram: This chapter we'll learn the very basics of editing raw photos. We'll start out by learning about why raw photos are so great. Later on, we'll go through the process of editing a raw photo. Let's get started by learning about the histogram. Before we jump into affinity, we need to understand how histograms work. Knowing how to understand a histogram is vital to editing raw photos. When you take a picture, the histogram will tell you all about how the lighting in your picture is distributed. You can think about the histogram like this. On the left side of the graph, we have the number of pixels in your picture, and on the bottom of the graph, we have the pixel brightness. Let's put some bars into this graph. If you have more pixels in your ph that are dark, this part of the histogram will be higher, and if you have more pixels in your photo that are bright, then this part of the histogram will be higher. Let's take a look at a real example. This is a photo with good lighting. It has some dark shadows and some bright highlights. Everything looks very evenly distributed. Here's the photo, very nice and here's its actual histogram. Just like with the simple bar graph, you can see the general shape with some shadows and some highlights, with most of the lighting being somewhere in the middle. Here's another example. This photo is very bright, too bright. It has no shadows and a ton of highlights. In fact, because the highlights bar is so large, we can assume that the highlights are clipping, otherwise known as blown out highlights. Here's the photo and histogram. When you have blown out highlights, it means that the bright areas of the photo have become too bright, making them pure white. Once they're pure white, they no longer have any detail left in them. In this example, you can see that the skin has these pure white spots without any skin texture. Here's one more example. This photo is very dark, too dark. It has no highlights and a ton of shadows. In fact, because the shadows bar is so large, we can assume that the shadows are clipping, otherwise known as crushed shadows. Here's the photo and histogram. When you have crushed shadows, it means that the dark areas of the photo have become too dark, making them pure black. Once they're pure black, they no longer have any detail left in them. In this example, you can see that the background and hair are both so dark that we've lost all detail. When a regular photo has blown out highlights or crushed shadows, there's nothing you can do to fix it. Affinity photo can't restore any details that existed in those areas. Be now all that's left is a big globe of white or black pixels, but with raw photos, it's another story. Stay tuned for the next video. 4. RAW Benefits: Let's talk about the benefits of using raw photos. The major benefit to raw photos is that there's secret information outside of the normal histogram. This secret information is only accessible when your photo is raw. The main goal when editing a raw photo is to get all of the secret information inside of the histogram. Once all of the information is in the histogram, there's no more need to keep the photo raw. Let's start with a dark raw picture. We have a very dark photo with secret information in the shadows. The histogram looks really dark and we need to shift the lighting to reveal the shadow information again. Here's what this looks like after. Pretty incredible. We were able to get so much of the information back and the histogram looks way better now. Raw photos are amazing. Let's do one other example with a very bright photo. You can see that the histogram is hiding the extra bright details right now, and here's the after. We've recovered the highlights so that we can see all of the detail again. Being able to access that information is the whole reason why you should shoot in raw formatting. It can make all of the difference if you take a photo that's a little too bright or too dark. Now that you know the benefits of shooting in raw. In the next video, we'll talk about where to edit these types of photos. 5. Photo Persona vs. Develop Persona: Let's talk about when you should edit in the photo persona or the developed persona. When you open up a regular photo in affinity, you use the photo persona. This is where 99% of the work is done in affinity photo. But when you open a raw photo, you are immediately taken to the develop persona, which is a totally different workspace. What's the difference? Well, this new workspace, the developed persona can edit the brightness, contrast, and saturation. But so can the photo persona? In addition to having those same abilities, The photo persona also has many other features like layers and masks, which are extremely useful in photo editing. In general, you should do most of your editing in the photo persona. Since the photo persona can do so much more, why would you ever use the developed persona? That's a great question. The main benefit to the developed persona is that it can do one thing that the photo persona can't do. It allows you to edit raw photos and recover all of that secret information that we talked about in the last video. Here's the workflow. First, open up your raw photo. This will take you into the developed persona. Here you can unclip your highlights and shadows, and that's it. Even though the developed persona technically has the ability to adjust more things in your photo. I suggest you only adjust the lighting of the histogram. Then you can develop your photo and do the bulk of your editing in the photo persona. All right. That was a lot of information in the next video. We're going to see all of this in action and jump into affinity. 