Can Affinity Photo 2 be used to edit infrared
photography? Does it have the white balance and color swap tools needed for infrared images? How
about the iPad version, can that be used to edit infrared photography? Let's find out. Affinity
Photo 2 is available in macOS and Windows desktop editions, as well as an iPad Edition.
Each is available for a one-time purchase with no subscription. Let's start by talking about
the Personas used in Affinity Photo 2. This is key to understanding how Affinity Photo works.
There are a number of personas up here in the upper left-hand corner. We have the Photo Persona.
We have a Liquify Persona, a Develop Persona, a Tone Mapping Persona, and the Export Persona.
The important thing to understand about these first four is that some of them work with
raw data and some of them work with raster data after the raw image has been rasterized. If
we start with the Develop Persona, this is the Persona where we can take a raw image and make our
initial adjustments to it. One important thing to keep in mind here is how we process this image in
the Develop Module.
The output, if we develop this image, is going to be pixel layer. That means we're
going to rasterize the image. That's important for infrared. In infrared, we will lose some of the
control over white balance. In a raw image, the white balance control is a temperature slider that
works in Kelvins, but once an image is rasterized and turned into a pixel layer, then it will become sort
of a yellow-blue tint which operates differently. That's something to be aware of. In the output
area, selecting raw layer embedded or linked and what this will do is much like a smart object in
Photoshop, the raw layer will keep the raw image within the image so you could go back and make
changes to the white balance even after you have developed it. All right so now that we understand
a little bit about some of the personas, we'll dive into some more of them later.
Let's start to edit
this image. First of all, we'll get a white balance. We're in the Develop Persona and we will come
down on the right-hand side to white balance, and I'll check on that. We'll close down some
of these others, so it's easier to see. Here is the white balance panel. The picker, it's a little
confusing, the picker is over on the left side in these tools, the white balance tool picker. If I click on that and then select the clouds in the image, now I will get a white balance.
I will increase the exposure. We'll get this up, maybe it goes up about a stop. I could increase
the Black Point brightness. I'll add a little bit of contrast and a little bit of clarity. We'll get
those up a little bit. I could also add saturation if I wanted to and Vibrance at this point.
In
addition to white balance, I could adjust the shadows and highlights. We'll open that up, collapse
some of these others. These shadows and highlights, I could bring the Shadows up. I could adjust the
highlights, bring those down if I like. I'm done setting a white balance so I want to develop.
I'll go up here and click develop. Now that I've developed the image, we've switched over to the
Photo Persona where I can add layers and make other adjustments.
Let's talk a little bit more
about white balance before we do anything else. If I come down to the right-hand side, I'm in the layers panel, and if I click adjustments, there is actually a White Balance
adjustment layer. This would allow me to make additional changes to the white balance if you
found that the white balance adjustment you were making in the develop module was not enough, you
could make additional changes here in the white balance to tweak this, maybe I want this to be a
little bluer.
You could also do a little bit with the greens and magentas. I'll leave those alone.
We've got the white balance adjustment module to make additional changes to the white balance.
At the top of the screen, we also have some auto adjustments. We have an Auto White Balance, Auto
Colors, Auto Contrast, and Auto Levels. I've tested the Auto White balance it really doesn't
work very well. In fact, none of these auto settings work very well for infrared. They might work better
for visible light images, but they don't add a lot of value for infrared. Now that I have a good white
balance, let's talk about swapping colors. Of course, we have three ways to swap colors for color
infrared photography; the channel mixer, invert, and Hue, and the good news here is that Affinity
Photo 2 has all of these methods. Let's dive in and look at each one individually. Let's start
with the channel mixer. We can go here in the layers panel, and come down to adjustments and
we can select Channel Mixer, and now I can make a typical adjustment that you would with a Channel
Mixer.
