Procedural Texture: Non Destructive HDR Tone Mapping (Affinity Photo)

Utilise completely non-destructive tone mapping for a powerful HDR workflow, especially for 360 imagery where seam awareness is a priority.
Credits: HDRI from Polyhaven, photography by James Ritson.

[@mvz]

Affinity should definitely pre-load some of the most commonly used equations as presets for the users.

[@MichelMayerle]

Absolutely. It can not be expected that regular humans know how to work with such formulas 😂

[@manuelremusstanca5539]

It has some presets pre-loaded.
You can use and modify them as you wish and you can save the new ones. It is not so hard to do it.

[@javierrivero7]

I congratulate you for the new tutorials where the image of the person who is explaining does not appear, since this image distracts and covers part of the program's interface. Congratulations!

[@manuelremusstanca5539]

For Red lerp(sqrt(R /(R+b)), R /(R+b), a)
For Green lerp(sqrt(G /(G+b)), G /(G+b), a)
For Blue lerp(sqrt(B /(B+b)), B /(B+b), a)
I put the Procedural filter in Soft Light blend mode, but can be put in other blend mode, it depends by the picture and what you want the final result to be.

[@calamalabar]

great effect and very well explained equations. I'd love more tutorials and equations on the more creative side of things (digital painting vs photography) as well as distort equations as well (mirror-like effects)

[@MrsRijnvis]

what a wonderful tutorial, thank you very much for this 11:18

[@davidstraker8336]

Very helpful. Thanks, James. Especially useful was the note on how HDR data is held, which I didn't know, plus the simple algorithm for compression.

[@Puckerization]

Way too complicated for most users!

[@timkreutzkamp8519]

Uhhh, this could be awesome for 3D Renders. You should be able to recreate the Tonemapping Algorithms from Vray, Redshift etc...

[@JamesRitson]

Yes-one example is recreating the normalised log2 transform that Blender Filmic uses. Procedural texture doesn't have log() yet, but it can be approximated with pow()...

[@VittorioSergi]

Hi James, excuse the question here on youtube but I know we do share a particular interest in astrophotography, the question is, can procedural texture be used as some sort of a substitute for Pixel Math? (you know what program I'm referring to).
Or are there any other alternative filter or equation generator in Affinity that would sort of work that way?
Thank you

[@JamesRitson]

Hi Vittorio, yes, you can indeed achieve quite a lot of what Pixel Math does using procedural texture equations :) (my astrophotography macros use procedural texture filters for things like colour preserving tone stretching, weighted intensity masking, channel blending etc)

[@ptst19]

Uff... A macro is needed

[@manuelremusstanca5539]

It took me 5 minutes to make the Procedural Filter and the macros. Further, I extended the formula to have a fine adjustment.

[@mihaimihai7505]

Better type in comment the formula

[@otrapersonass]

what

[@volkerbosch9078]

Oh Man, what a Workflow.😂. Think about, we have 2022 …

[@chrisraine1326]

Photography editing is meant to be an artistic process. This is like GCSE arithmetic. 😛🫣

[@davido2644]

I understand what you mean, but the whole Affinity suite uses calculations like these (or even more complex) without the user being aware. Even if not everyone will be able to take direct advantage of this by creating new formulae, some will benefit from presets made by those more mathematically inclined. Viceversa, the creative vision of those without mathematical skills can be enhanced or enabled by those with them when there no easy way to do it, even if the latter might never come up with those original ideas in the first place.
It's all about community and collaboration 🙂