In today’s video I’m going to show you guys in one simple tool how to even out uneven backdrops in affinity photo
if you we kind of we kind of look closely here let me let me get rid of a couple of windows that we don’t need ok so watch as I’m zooming in here you’ll notice on this side of the backdrop it’s very bright the light is kind of coming in from this side and it’s kind of straying across to this side of her face and then over on this side it gets kind of dark d do you guys are you guys tracking what I’m talking about here so it’s like you’ll notice on this side over here the right-hand side it’s very bright over on this side over here it’s very dark it kind of gets a little gray as well
I’m going to show you guys how to fix is that in affinity photo that’s what I mean when I when I say uneven backdrops that’s what I’m talking about so when you’re using I’ll give you guys kind of a breakdown of this is a one light setup but when you’re using only one light depending how the light is positioned sometimes it doesn’t hit your backdrop exactly evenly and when that happens depending on how close the model is to the backdrop will determine how the light is going to spray across the backdrop in this situation the model is kind of close to the
backdrop the light was only hitting one side and then everything else fell off the shadow so an affinity photo right now I’m gonna show you guys how to fix that so basically what we’re gonna be doing we’re gonna do anything but be selecting the background and we’re gonna be using an average layer using the brush tool and then also a saturation layer to even out the back drop drop layer so this is the before and after you’ll kind of see that the selection isn’t perfect but that’s not my goal to show you guys how to do perfect selections and affinity photos
showing you how to fix backdrops here so we’re gonna delete that and we’re gonna get started so after you load up your photo you’re gonna go into the selections persona we’re gonna go over here to our smart selection brush and we’re gonna make sure this is set to add and we’re gonna leave the with maybe at about sixty pixels 60 to 100 pixels somewhere around there you’re gonna select your backdrop and we’re gonna do that select your backdrop select there select there now I’m not gonna do this perfectly just because I’m just gonna just show you guys
how to do this really quickly we’re gonna just get rid of some that here and that little thing on the shoulder all right that’s good enough alright so then what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go over to our layers panel we’re gonna hit add fill layer okay so what you’re gonna do now that basically added a color layer of whatever color you have selected here in the CMYK RGB slider to then uses the background so what I’m gonna do first and foremost is I’m actually gonna go to scroll down to gray sliders I’m gonna set this at 50% gray the reason why I’m sitting it’s
50% grace because that’s in the neutral color that we use in photography to basically dictate even exposure even color all of that so when I set it to 50% gray and then I set this basically this layers this layers I guess it’s kind of like a layers mask or not mask it’s that’s how the layers are actually gonna affect the selection below it and what we’re gonna do is you’re gonna set this to average what average basically does is it evens it takes the the culmination of the layer that’s that currently selected and the layers below it in terms of color saturation tool and
Lumosity things of that nature and it culminates all that into basically medium gray or whatever you have set on the layer it averages out all of that stuff so averages out color average out averages out saturation hue averages out luminosity all of that stuff gets averaged out on the average layer when you have this as your your interaction or your your layer mask whatever it is for out the name of this I don’t know why I’m blanking on the name of this but yes this is this how this how the layers in Iraq so what we’re going to do is we’re going to basically adjust the
opacity here so somewhere between 50 to 70% the reason why I do that because I don’t want it to be completely gray and then lose all the color so I said it’s usually about like let’s say 60 or so for this photo okay so that’s let’s show you before an hour that’s where we’re getting right there okay so next thing is what we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to layers fill layer this time we’re gonna change this blend mode is what it’s called we’re going to change that to color go back to our little color selection right here what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna
come to the photo persona persona I’m actually gonna delete or minimize this layer right here you’re gonna come over here to the ink dropper we’re gonna select a color somewhere in the middle of the backdrop and then that’s going to set it right here to our actual color picker we’re going to select that in the recent color and we’re gonna go here to fill by default when you change this color right here it also changes that fill layer so basically what I’m doing when I’m using the color picker I’m picking that I’m like basically disabling this layer and then I’m
coming back to what after I picked the color so right there that’s how we’re gonna get the color of the backdrop you’ll notice that it went from this light gray to now a brown let me actually go back to the selections persona and deselect that because we don’t need any of that anymore and then now you’ll notice instead of a light gray we’re getting a light brown and then now we’re gonna set that opacity to a hundred percent to get whatever color that you want you can just go over here and you can change this back to CMYK or RGB and then you can
adjust adjust the color if you’d like to whatever color you want it to be my goal is not to change the color that was there that’s why I use the color picker so I’m gonna go back to the brown that was there because I don’t want to actually change that but you can change that if you’d like and you can change the saturation of it and things of that nature but that right there let’s kind of group these together and I’ll show you what that did let’s get out of that whoops didn’t mean to do that and you’ll see the before and after different that’s how you even out the
backdrops from here now you can basically go into the other tutorial I recorded on how to change the color and then adjust it accordingly to whatever your specific visual need or your idea or your vision was but that’s how you even them out though as you notice the the saturation and and the the brightness on this side was way brighter over here and more saturated and it got really d saturated and kind of dark over on this side and then once we do that we even out the whole thing so over here is pretty bright over here is pretty bright as well if you want it to
be more even you can upgrade this even more and then now you get an even even more even backward backdrop that’s just kind of up to you but that’s just that’s one way to do it you can also I’ll give you guys another tip as well you can also set this instead of average to Lumosity and that would further change the the exposure of the background the brightness of the background as well I don’t normally do it on luminosity because I think it’s a little bit too strong depending on how the photo was shot if she’s standing up like this luminosity works great if
they’re sitting down average works better in my my personal experience but you guys can use whichever one that you think is best and we’ll just kind of leave it at that so average more luminosity again I think average is just a little bit more natural but it still fixes it it doesn’t look as bad as it was before but either work and I’ll show you before and after with the luminosity fix before and after I know the color of the background did change and you would just go in here and we just play around with the RGB in the CMYK basically I will just probably go to HSL and I
would just increase the saturation to make sure it looked a little bit more similar it was kind of like sort of like that that’s how you fix it so I hope that was helpful to you guys I hope that you find some value in this video maybe that kind of unveiled a little bit of mystery on how people how photographers are fixing you know backdrops because we don’t always shoot it evenly so sometimes you do have to use these techniques to fix it unfortunately so that is the way that we are fixing it in Photoshop or affinity photo or Lightroom all the all these platforms work
exactly the same way I will be doing future videos on showing how to do these in those platforms because there bit different but suffice it to say that’s how you do it infinity photo so I hope that was helpful I hope I had some valid you guys today if you’re new here please consider subscribing we absolutely love to have you as a part of the team as part of the the unity the family please leave a like comment and comment down below if you found this video helpful or you have any questions or something I missed that was important to you let me know in the comments down below and as always my friends peace out have a great day and walkie brother
