Affinity Photo - 5 Filters for Landscape Photography

Key Takeaways

today I'm going to show you my five favorite landscape filters hello my friends and let's get started we are working inside of affinity photo but we're going to use the free Nick collection I will provide a download link for this and also a link to how how to install this in Affinity photo so you can use it yourself this picture will be our end result and this is our starting picture I will show you the filters individually and then in combination with each other and to show you that better we will use the picture of this doc so you can really see the effect that is going on in the landscape it's a bit hard to see um to get to the filter go up here to filters plugins Nick collection and then we're going to use the color Effects Pro 4 which is part of the Nick collection there we go when you load this on the left side you see a long list of all the filters that you have for your use and there is subsections like landscape wedding architecture and all that other good stuff this is a suggestion of filters that are both uh best for these uses but what you can also do is when you click on these little stars they will make them your favorites and you have this little um section up here which says favorites so I've selected five of them which are really great for Landscapes the first one I'm going to show you is white neutralizer which will make a neutral white tone in your picture and we can see this here with the dock picture for example you can see the background has kind of this color cast over it and also this uh the fur it has some kind of color touch inside of it so what you're going to do with the uh with the filter activated is click here on the Color Picker on the right up here and then you click on the background uh or on a white color basically and now you have two sliders one is adjust the whole image the other one is neutralized wides and when you move them you can see what kind of effect they have so adjust whole image means the degree on which this filter is applied to all of the image and not just the tone that you selected so it's kind of a um how can I say a range of precision of the white that you want to adjust so if you go to 100% % it's taking all of the picture if you go to 0% it's taking basically none of the picture so you want to be somewhere in the middle the neutralized whites on the other hand is how strong it's going to neutralize the color into a white color if you go to zero there not really a change but if you go to 100% you can see that all the whites in the picture the background and also in the fur they are completely White there is no color cast in them anymore so you mostly want to retain some kind of ambient color which really depends on the usage but of course with landscape you mostly want to retain some kind of ambient surrounding color from the light so also put this in somewhere of a middle spot okay the next filter that we are going to look at is the color no sorry the pro contrast the pro cont one of my favorite filters inside of the Nick collection where you have three sliders the first one is correct Color cast which is very or not very but kind of similar to what we have seen right now because if you move this up to 100% you can also see that it removes the color cast in the picture the reason why we need to use both of these filters is because if you want to just make the wide neutral but then apply other colors and afterwards you want to use a contrast in your picture from the pro contrast you will set this one here to zero and use the white neutralizer as an individual effect so this is why I show you both the second one is correct contrast so this is kind of self-explanatory it's a normal um contrast correction but the third one this is one I really like because it's a dynamic contrast and this means that contrast is only applied where it is needed in the picture so you can see that it is not equally applied on all of the parts of the picture you see there's a very low contrast and it's kind of mushy it's applied a lot more than on other parts where you can see that there is already a lot of contrast you can see there's less going on than for example here in the fur in the dark parts of the fur where it's giving a really nice contrast so we will see later in the landscape that this has a really nice and interesting effect the next one that we are going to look at two that sound very similar Skylight filter and sunlight filter the first we're going to look at is the sunlight filter and this has a very nice effect because with this you can adjust the amount of sunlight and the color of sunlight that you want to have inside your picture we have again a lot of faders on the right side so one is the light strength the light temperature the brightness the contrast saturation I think the lower three you know already if you have used a photo tool before so brightness contrast saturation kind of self explanatory the upper ones are more interesting to us because this is the light strength and the light temperature and you can see with the light temperature that even it shows you the degrees in kelvin so the lowest one is 5,1 100 Kelvin and the highest one is 7,700 Kelvin this is not of course the room temperature it's the light temperature so this is pretty important to us it doesn't really make much sense for this picture maybe a little bit uh to make it in the in the cooler area but you can see that the this is a very cold light right now and when we put it to the other direction you can see it's a very warm light on the light strength um it sets the the amount of light that you're going to apply to the picture so that you are shining onto the picture of course you can't remove all of the light it's not the sense of the filter it just tells you how much you're going to add so if you set it to zero there's no extra light going to be added and if you set it too high there's a lot of light going to be added so this is way too bright but you can do that of course you know so there's the possibility do that and this is the difference to the brightness because the brightness is just the picture brightness you can set it very bright and very dark but as you can see the brightness is different from the light strength you know because yeah like I said it's just