6. Basic RAW Edit: Okay, that's enough technical stuff. Let's edit a photo. Like we talked about, when you open up a raw photo, we're brought into the develop persona automatically. Now that we're here, let's take a closer look at our histogram. This histogram has a pretty even distribution of all of the lighting. I think this looks pretty good. But when you look at the actual photo, you can see that it looks dark. That's because this photo should have more highlights, especially because this is snow. We need to shift the lighting to make the photo have more highlights. In the next few videos, we're going to talk through all of these sliders so that you know what they do and how they affect our histogram. But just to keep things simple for now, I'm just going to raise the exposure to brighten up our photo. You can see this moves the histogram over toward the highlight side. I'm just going to raise this up. And that looks pretty good. Now that the histogram looks better, we can go ahead and develop the photo by coming up here to the top left and clicking develop, now we're in the photo persona and we can continue editing this photo however we want. First, let's add a little bit more contrast with the curves adjustment. I'll go to our adjustments, I'll select curves. Then I'm just going to add a little bit of an S curve by raising up the highlights and lowering the shadows to create a S shape. Now that we've enhanced the lighting, we can go ahead and enhance the colors. I'm going to go back to our adjustments and apply an HSL adjustment. Then I'd like to enhance the colors. I'm going to shift the saturations lighter over to increase this. I like how this is bringing out some of the blues and the shadows and the yellows of the trees. But I wish this red house was a little bit more vibrant. I'm going to go to the red channel and then I'll increase this saturation so that that stands out a little bit more. Okay. And with that, we finished the edits in the photo persona. So I'll select both of these layers by holding shift and clicking. And then I can turn them all off so you can see the before and here's the after. In the next video, I'm going to show you some great tips for working with those sliders in the developed persona. 7. Slider Tips: Let's learn some tips for working with the developed persona sliders. So just like we did in the last video, to adjust any of the sliders. All you need to do is click and drag to raise it or lower it. Or if you prefer, you can always type in a number right into this box, I'll type two, and then I'll press enter, and now we have an exposure of two. Another way you can do this is you can use the arrows next to it to slightly lower it or slightly raise it. That way you have a little bit more control, if you want to reset the slider, all you need to do is double click on it, and now we're back to zero. Or if you've made a lot of changes to all of the different sliders. You can always reset this entire exposure section by clicking on this little reset arrow right here. One other thing you can do, I'll just move these around a little bit. Is you can turn the entire section on and off to see the difference. I'll just click on this checkmark. Here's the Bo and after of this section. That's how the sliders work. This works with all of these different sections, and we're going to go through each one in the next video. 8. Slider Deep Dive: Let's take a deep dive into each of the sliders. Let's start in the exposure section. First, we have exposure, and we also have a slider called brightness. Both of these affect the histogram in a very similar way. By mostly brightening things up. You can see as I brighten this, the whole histogram shifts this way, but we're mostly affecting the highlights. The brightness lighter does the same thing, but it just moves it a bit les intensely. I like to move the exposure slighter to a good point. Then I'll use the brightness slighter to tweak it a bit to the right or left. Okay. We also have a black point slider, which does the opposite. It mostly focuses on the shadow side. As I move this, you can see that the highlights over here aren't really being affected. We're only really affecting the shadow part of the histogram. In our next section, we have enhanced. Let's go ahead and start with the contrast. As you raise the contrast, the bright parts of your photo will become brighter and the dark parts will become darker. You can see this in the histogram. We're stretching it out from both sides or bringing it in from both sides. Next, we have clarity, which adds some sharpening to your photo. Without getting too nerdy, it basically adds a type of sharpening that can look good on textures like rocks, water, clothing, tree leaves, clouds. But it doesn't really look good on skin. You can see what it's done to our model here. I tend to leave this slider alone. I'll just double click to reset it. I'd much rather do sharpening once we get to the photo persona, where we have a little bit more control, and we also have a filter called the high pass filter, which looks really good on skin. Remember that the goal of the developer Sona is to bring back the secret information in our histogram. All of these extra sliders that I'm about to show you, I usually don't use. I just want to let you know that they are here. Next, we have saturation and vibrant, which both increase the intensity of your photos colors. Saturation makes all of the colors more intense. While the vibrant slider only makes the dull colors more intense. Use the saturation if all of the colors in your photo need a boost and use vibrant if you just want a little extra pop. Again, I generally don't use these sliders in this persona, but there they are. The next section we'll have to check on to open it up. This is the white balance section, and these