I can set, here in the Red Channel, I can set Red to be 0%, and Blue to be 100%, and then I could
switch over to the Blue Channel, where I can switch Red to be 100% and Blue to be 0%, and now I've
used a red-blue color swap in the Channel Mixer to swap my colors. In addition to a red and blue
swap, I could make changes to the Green channel. I could go in, and I could set the Green Channel
to 100% Red and no Green or Blue, and that gives me this look, or I could change to 0% Red, 0%
Green, and 100% Blue, to give me a different set of colors, or I could split the Green Channel to
try to give me a most realistic sky, and that will give me 50% Red, 0% Green, and 50% Blue, and then
that's another way to deal with the Green channel in your color swap. Here's an interesting tidbit
for Affinity, you could actually swap colors not only in RGB but in CMYK. Let's see what that looks
like here in the Channel Mixer.
I'll hit reset and then under Channel output, I will select CMYK as
my channel, and you can see, now I have Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. What I will do is, I will swap
the Cyan and Yellow channels. Under Cyan, I will switch this to 0%, and I'll switch Yellow to 100%,
and then I can switch to the Yellow Channel, and I can switch to Cyan to 100%, and Yellow to 0%, gives
me, pretty much the same effect, but I think it's interesting that you could actually do a color
swap in CMYK in addition to RGB. All right, let's talk about the invert option. I will close the
Channel Mixer and I'm going to take this Channel Mixer adjustment, and I'm going to click the
visibility to hide it so it's no longer visible, but we're still retaining it. Now we want to
do an invert. Let's go down to adjustments and I will select Invert, so this inverts the image in
its entirety so it looks a bit like a film negative.
In order to correct this, I'm going to need to change
the blend mode. We'll go up here where it says Normal, and I will change the blend mode to either
Hue or Color. Either one will produce the same results. Now we're only inverting the colors, the
hue or the color, we're not inverting the tones of the image. This is the result of an Invert
adjustment. Let's move on to the third option for swapping colors which is a hue adjustment, and
I can start by toggling off the Invert so that is now hidden, and we will create an HSL adjustment. We'll go down to adjustments and I will click on HSL, to bring up the HSL option, we have, much
like you've probably seen in other HSL panels and other applications, a global option, which is
indicated by the rainbow and then individual color channels.
We'll stay on the global option. I will
take Hue shift, and I can drag this to 180°, and I've swapped my colors. I could also pick a different
amount for slight variations. I could go 170, 160, or I could even go into the negatives and pick
values there. If you like those colors you can do that as well. One of the nice things things about
the HSL panel is after I've made our Global color swap, whether it's in HSL, or Invert, or Channel
Mixer, I can use the HSL panel to change individual colors. I could change just the color of the sky
or just the color of the foliage.
Let's pick one of the individual channels, in this case, I'll pick
blue and I'll use my picker to then pick the sky so we know specifically the color we're looking to
adjust. The interface might look a little confusing because of our color swap, this looks yellow now,
that's okay. If I go into the Hue shift, I can make Hue adjustments. You can see this makes my sky
a little more teal or this makes my sky a little more purple without impacting the foliage. I can
pick the exact color that I'm looking for and I can repeat the process for foliage. I can pick
a different channel, let's say the Yellow Channel, use my picker, and select the ground here and now
this will allow me to make Hue adjustments to the foliage. In addition to the Hue adjustments,
I could also change the saturation. I could add saturation or change the luminance. So lots of
options here in the HSL panel to do a full-color swap or to tweak individual colors after you've
done a color swap.
Now if having support for all of the color swap methods wasn't enough, Affinity
Photo also supports LUTs, so you could import LUTs to do color swapping as well. Let's show you how
to do that. We'll start down in adjustments, an adjustment layer, and we'll pick LUT. This will open
up the LUT panel where we can then load an external LUT to be able to do this color swap. I'll click
load LUT, this will allow me to pick an external LUT, and in this case, I'll pick from some of my freely
available creative infrared LUTs, so let me pick one of these, and we'll open this up, and now the
color swap and any color effects that are part of that LUT have been applied to the image, and I can
manage that right here in the LUT adjustment layer, so great options for color swapping in Affinity
Photo, Channel Mixer, Invert, Hue-shift, and LUTs, all available.
