How to Create Luminosity Masks in Affinity Photo
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มี.ค. 2019
- Have you ever tried Luminosity Masking using Affinity Photo?
If you’re used to creating Luminosity Masks in Photoshop, Affinity Photo has probably left you scratching your head. The keystrokes and methods used in Photoshop don’t translate to Affinity Photo.
Although I’ve previously published a video about creating Luminosity Masks in Affinity Photo, it was very basic. It looked at using the Tone Selection feature to select Highlights, Midtones and Shadows. If you’re familiar with Luminosity Masking using tools like Photoshop, you will know you can create sets of masks. For example, you may have a set of 5 Lights masks, each targeting progressively lighter tones.
In this video, I’m going to demonstrate how you can use Affinity Photo to create similar Luminosity Masking sets. The Luminosity Masks you create will be just like those you can create using Photoshop. Best of all, I’ve tried to create an approach that avoids needing to remember lots of keystrokes. You can do everything you need using the mouse.
If you like this video, please do share it. It’s taken a lot of effort to develop this method, and sharing my work is one of the ways you can help support me. Thank you.
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I havn´t seen this FANTASTIC tutorial before. Congratulations, it has been very interesting and useful. Thank you very MUCH !!
You're very welcome!
As soon as Serif or someone makes an extension panel for luminosity masking like the ones available for Photoshop I'll be a permanent Affinity Photo user. I just can't get away from the functionality available with those panels in Photoshop. I hoping and wishing this feature will soon be made available for Affinity. Thanks for sharing
Perhaps I should dust off my programming skills and have a crack.🤔
You're a master, Robin. Thank you, hats off. Precisely what I've searched for. 10 min video, problems solved, and I am subscribed and joined your lovely newsletter as well, mate.
Glad it helped and thanks for subscribing 😀
Excellent tutorial. Thank you for the hard work to create it.
Thank you
Wow, I would have never thought of this! You sir are awesome, thank you!
Thank you. Great to hear that you like the idea.
thank you so much. great pace, superb explained!
Thank you. I'm pleased you liked it.
Excellent tutorial. Thanks so much for taking the pains to explain it so lucidly.
Thank you very much
I agree, excellent vid !
Very helpful - thank you. I'm a long-time P'shop user and heavy user of TK Panel and Lumenzia so obviously looking for similar sophistication when it comes to luminosity masking
Thank you and be sure to watch my video on the Alternative to Luminosity Masking th-cam.com/video/z_U6TKOWNZw/w-d-xo.html
Thanks Robin, much appreciated.
Thank you.
thanks heaps - absolutely what I was looking for!
Great. I’m pleased its helped you.
Much appreciated, and yes, this is a lot of work but provides such precision in targeting adjustments, I have written it up since the written instructions on your site have left out the initial steps in creating the masks. ONce I finish the write up, I will sent it to you in case you want to include on your site. thanks again, Lazaro
I'm confused. I'just checked the tutorial and it does explain all the steps to create the masks. I'm not sure why you think it doesn't. Drop me an email with anything you think is missing so I can check. Thanks.
Great Tutorial, absolutely what I was looking for! and superbly explained
Thank you. I also included a writen version of the video on my Lenscraft website. I'm aware the video can be a lot to take in at times.
HI Robin, I have been trying to record as a macro the steps in creating Luminosity Masks, but for some reason Affinity cannot record the renaming of the spare channel to Lights 1,
any ideas . Any help would be appreciated.
@@stuartbraithwaite1297 Sorry, I have no idea. It appears to be a limitation around some of the actions you can record in the Mask Studio Panel. There are a few things I tried and they all appeared to generate a "Macro Warning". It may be one to raise on the Affinity Forums or even request as an enhancement.
Wow, this is going to need a few reruns to adsorb Robin, but many thanks for all your hard work in producing such a detailed tutorial.
I'm sorry I couldn't make it much simpler but I was trying to avoid all the shortcut keys that tend to put people off. I will put a tutorial together and publish it on my Lenscraft website when I get a moment. That might also help. I hope you find it useful.
No need to be sorry Robin I love to see all the steps to make for easier understanding, but I hope to run some of them into a macro possibly.
I think a macro is a good idea. Quite a lot of the process is repetitive.
Thanks for the great tutorial.
Thanks. I'm pleased you liked it.