the brightness and of course then you have the contrast which I think you know and the saturation and the saturation is influencing the picture but in a very soft way so you see if I put it up the maximum is 30% and the lowest part is-4 40% it's not going completely black and white because this is just influencing the sunlight in the picture but these are very very nice um settings to use the next one that sounds very similar is the Skylight filter which just has one setting and the difference is with the skylights filter you're just applying a warm sunny Skylight to the image so you just have one setting which is the strength you can add none and you can add a lot of it you can see this is getting very sunny so you can imagine when you have a landscape picture you can get a really nice sunny light into that picture with this filter so we have one left and this is the color stylizer which doesn't really make sense for the doc picture right now but it you can see very well how it is applied on the picture um up here on the right you have the color you can choose when you click on this little um box um a color selector pops up and you can basically choose any kind of color um let's use a green color for example and you can see as's a lot of green light um or color applied to the picture and again you can set um the contrast in the picture you can set the saturation in the picture another thing and this you can do this for all of the effects that you've seen so far is down here it says control points and when you click on this you have the opacity that you can set to zero or 100 so you can influence how much of the effect is applied to the picture and we have these kind of control points here that I'm not going to explain in this tutorial but this basically allows you to use the filter for just a certain area of the picture we will talk about that in another video so now I will close this again and we will apply this to the complete landscape so make sure you click on the layer that you want to edit not on any other layer because it will always pick the layer that you're selecting so this is our starting picture let's go again to filters plug-in Nick collection and our color Effects Pro 4 there we go it's going to load up taking a little bit of time did it not work oh no there it's there it is sorry it took a little bit so we're going to start out with the white neutralizer to give us a little more of a neutral white in the picture I will take the Color Picker and put it somewhere here because I want mostly to influence um the clouds and the background so let's make this a little bit more neutral and let's see if I'm adjust the whole image I will stay also in a kind of low range it's a it's a very subtle adjustment there's not really much going on but it's making the picture a little bit more neutral so we have a more neutral picture to start with the next thing we need to do because we want to layer the effects now is down here it says add filter you need to click on this because now if you click over here it will just replace the filter you don't want to do that so click on ADD filter and now you can click on another one and we will start with the sunlight filter to give us a nice soft sunlight in the picture now let's see light strength I think I will keep the light strength pretty low the warmth is already in a nice position and I don't really need to touch the other ones and the good thing is because they are stacked now you can go back and forward between the different filters to see what adjustment fits your taste we will already go to the next one so add a filter and go to sunlight in this uh no sorry to Skylight in this case and here we can adjust what kind of of a warm evening it's going to be just also adding a little bit of warmth to the picture you can see also here the difference of the effect that it has um we have this is the sunlight with KES a very nice sunlight but this is the skylight with makes the picture warm uh but doesn't really add more light it's just influencing the temperature um of the of the lights in the picture so there we go the next one we're going to add so click again on ADD filter is is going to be our color stylizer and this will enable us to make this very nice Violet Hue that you see in a lot of pictures online so let's select um a kind of medium violet color not too strong so there we go maybe this one there we go and you see now all of it is kind of violet and it's too much we don't need that much so now it comes into consideration to have this control Point setting down here so click on that that you have the opacity setting and then we can remove this to a value where we have a light touch a little bit of the wolet in the picture but not too much okay so this already looks pretty good but what is still missing is that the picture is too mushy it doesn't look good enough yet so we going to add the last filter so add filter click that again and then we go over here to our Pro contrast and we are just using one of the sliders this time and that is going to be our Dynamic contrast and we push this up you will see that the sky is beautifully coming into our picture and also on the water and we have a nice contrast so even the reflection looks more crisp and more nice and the picture overall has a much nicer effect now of course like I said because these are live filters you can go back and forth so you can go back here for example to the Skylight and influence how much of it maybe we take a little bit more like this and you can adjust them to each other so you get the perfect result for your picture this is what is really nice about stacking um the effects you can see here if I go to cold it's a very cold light still and if you go to warm you get a really nice warm situation also in the reflections of the sky everything so this is kind of a very nice result I would say of course you can use them to your heart's content and to your taste what you want to have in a picture but for me those are my favorite five uh filters for landscape use so this was the video thank you for watching if you want to see more from me subscribe I do a new video every 3 days and if you want to support me even more go to patreon and find out about the different options I have to offer thank thank you very much and see you in the next video bye