CREATE, THEN MERGE, THREE IMAGES
SHOOT YOUR IMAGE
01 You’ll need a camera capable of shooting raw images for this. It’s a feature of all DSLRs, most high-end compacts, and some phones. Raw captures the entire readout of the sensor without compression, so we can use a raw image processing app to extract shadow, midtone and highlight data from a single image, before merging the three back together to create the final result.
OPEN IN AFFINITY PHOTO
02 Affinity Photo is split into task-specific Personas, and one of these is for raw image development. Right-click your raw file in File Explorer, select Open With > Affinity Photo, and Affinity will recognise the file and open in the Develop persona. From here, you can crop and straighten the image using the Crop tool, one up from the bottom of the toolbar.
CREATE AN IMAGE
03 We’re going to use the Exposure slider (located in the Exposure tab of the Basic tools on the right of the interface) to create three images: One will be dark; the second will be as you’ve shot it; and the third will be too bright. Click ‘Develop’ and Affinity will open the image in its Photo persona. Export it as a JPEG (File > Export), with a name like ‘midtones’, then return to Develop.
CREATE MORE IMAGES
04 To create a ‘dark’ image, drag the Exposure slider back to -1.5. You can type the numbers in for extra accuracy. The unit used to measure exposure is the ‘stop,’ so you’re darkening the image by 1.5 stops. Export this in the same way as the first, calling it ‘shadows’. Repeat the process in the other direction, brightening the image by 1.5 stops. Export it as an image called ‘highlights’.
HDR MERGE
05 Close all your images, and go to Affinity’s File menu. Choose ‘New HDR Merge’ and, in the window that appears, use Add to choose the three JPEGs you created earlier. Make sure Tone Map HDR Image is ticked, but don’t worry about automatic alignment as the camera didn’t move between exposures. Click ‘OK’. There will be a brief period before your merged image is presented.
PRESETS
06 Following the merge, you’ll find yourself in Affinity’s Tone Mapping persona. This is dedicated to creating high dynamic range images, and on the left you’ll find some presets. They’re grouped under Default, Extreme and Crazy – and with names like that you should know what you’re getting. We’re going to use Dramatic from the Default set for our landscape photo.
SPLIT VIEW
07 At the top right of the interface are some moon-shaped buttons that control the split view. The full moon shows only your edited image. The split blue-and-white half moons puts a divider up the middle – you can slide the divider back and forth to see the changes. The mirrored blue-and-white half moons show the same view, with the unedited image on the right.
MANUAL CONTROL
08 The presets aren’t the only way to edit your image. On the right are sliders similar to those in Adobe Lightroom. The Tone Compression slider effectively controls the strength of the effect, cramming more tones from outside your screen’s display gamut into it. We tend to leave this at 100%. Local Contrast needs more care, as it can produce an extremely artificial result.
MAKE USE OF OVERLAYS
09 Edits can be painted on to your image using Overlays. There are tools on the left for painting areas, erasing what you have painted, and for creating gradients. Once these are created (there’s an Edge Aware option at the top) they appear in the Overlays window on the right, and with one selected, all the edits you make only appear inside the Overlay’s area.
FINISH AND SAVE
10 When you’re happy with the look of your image, click the Apply button (top left). Doing so takes you back to the Photo persona, from where you can edit the image. When you’re done, you can save it using File > Export, or there’s a Persona dedicated to the job called Export. This places export tools at the right of the interface, and adds a lot of complex options to the process.