are the easiest to understand sliders. You can add more yellow to your photo or more blue, or you could add more magenta or green. Green and magenta are typically not needed for sunlit outdoors photos. They're mainly used with photos that have strong artificial lighting. As you might expect, the photo persona can do this too. I generally wouldn't use this section. Next, we have shadows and highlights. Finally, a section that deals with the lighting. I do use this section. You can see as I move this shadow slider, we're only affecting this part of the histogram. I'll move this up. You can see that shift or down. This is really good for some fine tuning. Once you're done with that exposure section. For the highlights, it does the same thing, but on the right side with the highlights. You can see how that adjusts things. Last, we do have another section called profiles. This affects your color space. You could change it from S RGB to something like Adobe RGB if you wanted to. But unless you really understand what these technical terms are, you should just leave this alone, I think. I'll turn that off. Now, you know what each one of these sliders does. I think you're ready to learn more advanced tips and tricks, and we'll do that starting in the next chapter. 9. Default Tone Curve: In this chapter, I'll teach you some tips that I have that make editing raw photos so much easier. Let's get started by talking about the default tone curve. Let's start by coming up to the top and opening up the assistant. You don't need to worry about most of these options, but the most important one is this tone curve option. By default, Affinity applies a tone curve, which means that Affinity will secretly add some lighting adjustments when you open up a raw photo. These adjustments usually look pretty nice, but I like to start with no edits done to my photo so that I have full control over my image. To turn off the tone curve, just click right here, and then select take no action. You can close out of this, and this will now be applied to all of your future photos. You'll need to close out of this photo. I'll click Cancel. Yes. Then we can reopen it. From now on, you'll have no tone curve applied to all of your raw images so that you can have complete control. I just wanted to show you a side by side. This is the difference. I know that the tone curve can look nice, but remember that the goal of the developed persona is to bring all of our information into the histogram, not to make the photo look perfect. So with that turned off, I'm excited to show you another great setting that you can adjust in the next video. 10. Clipping Indicators: Learn about clipping indicators. Clipping indicators are a way for affinity to tell you if you have clipped highlights or shadows. This is super useful because sometimes an area will seem clipped, but it's hard to tell just by looking at your photo. Let's start by turning on the clipped highlights indicator. That's the red one right here. Right now, I can't see any clipped areas. I'm going to increase the exposure to show you what this looks like. As I bring this up, the sky turns more and more red, telling us that those areas have blown out highlights. You can see this really well on the histogram as I move this up, all of that information disappears. This really is just an indicator. When you develop and export this photo, the red spots won't be there. It'll look like this. You can see that when I turn it off, it can be hard to tell that those areas are all clipped. Let's do the clipped shadows indicator next. That's the second one right here. Again, I'll need to adjust the photo to see some clipped shadows. I'm going to bring the black point up. You can see for this picture, I need to erase this black point quite a bit for that blue to appear. But you can see that the darker the image gets, the more clipped areas that we have. Last, we have clipped tones. To be honest with you, I never really use this one. Clipped tones is telling us where the colors are being clipped, meaning that the colors aren't being accurately displayed. In this picture, you can see that the colors aren't accurately displayed, where we have our blown out highlights and our crushed shadows. We already know those areas are problem areas, because we already saw that with the other two indicators. I never use this one, just because I find it repetitive. Plus, I only use the developed persona to adjust the lighting, not the colors. Feel free to ignore that last one. To finish off this video, I just want to point out that while clipping is technically wrong or bad. I want you to remember that you are the artist. Use the indicators as a guide, not as a rule. A little clipping, especially in areas that are supposed to be pure white or black, isn't a big deal. On the other hand, stuff like blown out skin is a big deal. I wouldn't ever want clipping on the skin. But in this picture, maybe you're okay with just a little bit of clipping in the sky to show what a bright day it is, or a little clipping in the trees will show some nice darkness there. Whatever you think looks best. Okay. Go ahead and turn your highlights and shadows indicators on because in the next video, I'm going to show you a really cool trick that will make editing the lighting way easier. 