Tutorial 3
James Paterson corrects unsightly colour casts and shows you how to boost your photos with a range of Affinity Photo tools
Achieve perfect colours in Serif’s Affinity Photo editing software
Affinity Photo by Serif offers a wide array of colour correcting tools. We’re going look at some of the best options, from white balance adjustments to powerful selective colour tweaks. Along the way we’ll encounter many of the most useful colour tools and settings in Affinity Photo. Whether you have a photo with a colour cast, a portrait with unnatural skin tones, or a colour temperature mismatch, these techniques described are sure to help.
We’ll use Adjustment Layers to make a series of colour tweaks
here. These allow us to make our changes on separate layers, so we can always go back and tweak things later if need be.
At first we’ll use the White Balance command. This lets us correct the yellow cast in our original photo by using a colour picker to source a neutral point in the image. But if things still don’t look right we can go on to tweak things manually. While doing so, it can be helpful to boost saturation to eye-pooping levels
to get an exaggerated idea of the colour shifts in the image.
From here we can go on to tweak the balance of colour using the Colour Balance command, which lets us fine-tune colour shifts in either the shadows, midtones or highlights. Finally, we can selectively boost colours, either by targeting specific ranges in the image (as we’ve done here to boost the reds), or by using masks in combination with Adjustment Layers to isolate and alter specific portions of the image.