9 White balance
Create a White Balance Adjustment Layer to adjust how
yellow or blue, warm or cool, your image looks. Ours is a bit warm,
so by adding more blue we can make it appear more natural, as it
was taken on a winter’s day – add more yellow if your image looks
too cold. The Picker allows you to sample an area that should be
white – the program will alter the rest of the colours to match.
7
Spot removal
Dust spots can leave grey circular marks on your images
that can usually be brushed out. We haven’t got any of those on
this image, but there’s some bird poop on the log that we can
treat the same way. Select the Healing Brush tool (it looks like a
plaster and lives near the bottom) from the toolbar, and in the
Layers palette make sure you’re working on the Background layer.
5
Crop tool
Our picture of a black kite sitting on a log looks great, but
there’s clearly a dustbin just behind the log on the right. This gives
away the fact it’s a captive bird more than the ring on its leg does,
and adds nothing to the picture. We can remove it with a crop,
improving the composition at the same time. Select the Crop tool
from the toolbar on the left, it’s black, three down from the top.
10 Denoise
Brightening the image has introduced some digital noise.
Affinity can remove this, but it has a softening effect. To avoid this
affecting your image, select the areas you want to denoise – the
background in our case –with the Selection Brush, below the Crop
tool. Go to Filters > Noise > Denoise and slide the Luminance
slider to the right. It will only affect the selected areas. Q8
Healing Brush
This tool is clever, because it tries to blend its strokes in with
the existing image. You need to select an area for the brush to
copy from, so hold [Alt] and choose an area that’s similar to the
area you want to fix, but unmarked. Often, this is right next to the
area you’re working on. Once you’ve chosen a source, you can
paint over the blemish or spot you want to remove.6 The crop interface
Select the tool, and a grid appears marking out the Rule of
Thirds: elements that sit on the lines or intersections are meant to
be more pleasing to the eye. Select Original Ratio from the Mode
dropdown, then adjust the rectangle so elements you want to
remove are cut from the edges, and points of interest hit the grid
lines. Click the blue Apply button, top left, when you’re happy.34 |^ |^ March 2020