11. Editing Trick: In this video, I'm really excited to show you an editing trick. This trick isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn good. I want to show you how this works. Step number one, make sure you have your two clipping indicators on for the highlights and shadows. Next, you're going to go scroll down to the shadows and highlight section. Turn that on and then bring the highlights all the way down. Then you're going to go back up to the exposure section, and Here's where we'll start working with the clipping indicators. First, you're going to raise the exposure until you start to see the red clipping indicators for the highlights. I'm starting to see them right in here as I bring this up. I'll bring it back just a little bit. And last step. We're going to do the same with the shadows. I'm going to raise the black point until I see clipping indicators for that. I'm starting to see indicators down here, so I'll pull this back just a little bit. And that's the editing trick. Why does this work so well? Well, remember everything we learned. The exposure makes everything brighter. But the highlight slider only affects this top portion right here. By lowering this down first, we can brighten the image even more, which makes it look really nice. Now, I do have one warning or tip for you. This trick can skew your colors in your image. You might need to desaturate or even change the white balance, and this can all be done in the developed persona or in the photo persona later. Go ahead and leave this picture open because we'll use it in the next video where we'll learn about seeing the before and after of our work. 12. Before & After: Let's take a look at the before and after. Unlike the photo persona, we don't have an easy way to turn all of our edits or layers on and off. We could go section by section to turn them on and off, but there's an even easier way. Go on up to the top of the screen. Here we have a few options to see the before and after. First, we have the split view, which allows you to pull this back and forth to see the before and after. Next, we have the Mr view. This one's nice just to see it side by side like this, and it even works if you zoom in. Very nice. If you want to get back to normal, just click on this first single view option. A nice. That was very easy. We've spent a lot of time working with the default develop persona workspace here. But in the next video, I want to show you how to use another one of these panels, the Lens panel. 13. Lens Panel: This video, we'll take a look at the lens panel. But before we do that, let's do a quick edit of the giraffe using our editing trick. Step number one, make sure you have your clipping indicators on for the highlights and shadows. Then we're going to scroll down to the shadows and highlight section. Check that on and bring the highlights down all the way. Now we can go back up to our exposure section, and I'm going to increase the exposure. You can see we actually have to bring it all the way up before we see the red spot. I'll just back it off a little bit, but that looks pretty good. Then I'll bring the Black point up. I've brought it all the way up and I can't see any blue spots for our indicators. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we're done adjusting that, we can take a look at the lens panel. The main use of this panel is lens correction. That's what I want to focus on in this video. Affinity can typically detect what lens you're using for your camera, and then it will correct for that automatically. But sometimes you want to give it a little bit of manual adjusting. Here's how this works. First, we have the distortion slider. You can see how this blows your image up or scales it back. I find this really useful for selfie photography because a lot of the time your subject can look like this where their nose is really close to the camera, so it looks a little bit distorted. In those cases, I like to pull it back. With this giraffe picture, I think it would be good to pull it back just a little bit. Next, we have horizontal and vertical, which just tilts your image a little bit this way and that way. This is really fun to do with buildings to adjust their perspective. We can also do this vertically to make the building look taller or in this case, the giraffe look taller. Then we have rotation. Now, rotation and scale are more for cropping, but you can see what this looks like. And for scale, we can bring it all in, so we no longer have the transparent edges. You can do all of these different edits in the photo persona, but I'll be honest with you. It's a little bit more tedious to do in the photo persona because all of these different filters and tools are in different places. So I actually like using this in the develop persona so that we can quickly just adjust the sliders and get the picture looking exactly how we want it to. That's a win for the developed persona. Go ahead and keep this picture open, and in the next video, I'll show you how to clean up your develop persona workspace. S. 14. Clean Up Workspace: Let's clean up our work space. Generally, in the developed persona, I only like to use three of these different panels. I like to use the histogram, the basic panel, and the lens panel. All of these other ones I never use. To clean up the work space, I like to click and drag on their name and then click on the x to remove it. I'll just do that for all of the ones that I don't use. All right now that that's cleaned up, I think this looks a lot better. Now, if you ever want to use any of those panels again, you can just go up to the top of your screen to window, and then you can click on the name of the panel that you want to add back in, and you can also reset your entire studio if you want by going to Studio, reset Studio. The last thing I want to do to clean up our workspace is I actually want to remove these numbers down here. They take up a lot of space in our panels, and I don't even really understand what they mean. To get rid of those, just go up to the Hamburger menu and then click on Advanced, and that will remove all of those advanced numbers. We have a cleaned up histogram and we have more room for all of these sliders. This looks so much better, and I'm really glad that Affinity lets us customize the workspace this way. Every time you bring in a new raw photo from here on out, your workspace will look just like this. In the next video, I'll show you some options for developing your raw photo. 