Congratulations!! I follow all your videos from Italy...I enjoy watching your videos because they are explained in a clear and precise way. Thank you!!!
It's a while since I made this video and can't remember if I covered it but painting with the Brush in Overlay mode is also a great way to clean up masks.
I’ve used the overlay with 50% gray method for dodging and burning for years. I never thought of blending the image with itself! I also dabbled with using the layer created by Silver Efex Pro as a contrast layer using the overlay blend mode. Makes for interesting results. Thanks for the videos Robin! Do you have any for Afinity for IPad?
Thanks for the suggestion and I'm glad you like the video. I did a couple of shorts for Affinity Photo i{ad but haven't done any longer videos yet. It's on my list but trying to use the screen recorder on my iPad whilst using Affinity Photo is extremely tricky.
HNY Robin, thanks for this tutorial. Can I ask a question of you? I use Affinity Photo and when I dodge and burn; I use a 50% fill layer with fill opacity set to 15%, I used to use the left hand blend range graph to set that before Affinity added fill opacity in ver 2.0, I select that with the layer I'm working on. I flick between dodge and burn using Alt on my windows computer. This particular technique was transposed from a photoshop tutorial to Affinity by myself. In your tutorial here you just painted on the image with black and white without any 50% grey layer. Does that mean that Affinity has that 50% grey layer hidden under the hood so to speak when dodge and burn tool is selected? The way I do it works fine as it not only darkens or lightens but also enhances the colour to stop it looking strange after lots of brushwork. After watching your tutorial today I'm starting to wonder if some of my actions are superfluous overkill. Cheers.
In my approach, it's the blend mode that controls the effect. If you fill a layer with 50% grey and then set the blend mode to either Overlay or Soft Light, you will find the grey vanishes. That's because grey is a neutral colour for those blend modes. If you paint with a darker colour than 50% grey, it blends with the image making it darker and if it's lighter it lightens in. This works even if you don't fill the layer with 50% grey. It's also possible to paint with colour other than black/white/grey using this method so that you add colour at the same time as dodging and burning. This works well with the Soft Light blend mode.
Sorry it’s not related to this video but wonder if you can help. If I open a black and white image in Affinity Photo (not v2) and then drag in a colour photo (which would create another layer), that colour photo is also imported in black and white? Is this possibly a bug or am I missing something obvious?
The only things that I can think of are that you have a black and white adjustment layer in the image that's acting on the new image layer. The other possibility is that the image or document is in a greyscale format rather than colour. Then any image you add to it will be converted to that format. You can check it in the Document menu by choosing "Convert Format / ICC Profile". There is then a dropdown at the top of the dialog for setting the "Colour Format". Check this is using one of the colour formats like RGB or CMYK. If it says grey then that's the cause of the problem.