Nice work Robin. To make it easier to see what is happening, start with a gradient (white to black for instance) and perform your actions. Reveals what is happening without being distracted by a picture.
Good point. Thanks for adding.
This is bang on the money. Cheers!
Thanks
Fantastic! I've been struggling with how to do Photoshop style luminosity masking in Affinity. There is one suggestion I'd make to eliminate an unnecessary step when masking an adjustment layer: Select your pixels from the Spare Channel first, then create your adjustment layer. The layer mask will then be part of the adjustment layer instead of having to apply the mask separately. It simplifies the stack. Aside from that, stellar tutorial! Thank you!
Thanks. As you point out you can take a few shortcuts in the process. I was just trying to keep things clear with the video because I thought it was already a complex process.
Thanks a lot Robin.
You're welcome. This one took quite a bit of working out.
Thanks .... Great video, a lot of advanced concepts. This ability to do luminosity mask was the deal breaker from going from Photoshop. Glad I am able to do, though Photoshop deals with mask (just deal with it within the mask/channell itself, access to all the editing of the channel like a photo) in really superior. I guess the concept of a spare channel in Affinity is the key. How would I load an image (gray scale) from a separate file into a spare channel? I do that often, just dealing with all the manipulation on a separate image, then "pasting it" into the mask of the final image. I do a lot of portraits/fashion, and manipulating the red channel where much the skin tones are.
Attempting this technique on stretched astrophoto where the average lum is still much darker than your example. Any advice one how to get that first attempt at "load selection from channel" to pickup more of the image? My thought was to apply a "screen" mode on the very first duplicated gray image before going into channel selection
Robin, thank you for this excellent tutorial! Hugely appreciated. I am revisiting this video in light of the recent "privacy" changes that are required to use Adobe products. I love working in luminosity and color ranges. I am assuming that there are not yet 3rd party panels available to isolate these color and tonal ranges? Or at least some type of action that we can create to facilitate the process of creating these channels? I will need to do a deep dive further into this. Thank you again!
I'm glad the video helped you. As for third party panels and macros, I'm not aware of anything. I once tried to create some macros to produce the masks but the recorder doesn't work with some of the studio panels (or at least didn't).
nicely done by turning the image into a b+w and then applying a blend filter, I've been using curves within LAB color space / lightness and then merging the image for different versions. Yours is cleaner but there is no visual to the tonal range mask created. Thank you
Thanks. There are a few other variations you can use to do this. I probably need to give this more thought.
Paul, although it doesn’t offer a complete range of three levels of each tonal value, have you tried the following method:
• Duplicate the layer
• From the Select Dropdown > Tonal Range > Midtones/Shadows/Highlights to get your selection.
• Create a layer mask of the selection, which you can then save as a spare channel.
• If desired you can manipulate/fine tune the mask selection with a nested Curves Adjustment Layer set on the Alpha Channel.
If you haven’t tried this method, you might want to experiment with it. It might inspire you to create another great video.
And thank you for all of your videos. I’m a subscriber and enjoy your presentations.
Thanks th-cam.com/video/cDaPve_KckM/w-d-xo.html
BUt who is Paul?
Robin Whalley - Not sure where I got the name "Paul" from! Sorry Robin. Even if I don't refer to you by your real name, I still appreciate your videos. I'll try to get the name correct next time.
No problem, it just confused me. Someone recently posted a comment to my website but it turned out they had mixed up their comment with an email they were sending to someone. Quite amusing really.
What is a ( nested ) Curves adj layer?
Robin - you do a great job of explaining but in honesty there is no way I am going to remember all of these steps. I like Affinity but I also use On1 Photo RAW and doing a Luminosity mask with them is much easier. Great video and thanks for all that you do to educate us.
I totally understand. This won't be for everyone but quite a lot of people have asked me how to do this. That's also why I like to cover quite a range of tools on this channel. It gives people options and it's always good to know how something could be done in another package.
I'm in the same boat as you. What you need to do is open 1 of your pics & follow along step by step pausing this vid after each step. Then move on to the next step & so on. Have fun!
Great work that has stretched the few grey cells I have.
Thank you.
Haha !!!
Return the saturation to the default position and the grey cells should return to their original colors.
Thanks
You're welcome.
Excellent tutorial. Thanks. I have just started using Affinty Photo ( put off by PS subscription ) . Is there a way of creating an action to do this?