15. Develop Options: Let's learn about some options that you have for developing your photos. Before you press develop to go into the photo persona. You can actually change the output. I want to tell you about all three of these output options because you might prefer one over the other. The first option is the default option, pixel layer. This is the simplest method. When you press develop, you're brought into the photo persona, and now you can make any edits that you want to your photo. The drawback to this method is that your photo layer has been converted into a regular photo. It's no longer raw. You can't go back into the developed persona to change any of those sliders. Back in the developed persona, I'm going to show you the other options. The next option we have is raw layer embedded. With this option, when you press develop, affinity will keep the raw file inside of your affinity file. I'll just select this option and press develop. Because the affinity file now has the raw file embedded into it, you can actually go back and continue to edit the sliders at any time. All you need to do is double click on the Layer icon right here, and you're brought right back into the developed persona. You can see we still have all of our changes active and we can continue to edit them. The downside to this method is that your affinity file is larger now. When you save the affinity file, it will take up more space on your computer. This will not change your file size when you export to a JPEG. It's only going to affect the affinity file size, and the last option is raw layer linked. This option is very similar to embedded. When you press develop, you can come into the photo persona and make any changes you want. You can always go back into the developed persona by double clicking on the layer icon. This one seems very similar, but there's a little bit of a difference. As a bonus, it allows you to come back and continue editing this raw photo without making your affinity file larger. It does this by linking to wherever you've saved the raw file on your computer. The drawback to this setting is because it's linked to wherever your raw photo currently is. If you move or delete your raw photo file, the link will be broken, so this affinity file won't open properly. I have one last thing that I want to show you. I'm just going to click develop on one of the raw layer options. Then I'm going to quickly apply an adjustment. I'll do the black and white adjustment. Okay, you've developed your photo, you've applied an adjustment, and you decide that you want to go back into the developed persona to adjust the lighting a little bit more. Double click on the layer icon, and you're brought right back in here. But your photo looks a little different. It has the black and white adjustment still applied. If you only want to see your raw layer, you can turn off, show all layers right here so that you're only working with the raw layer. Or if you like seeing all the adjustments you've made, you can check that back on. All right, great job. Now you know how to edit using the developed persona, and you even know some unique settings that you can use. Now you're ready for some practice projects that we'll do together in the next chapter. 16. Waterfall Portrait: Develop Persona: This chapter, we'll do two practice projects together, starting with this waterfall portrait. To begin, we'll do our editing technique, and you can already see, we need to bring down those highlights. I'll just scroll down to the shadows and highlight section and I'll bring the highlights all the way down. Our histogram looks a lot better now. I'll just scroll up to the exposure and raise this up. You can see the red starting to appear, so I'll back it up a little bit. And I'll do the same with the Black point raising it up. And even with it raised all the way, I don't see any of those blue spots. So I think this looks pretty good for this photo. That was super easy. So now that we have all of the information inside of our histogram, I'm going to come up here and press develop. All right. Now that we're in the photo Persona, we can keep on editing this photo, which we'll do in the next video. 17. Waterfall Portrait: Photo Persona: In this video, we'll edit the Waterfall portrait in the photo persona. There's 1 million different edits that you could do in the photo persona. But let's just review a few of the most important ones. First, a very important edit that you can do is cleaning up your image. I like to do this at the very start. I'm just going to add a new pixel layer by clicking on this button right here. Then I'm going to go over here to select our in painting brush. And then I'm going to change the setting up at the top to current layer and below. With all of that prep work done, now we can go ahead and zoom into our picture to remove any problem areas. So up here, there are a few birds flying, and I love birds. Don't get me wrong, but they're so out of focus that they sort of look like dust specs in this photo. So I am going to paint over them to remove them. You can continue your cleanup to clean up any other areas that you find distracting. If you find these white specks distracting, you can go ahead and remove a few of those. Or if you see anything on your subject that needs cleaning up, you can go ahead and do that now. I think he looks pretty good, though, and I'm not seeing anything down here. That was very easy cleanup. Now that