Photo tonal tweaks
How to reveal more color and detail in a high–contrast location
REQUIRES
Affinity Photo
you will learn
How to adjust shadows and highlights independently, boost selective colors, and mimic a graduated neutral density filter
IT WILL TAKE
20 minutes
When faced with a high– contrast scene, your camera may struggle to get a balanced exposure that reveals detail in both the shadows and the highlights. On Auto mode it may set the exposure to capture bright highlight detail, plunging the shadows into darkness.
If the camera exposes to prioritize capturing shadow detail, then the highlights may become overexposed and lose detail. If in doubt, it’s best to set the camera to Manual mode and choose an exposure that captures detail in the highlights. It’s much easier to restore missing shadow detail in Affinity Photo than it is to claw back detail in overexposed (clipped) highlights.
In this project’s example image, our Scottish castle is backlit, losing much of its details in the underexposed shadows. We could boost the global exposure to reveal more shadow detail, but that would blow out the correctly exposed sky. Fortunately, Affinity Photo enables us to carry out selective tonal adjustments to reveal missing shadow detail without altering the healthy highlights.
Our example photo is a raw format file, which means that it contains much more information about the scene’s colors and tones than we would get when shooting a compressed JPEG. By working with a raw format file, we can use Affinity Photo’s Develop Persona (or workspace) to selectively lighten the underexposed shadows to reveal more missing detail, boost midtone contrast to tease out cloud texture, and create more vibrant colors.
The Develop Persona is like a digital darkroom for fixing typical photo problems with exposure and color, providing useful tools close to hand. If you prefer to shoot and edit compressed JPEG format files, you can still use the Develop Persona tools covered here, though you may end up with unwanted compression artefacts.