Unfortunately not. Whilst most of the steps can be recorded, the Macros in Affinity won't allow you to record some of the steps. I was trying to develop a workaround but then hit a dead end. Hopefully they will change the Macro recorded in the future.
If you search the Affinity forums, there is a member on there who created a set of luminosity macros which you can download to use. They are very helpful.
@@ItsFritzDaCat Thanks, I will take a look at those as well because the Macro tool won't record some of the actions I was performing. It's possible they were using shortcuts. It will be interesting to find out.
I enjoyed this tutorial and decided I should have it a a macro so tried creating a macro using this method and did for the lights but could not go any further and get it to work. What do I need to do to get the darks and midtones.
Unfortunately it's not currently possible to record this as a macro. The recorded doesn't work with all areas of Affinity. It would be nice if they fixed that.
@@RobinWhalley Thanks Robin At one stage I had a Macro that covered the lights midtones and darks but for some reason it stopped working and after trying realised you are right You cant record it.
this is a feature that needs integrating into affinity photo's tool kit, like frequency separation. Luminar 4 has it built in to its filters.
There are some tools already in Affinity Photo but working with them is very different to Photoshop. I think a lot of people who do Luminosity Masking come from Photoshop which is why they were looking for something similar. Here's one example th-cam.com/video/z_U6TKOWNZw/w-d-xo.html
Affinity Photo is my default and prefered post-processing software since October 2018. However, I also use Luminar 2018, HDR-2017 / 2018, and Picktorial 3.0 for specific task I find too complicated to perform in Affinity Photo. for very basic editing / enhancement, Nikon Capture and Nikon View is more than sufficient for my needs.
What a complicated way to perform a simple task of adjusting tones / luminosity of portions of the photo. Macphun (Skylum) HDR-2018 approach is to select the luminous intensity from scale of 0 to 10. That will create a shade over the affected area. Select the task (brighten or darken) then the strength of the effect, just brush over the area you want to darken or brighten. Click DONE to finalize that action. The strength of the effect could be adjusted ANYTIME. The task could be done directly on the original OR an over an ADJUSTMENT mask (layer). The user can add as many mask as WANTED to perform other task such as changing or adjusting colors, selective sharpening, white balance correction, etc. The layers can be disabled and enabled at will. One mask is often sufficient to me but I generally use two or three adjustment mask.
There are several ways to create or simular Luminosity Masking in Affinity Photo and this one is probably the most difficult. As I said in the video, I came up withthis in response to a request. The individual asked how can they replicate the specific steps in Affinity that they use in Photoshop. Many of my videos are in direct response to questions or points raised by viewers and I need to give specific answers.
Is there a possibility that all the steps presented for creating brightness masks can be done with the help of a macro command? THX .
Unfortunately not, at least not a few months ago when I last tried. The macro system can’t record all the panels.
Nice. How do you edit a mask, like curves etc? When I select the mask then hit adjustment layer, it creates a new adjustment layer for the whole image. New to Affinity : the channel, mask, edit mask, blending layers etc I use in Photoshop a lot, and hope I will be able to do similar process in Affinity.
That's one of the limitations of this method with Adobe. You can't apply adjustments directly to images or masks as you can in Photoshop. You can work around it by converting the mask to an image and then editing the image. You can then flatten that and apply it as a mask but it's very messy. The alternative is to the blending ranges option which I explain in these two videos th-cam.com/video/uaZKayQZn-c/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/z_U6TKOWNZw/w-d-xo.html
@@RobinWhalley Thank so much. I will look into it. It does not sound like too much trouble considering the impact you will have on editing the photos. You should do a tutorial on that. The ability to deal with masks in paramount in any advanced editing situation, really, among the primary skill set. What Affinity is doing, essentially putting much of the editing in an adjustment layer, and not allowing it on the mark defies common sense.
@@dannygo4230 I know. I'm actually developing a book about it. There's far too much to condense into a useful video. I may publish a few topics once the book's done.
@@RobinWhalley Nice. I really encourage you. The "movement" to leave Adobe is real, just about everyone is complaining. We may see an inflection point here. I still remember the old Serif products as really clunky toys compare to Adobe. Affinity could be just a few quick upgrades away for really significant adoption. And that will be GREAT for the market.
Forgot to add in my previous that I am using Affinity Photo 1.7.1.404 with Windows 10
Thanks, it inspired me to create my first macro following the steps(50) to get the 9 channels. Any thoughts on what next?