we have that step done. The next thing I like to work on is the lighting. Let's go ahead and do that. I'll come over to our adjustments, and I'll select a curves adjustment. All right. First, I think this photo looks a little dark and dull. I'm going to add an S curve with a little bit extra brightening on the highlight side, and then I'll bring down the shadows a little bit like that. Okay. That looks pretty good. Now that we've adjusted the overall lighting, we can go ahead and do some targeted lighting to make our subjects stand out even more. I'm going to add a curves adjustment. And for this curves adjustment, I'm going to darken Then I'm going to invert this layer by pressing command or control I. Now this is applied to nothing. We can grab our paint brush tool, and we can paint in white paint. Now we can softly apply this darkness to the background. I'm just going to increase the brush size using the bracket keys on my keyboard. I'll make sure I'm painting with 0% hardness and a nice low flow. Then I can go ahead and begin painting. Just softly painting this around the edges, especially on the mountain here. All right. Now you can see by darkening the background, our subject stands out a lot more. I'll just paint a little more right here. The lighting is looking pretty good. But now that it's brighter, we can see that the colors are way too saturated in this photo, especially his shoes. I'm going to fix this by applying an HSL adjustment In the main color channel, I'm just going to shift the saturation downward until it starts to look normal again. I think around 25% for this picture looks pretty good. I think this looks really good with all of our adjustments. Let's just do one more step to finish this off. I want to straighten this photo since it looks a little tilted right here in the horizon line. So I'm going to select the crop tool. Then I'm going to select right here where it says straight in. Now I can just click and drag across that backline and when I release my mouse. You can see that this straightens it out and it even trims it inward, so we no longer have transparent edges. I'm just going to press apply. Then I'm going to select all of the changes we made by holding shift and clicking on the last layer, and we can see the complete before and after of all of the work that we did in the photo persona. And with the Magic of editing, I can also show you what this picture looked like as a raw photo and what we have now so much better. I hope you enjoyed taking a raw photo from start to finish. In the next video, we're going to do another practice project together. 18. Sunglasses Portrait: Develop Persona: This video, we'll begin editing another portrait in the developed persona. Once again, we'll use our editing technique to adjust the histogram. I'll scroll down. Check on shadows and highlights and bring the highlights all the way down. Then we can go back up here and I'm going to raise the exposure slider until we start to see those red spots appear. This is way too bright. I'm just going to back it off a little extra. There we go. Then I'm going to raise the black point up, and very quickly, we can see blue spots in the shadows of her hair. So I'll just back that down. Okay. Now that everything is in the histogram and our picture looks good. I'm going to press develop, and we can continue editing in the photo persona, which we'll do in the next video. 19. Sunglasses Portrait: Photo Persona: Let's finish up the Sunglasses portrait project. First things first, I want to start with doing some cleanup to remove distractions. Let's start by adding a new pixel layer. I'll select the in painting brush tool. Then I'll change our setting to current layer and below. And now we can zoom in and begin editing away any distractions we see. So I'm just going to start by removing some of the dust on her sunglasses. Then I'm going to start removing some of the flyaway hairs that stand out. As I'm painting away the blemishes, I just want to mention that when editing people's faces, it can be a sensitive thing to remove too much from them. I like to only clean up things that are temporary. This model won't have these exact flyaway hairs forever. I can remove them, no problem. Same with any little dots of acne or flex of dust on her face. Those things might last a week, but they're not always there. For this model, she does have a few mold on her face, and I think it would be best to leave them unless she asks us to remove them. I'm just going to continue painting painting until I've removed everything that I think is distracting. H. All right. I think that looks a lot better. Now we can go ahead and adjust the lighting to make our subject stand out more from the background. To do that, I'll start by adding a curves adjustment, and I'm just going to do an S curve to create more contrast. So Brighter highlights, darker shadows. Next, I'm going to create a little more darkness for the background. I'll add a curves adjustment. T. I'm going to darken the background. I'm mostly looking at the background over here for this. I don't want so many highlight spots. I'm going to bring this highlight node down to dull those, and I'll bring this one up to dull the shadows in the background. You can see the background looks a lot more dull. Now I'm just going to invert this layer with command or control I and using the paint brush tool. I'm going to paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal that darkness. I'll paint it over here on the leaves as well. We want all of the focus to be brought in toward our subject. Here's the before and after of bringing the focus inward. I think that did a good job of darkening the background, but now our subject is looking a little bit dark and I want