In addition to that, there's a number
of other adjustment layers that can provide great control over color. In adjustments, we will select
Selective Color and what Selective Color does is it allows you to tweak an individual color. We can see all of the available colors here; Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, Whites, Neutrals,
Blacks. I could pick any of these and then begin to make adjustments. Let's say I wanted to make
adjustments to the Reds, I can adjust any of these colors. I could put more cyan or less cyan in the
Reds. I could adjust the magenta or the yellow, and I could do this for each of the tones.
So lots of
power here with Selective Color. Next up, let's look at the Color Balance adjustment layer. If I
go into adjustments and select Color Balance, this gives me the ability to tweak the tone of
a color in the Highlights, Midtones, or Shadows, and then I can make my adjustments. Let's say
that I wanted the clouds in the sky, which are going to be my Highlights, I wanted those to have
a little bit of an orange cast or a yellow cast, I could come into here I could under yellow and
blue I could shift to the yellow side and add a little bit of a little bit of a yellow tone to
the sky.
So make a variety of adjustments for color balance, another powerful tool for adjusting
colors. Finally, let's look at one more adjustment layer for adjusting colors and that's going to
be Split Toning. If I open up the adjustment panel and select Split Toning, Split Toning allows
me to add a hue to the Highlights or the Shadows to affect the image. I can select the color
that I want to add so for Highlights, let's say I want to add more yellow and then I can adjust
the amount of saturation that gets added and for the Shadows, I could pick the color I want to add
to the shadows and then increase the saturation to determine how much of that I want.
You can play
with Split Toning to try different looks for your image. Split Toning and these other color
adjustment layers are a great way to add unique character to your images. Let's take a look
at the Tone Mapping Persona. Now before we do that, we'll have to convert our base layer from the raw
embedded raw image to a pixel layer. Let's go over to our raw image the bottom layer where
our image is stored, and I will rasterize that.
We can no longer make those temperature-based white
balance adjustments, but if you're far enough along in a process, then that shouldn't be a problem. Now that I've rasterized the layer, let's head back over to the Tone Mapping Persona, It'll take a
minute for Affinity to do a map for this image. One of the benefits of Tone Mapping in Affinity
is it allows you to add a great deal of detail to an image, in many ways it reminds me of the kind
of detail that you get in a monochrome image by using Silver EFX.
If you'd like to get that
level of detail in a color image you could do that through the tone mapping in Affinity Photo.
There's a variety of looks that you can try and then once you've picked a look that you like you
can go over to the Tone Mapping controls on the right, and you can adjust the amounts so you can
see the look that it has, the local contrast. So extreme local contrast, less local contrast, you
can play with those settings.
These give you a lot of control over the detail in your image in the
Tone Mapping Persona. The iPad version of Affinity Photo 2 has all of these features, which makes it
a compelling option for mobile editing. Here's a look at the iPad version. One downside that I found
with the iPad version is that if you plug in an external monitor it can only display an image
preview and not the main screen with the edit interface. In summary Affinity Photo 2 can edit
infrared images. The white balance options allow you to set a good white balance for
infrared. It offers all of the color swap options, plus LUTs. This may be one of the
best no-subscription alternatives to Photoshop. Affinity includes layers, panorama stitching,
stacking, HDR, focus merge, astro stacking, and more. Really the main feature that Affinity
Photo is lacking is catalog management. If you want a subscription-free feature-rich raw editor with
Photoshop-like capabilities for Mac OS, Windows, or even the iPad, then Affinity Photo 2 could
be for you. A 30-day trial is available.
Do you use Affinity Photo 2 to edit your infrared
images? What do you like or dislike about it? Let us know in the comments. If you'd like to
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