Enhance sunsets
James Paterson gives dull sunset colours a boost using Affinity Photo’s powerful Channel Mixer
Level-up sunsets with Affinity Photo
Have you ever returned from shooting a stunning sunset only to find your photos look slightly underwhelming? Those reds, yellows and oranges in the sky that seemed so bold at the time can occasionally come out rather dull. But with a few simple tweaks we can boost the sky, enhance the tones and produce an image that looks exactly how you remember it the day it was shot.
Affinity Photo has lots of colour boosting tools to choose from. In this tutorial, we’re going to use a neat trick that involves the
Channel Mixer adjustment. As the name suggests, this useful tool lets us mix our red, green and blue colour channels.
Each pixel in our image is initially made up of a specific value for red, green and blue, on a scale from 0-255. By adjusting the Channel Mixer we can change the values and shift the colours one way or another.
As such, the Channel Mixer can do wonders for your sunrise and sunset photos, as it focuses on and boosts the colour ranges that appear in the sky, resulting in lush warm tones. What’s more, because the effect sits on its own layer, we have the freedom to change the strength at any time, either by duplicating the layer to make it stronger, or reducing the layer opacity to make it weaker.
If we want, we can also make it work selectively over the sky by using a layer mask, which is useful here both for reducing the effect in over-saturated clouds and increasing it in the waves.
Here’s how to use this non-destructive method to super-charge a sunset image.