to brighten her up, so there's even more contrast. I'm going to add another curves adjustment. Just watching our subject, I'll brighten this up. That looks good. Then I'll invert this with command or Control I so that I can paint it in white paint just over our subject. Just making my brush a little bit smaller with the bracket keys so I can have more control here. All right. Now, I'll select both of those layers, so you can see the difference before and after. Now she's clearly the star of the picture. Okay. That was a lot of lighting adjustments, and I think it looks a lot better. So now we can go ahead and finish this off by adjusting the colors. Personally, I think the background just looks a little bit too saturated, especially right up here with the blue sky. So I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. Then I'm going to lower the overall saturation just a little bit. Then to take care of the sky. I'm just going to go to the Cyan color channel, and I'm going to lower the saturation down. You can see that helped, but not all the way. I'm also going to go to the blue color channel to continue to lower the saturation, and I think that looks a lot better for that area. Here's the before and after. All right. Great work. I'm just going to select all of our layers so that we can see the difference we made before and after And that was just in the photo persona. Here's a before and after of our photo from raw to finished. I think this photo looks so much better, and I really like how making the subject brighter and the background darker can help our subject stand out more. It's a subtle trick that I think really helps to make our subject the star of the show. All right. Now that you're finished with this chapter. In the next one, we're going to learn all about batch processing. 20. Batch Processing: Preset Method: In this chapter, we'll learn about batch processing raw photos. Even though affinity photo isn't really meant to do a lot of batch processing. I still have two methods that you can use for your photos to speed up your editing. Let's start with the preset method. For this method, just open one of the photos from your batch. We're going to start by editing this photo to get the lighting right. So I'll scroll down. Check on shadows and highlights and bring the highlights down. Then I'm just going to increase the exposure. Even though no red spots have appeared yet, I can see that we're already cutting off some highlight information, which is a little strange. Affinity usually will tell us when that happens. I'm just going to eyeball it looking at the graph. Maybe I'll brighten it just a little bit to fine tune. That looks pretty good. Then I'm going to bring the Black point up. You can see pretty quick, we've lost some shadow information. I'm just going to back that off. I guess this photo didn't need much editing because our histogram looks pretty good. Now that I've made those adjustments, I can turn those adjustments that we just made into a preset. I'm going to go where it says preset at the top of the basic panel. I'll click and then click Add preset. Now I'll just rename this and press. With that preset made, we can quickly apply these four changes to our whole batch. To do that, I'll just open up another raw photo. Then I'll just come over here to our presets and I'll apply the Alley photos preset that we just made. And now you can see all of our changes have been applied to this new photo. So with this method, you will have to do this one at a time, but it still speeds up the work because you don't need to adjust the sliders for each one. And when you've finished using this preset, you can go ahead and delete it. So go down to where it says delete preset. Do you want to delete Alli photos? Yes. And now it's gone. This method is best for editing a small photo shoot with around two to five photos. In the next video. I'll show you a method that takes a little more setup, but you can use it with more photos. 21. Batch Processing: Macro Method: Let's learn the macro method for batch processing. This is a great method, but there are a lot of steps. I'll walk you through it all nice and slowly, so no worries. It's definitely worth it to learn this. Step number one, open up your raw photo. Don't make any edits to it quite yet. We just want to come up here and choose one of the raw layer output methods. It doesn't really matter which one of these you choose, but just know that all of the batched process photos will be processed in the exact same way, whether you choose linked or embedded. H Then go ahead and press develop so that we can go into the photo persona. Now that we're in the photo persona. We're going to set up a few panels that will help us to record the steps that we take for this photo. To do that, go to the top of the screen to window. Then we're going to add two panels. First, the library panel. I'll just click and drag on the word library until it overlaps with the tools so that we can dock it right there. Then I'll go back up to Window, and I'm going to also add the macro panel. I'll just place this right next to the library panel like that. All right. These panels will allow us to record a series of steps for this photo. Then later we can apply those same steps to a whole group of photos. The next step is to make a macro category in the library panel. To make a new category, go to the Hamburger menu and then click on Create New category. You can call this whatever you want. I'll press. Later on, we'll use this category to save our macro into. We'll come back to that. The next step is going to the macro panel and pressing on the red record button. Now that we're recording, any action that we take on our photo will be recorded right here as a step. The