What adjustments would we want to make other macros with these 3 Light, 3 Mid, & 3 Dark channels? I found a way to bake pop-up slider adjustments into the macros...don't know if something like curves dialog box will pop up yet.
@@jameslax5928 Care to share the macro ? :)
@@brucevincentiis5680 After a redo I got all the adjustment curve layers and masks working properly. Could still be cleaned up a bit...Just thought Robin would do a macro tutorial based on it or offer it himself. If he is ok with it, I have no problem entertaining the idea!
These steps are a great candidate for a macro. These steps could all be recorded in a Macro, couldn't they?
Yes they are a great candidate but unfortunately not. The Affinity Macro recorder won't record some of the steps. Hopefully they will remove that restriction in the future.
Good video…..Can this be recorded as a Macro or Action ? You could record it for us and make it a download perhaps ? You could make perhaps a 5 and a 10 version….?
Thanks. Unfortunately you can't record this as a Macro. The Macro recorder in Affinity Photo won't work with some of the features.
Have you see my alternative method for creating Luminosity Masks (th-cam.com/video/iIGpHBULZjo/w-d-xo.html)? You could record a Macro to produce these.
with Luminar 2018 yu can do with just clic... add,,,luminity mask layer,,auto.....
But I was asked how to do this in Affinity Photo.
I've recently purchased Affinity. Recently I managed to do a long expose effect, by blurring the clouds with a motion effect in Photoshop. For some reason I cannot replicate this in Affinity. I'm using the motion blur, but the slider goes to 100, but the effect is not that extreme. Do you have a video on how to do this, or do you have a link for one? I cannot find anything in TH-cam on how to do this using Affinity,
Sorry I don't have anything but you can easily increase the blur by applying the filter multiple times. I think the shortcut key is Cmd + F or Ctrl + F to repeat the last filter you applied.
@@RobinWhalley Thank you for the suggestion. I'll give it a try.
I have followed this tutorial three times now and each time after creating the darks and deleting the background copy layers to create the Midtones, I find that although my original background is RGB in the Navigator, the original Background (Pixel) layer shows RGB in its thumbnail in greyscale on the main window. What am I doing wrong please?
I'm sorry, I can't figure out what you might be doing. It's very difficult without being able to watch you and check how you have Affinity set up.
@@RobinWhalley I had the same issue that upon deleting layers, my original image would convert from color to black and white. I found though that saving the project as a afphoto file and then closing and opening it up again, it would come back as color. I think it creates some sort of temporary glitch.
@@ggphoto36 Thanks. That's one I will store away for the future. There are a few things here and there that play up. I've been designing a print book recently in Affinity Publisher and it works great until you save and close the design. After reopening it the layout become mixed up. It took me ages to trace what was happening and come up with a workaround. IF I spot this one and can figure it out I will share something.
@@RobinWhalley
Hi again Robin. Thank you for replying. I did some experimentation of my own and was able to create a file of each spare channel which you can then open in another photo. However I soon realized what it actually is doing is creating a channel of the actual photo of what was in the first photo, so if it would save the darks 2, it would automatically save for the darks that were in that first photo and put them into the new photo which did not correspond to the darks in that subsequent photo. I suppose this is what makes those add-ons for Photoshop nice as they have basically created buttons that work as a macro and create the masks in one click.
But it matters not that much, as i learned a great deal about creating luminosity masks and can easily create one or two or all of them if needed in short order to edit my photos. From your video I learned how to create and modify masks and use them which to me is actually much more valuable than having an easy one click method where you do not understand what you are actually doing and how it all works. "Feed a man a fish and eats for a meal, teach him how to fish and eats for a lifetime."
I use Affinity and Capture One Pro and in the newest version you have a
luminosity button. You dont have to go through all this effort. It’s much easier with less memorizing all these different selections.
The older versions of Affinity also have the Luminosity button but, both this and Capture One produce a mask that’s very different to the sets of Luminosity Masks generated here. If you don’t agree, try creating a midtones luminosity mask like the one in the video. This is why a lot of digital editors are looking for ways to achieve this. But I would agree, it would be nice if you could do this easily. The available third party tools in Photoshop like Lumenzia and TK Actions make it easy to work with Luminosity Masks. I would love to see a similar capability in Affinity.
