Add drama to your pictures
Enhance city and landscape shots with a more dramatic sky
Exotic summer holiday locations give you more scenic photography opportunities than you get at home, as well as the free time to capture some shots.
As a result, you’re likely to have come back from your trip abroad with a camera packed full of stunning landscape photos.
However, when viewing your images from the comfort of a Mac, you may find that the contents of your memory card don’t live up to the memories in your mind. The colours in your photos may not be as vibrant as they appeared on location, and the large sun that dominated the sky during those magnificent sunsets may appear to have shrunk into a much more underwhelming ball of light.
Take this tutorial’s start image, for example. We planned to capture the sun rising behind the silhouette of a Greek church. As we couldn’t access the fenced-off church grounds, we were limited to where we could place the camera. This restricted the ways we could juxtapose the sun with the main subject. A decent sunrise needs a few clouds to add colour and texture but on this occasion the clouds were sparse. Our shot is also in portrait orientation, whereas we should have rotated the camera to capture a landscape-oriented version to place the church in context with its surroundings.
Overcoming obstacles
Fortunately, Affinity Photo’s digital darkroom tools can help us to overcome various content and compositional challenges to reproduce the perfect shot that we had originally hoped to capture – a much easier and cheaper solution than heading back to that Greek island to retake the photo!
You can use Affinity Photo’s tools to replace a disappointing sky with a more stunning cloud-filled sunrise, recompose the shot to create a landscape-oriented version, and even resize and reposition the sun for more impact and balance.
We’ll show you how to hide and reveal pixels in a non-destructive way, courtesy of layer masks and brush tools. This helps you create a perfect blend between your composited layers’ contents. You’ll also learn a compositing technique that softens the edges of your selected subject so that it doesn’t look too ‘cut-out’.