very first step we need to take is we need to go back into the developed persona so that we can adjust our sliders. Now, normally, because this is a raw image layer. We could just double click and go back into the developed persona. But sometimes when you record macros, there's workarounds you need to do because it doesn't always work. I just tried double clicking and this error came up. It's not going to allow us to do that. I'll press cancel. Instead, I'll come to the top of the screen, and I'll click on the developed persona right here. Now that we're in the develop persona, we can make the changes that we want to make for this photo, and I'll just do the same thing that I did in the last video. I'll bring down the highlights. I'll raise the exposure a little bit and the brightness. Then I'll bring the black point up just slightly. Now, with all that done, I'll press develop. Over in the macro panel. You can see our first step is recorded. We've made those changes and developed the photo. Now that that's done, and we're back in the photo persona. We can make any other adjustments that we want to this photo, and all of those steps will be recorded right here. I'm going to add a couple of adjustments, starting with a curves adjustment to adjust the lighting. I always like how an S curve looks. I'll just raise the highlights and lower the shadows to create more contrast. Then to adjust our colors, I'm going to use a different adjustment this time. Let's use the color balance adjustment. This adjustment allows us to affect the colors in the shadows, mid tones, and highlights. I'll start with the shadows, and I'm just going to add a little bit of blue to them. Then I'll go into the mid tones. I'm going to warm things up by adding a little bit of red, a little bit of green and some yellow. Now, I already decided that I was going to make these changes beforehand. That's why I'm going pretty fast. But you can take your time with this making sure to get the colors just right. Okay. Now that we've warmed things up there. I think the colors look great, the lighting looks great. I'm done with this macro. To finish. You're just going to come over here and click on this Stop button. Then we can save all of our steps by clicking right here to add this macro to our library. We can choose which category we want to save this in. Then we can give this a name. I'll press. Now we have this macro right here that we can use for our other photos. Now, to apply this to multiple photos all at once, we need to create a new batch job. Let's go up to the top of the screen to file new batch job. From here, there's a few things we need to input. First, we need to add our photos. I'll just click and drag like that to select them all and then I'll press open. Those are all ready. Next, we can change where they're saved. I'll click on Save into. I'll click on these three dots right here. I'm going to save them into this folder that I created before this video. With that selected, I'll press. Then we can choose how these are going to be saved. By default, it will save it as an affinity photo file so that we can go back and make any adjustments, which I think is great, and we can also save them as a JPEG. If you just want to see them exported, Okay. Last, we need to choose the macro that we want to apply to all of these photos. I'll click here to change the category to alley photos. I'll click on the macro that we just made, and then I'll press apply. Now, all we need to do is press, Affinity will work super hard on these raw photos to apply all of those changes to all of them at the same time. This will take a little bit of time because raw photos are large. Once they're done, you'll see how worth it all of this was. Here's how they all turned out. I think these all looks so nice with these changes. Because we save them as a JPEG and an affinity file, we can open up any of the files and adjust the edits. In this folder, I'm just going to select one of these. I'll double click to open it. Right now back in affinity photo, we can make any changes that we want. I think the lighting and colors look pretty good. But we can always do our little trick to make the background darker and our subject lighter. Let's go ahead and do that. I'll apply a curves adjustment with the goal of making the background look dark and du. I'll darken this. I'll raise the shadows so that they become more gray and I'll lower the highlights as well. I'll invert this with command or control I. Then I'll grab my paintbrush tool and I'll paint in white paint on this black mask to apply the darkness to the background. Now, you might be wondering why we didn't make this a step in our macro. That's because our subject is standing in a different location in each of these photos. Painting on a mask really doesn't make sense when you're doing macros like this. With the background darker, let's do one more to brighten up the subject. I'll just brighten it a little bit. I'll press command or control. Then with a smaller brush, I'm going to apply this to our subject. Like of that looks good. I'll just elect both of these layers so that you can see the before and after of our little editing trick. I might have made this a little too intense, so I can always lower the opacity to make it less intense after. Now I just want to quickly show you the before and after of all of the edits we did in the photo persona before after All right. Very nice. With that done, now you have two strategies for batch processing raw photos and affinity photo. Great job. 22. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I know that was a lot to learn, but now you're totally prepared to edit raw photos like a professional. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.