@@RobinWhalley I have been pressing the senior product expert, James Ritson, for an answer on this matter for a while but to no avail as yet. With your method is there perhaps a way to expand slightly and visualize the mask a bit better than marching ants, such as black and white for the inactive and active areas of the image like with the plugins you mentioned? Many thanks on this tutorial. I will attempt to record as a macro and play around with it
Wow - real a tricky clicky workaround. In my view, the lack of masking capabilities is the big weakness in Affinity .
I know, it's not easy. Fortunately you can also use this easier technique th-cam.com/video/z_U6TKOWNZw/w-d-xo.html
Great work. Nevertheless, luminosity masks have to be simplified for most users. Right now I see too many steps for something other programs make much easier. For version 2, maybe ;-)
Thanks Robin
I agree that this is complicated but it was done to demonstrate how the Photoshop mask process could be replicated in Affinity Photo. Watch my Blending Ranges video for a powerful alternative th-cam.com/video/uaZKayQZn-c/w-d-xo.html
I don't particularly like procedures that end with 7 layers and sublayers.
My way is to use the flood select tool (little magic wand) with the Refine option.
All you have to do then with the Curve tool (⌘M on a Mac) move the mid-tones.
@@pierregregoire9709 Thanks Pierre 🙂
Sadly, this does not work with the latest Affinity Beta (1.7.3.xxx) as as soon as I create more than 1 mask and load it to a channel, I lose all my saturation on the original background image
and it becomes a B&W image. I have tried duplicating the background and saving it at the bottom of the stack but regardless of what I try, the creation of more than 1 mask desaturates
the original completely.
Apologies if this sounds silly but have you checked in the channels studio panel that you have all the eye icons clicked to ensure all of the Composite channels (Red, Green, BLue and Alpha) are all visible. When you click on just one composite channel to work with, it turns all the other channels off. This will turn your image to black and white. You now need to click the eye icon to the right of each of these channels to ensure its visible. It's only then your image shows colour. The method still seems to work for me (on the Mac).
@@RobinWhalley will give that a try and see. I did notice that only the red channel had the eye icon turned on, thank you. These are the small details that can sink an attempt, I will give it a shot when I get back on to do some work. question? is changing blend mode to 'multiply' the way to vary the 'amount' of a luminosity range in order to increase it?
@@lazvaldes2857 Great. Hopefully that will fix it. And yes, the Multiply mode is what creates the next level in the Luminosity range. When people create Luminosity Masks in Photoshop doing all sorts of keyboard shortcuts, they are just setting the blending mode (but most people don't realise that).
@@RobinWhalley it solved the issue and enabling the 'eye' icons restored the color to the original background image. I noticed you have some courses on your website on luminosity masks but they pertain to Photoshop, which I do not use. If you ever redo those using Affinity, let me know, as I am interested in mage control via luminosity maks which allow me to pinpoint a range to adjust within an image and not have to use a global adjustement. I imagine I can 'stack' adjustments and assign them to specific luminosity channels, creating a 'stack' of adjustements targeting specific areas of the image based on luminosity. Again, thak you for your time
more easy with luminar 3 auto luminosity i thing t.y.
Lovely video thank you. The click sound on the mouse is however very distracting and annoying to me, but it may just be me.
I used to include the mouse click because a lot of people asked for it at one time. If I stopped it people would complain. In more recent videos I've dropped it.
Jesus Christs, the clicks. I winced at every single one, didn't make it through the video. I hope this is an exception.
I was just about to reply when I thought why bother...
My head hurts!
Yes, it's not the easiest thing to do manually.
And if this video doesn't tell people that someone needs to create a luminosity mask app I don't know what will.
I agree with you but I think it will take Serif to implement a development platform into Affinity first. That's why people can develop great tools and plugins for Photoshop. I haven't found any equivalent in Affinity. I now know how to do a lot with Luminosity Masks in Affinity but it's all quite complicated and messy.
Too many steps to remember. LOL
Lucky I've written it down then lenscraft.co.uk/affinity-photo/creating-affinity-photo-luminosity-masks/
@@RobinWhalley Got it, Robin. I will make experience with that. I am very grateful for your effort.
No problem
Now explain this to your mum.
She’s not interested in photo editing
Robin, apparently I was the only one who heard it but the background hum in your audio track forced me to give up watching the video after a few minutes. Yikes! Sorry.
Sorry. I don't know what the problem is and it's so severe that you can't watch the video.
Thanks
No problem