Canva Affinity for Infrared Photography

Can Affinity from Canva edit infrared photography? In this video, we’ll review the pros and cons, then edit an infrared image using white balance, channel mixing, HSL, channel inversion, LUTs, and color-grading tools. I’ll also cover Affinity’s strengths and limitations. If you’re considering Affinity for infrared photography, this overview will help you decide whether it fits your workflow.

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Transcript for Affinity for Infrared Photography. Duration: 28:28.

• 0:00 Can Affinity from Canva edit infrared photography? I'll give you a summary right up front, then we'll edit an image. Finally, I'll show you the issues that you need to be aware of. Hey, just a quick heads up before we get started. Just as I was wrapping up the edit for this video, Canva released a
• 0:16 new version of Affinity, and wouldn't you know it, it has new features for infrared photography. So I'll cover those things and insert them into the video. Just wanted to give you a heads up because things will jump around a bit as a result. Alright, let's go. So Affinity from Canva is free, so that
• 0:32 is a bonus if you are on a limited budget. It has a broad support for RAW files. This goes back to its days when it was owned by Serif and has a longer history. So lots of RAW support for cameras over 1300 camera models, so that's great. When it comes to editing infrared photography,
• 0:51 you can do it, but the options are very limited. This wouldn't be my first choice. When it comes to color infrared photography, you can set a white balance, and you have all of the options available for swapping colors. So that's good. One of the downsides of infinity is it uses a proprietary image format.
• 1:08 That means you're locked in and you won't be able to open these images with other editors. So that's kind of a downside. Finally, the image sizes can be quite large, so that's something to be aware of. We'll go over the details there. Let's do an edit of an infrared image and then we could talk about some of the issues.
• 1:24 Okay, so I've opened up an image here in Affinity, and the first thing it does is it takes me into a sort of develop module. And this is very similar to Photoshop Camera RAW, because we're looking at the ability to edit the RAW of this image, and then later on we will be able to do more with this image.
• 1:44 So you could see here in the upper left-hand corner, we have develop. We have some output options. I'll come back to that. That could be important later. Over here on the right-hand side, we have the tools that we're going to use to edit this RAW file. We'll start in the basic panel.
• 1:57 So of course, the first thing that I want to do with an infrared image is address the white balance. So we've got temperature and tint sliders here, but the picker is actually over on the other side of the screen. That's this icon over here, the white balance tool. So I'll select that, and then I can select
• 2:14 on the clouds in this image, and there we go. I have a pretty good white balance. So that was pretty effective. You can see if we look at the white balance panel, that the temperature gauge is capped up at 25,000 Kelvin, but regardless of that, we still have a pretty good white balance for our image.
• 2:31 Let's look at some of the other panels here in the basic section. First, I'll do exposure. I'm going to drag up the exposure a little bit. I'm looking at the screen, but I'm also looking at the histogram to kind of get a pile of pixels here, roughly centered in my image. I could also adjust the black point if I wanted to do that.
• 2:49 And then overall brightness. So you've got lots of controls here. The tone curve, a little confusing because all this does in this section is give you the type of curve that's available. The actual curve is elsewhere, so that's a little bit confusing. In most cases, you'll just want to stick with standard.
• 3:06 Enhance, you can add contrast, clarity, texture, saturation, vibrance. Most of those are self-explanatory. And then down here, we have shadows and highlights. So I could adjust if I wanted to bump the shadows or if I wanted to reduce the highlights, I have those options available.
• 3:22 Okay, let's move on to some of these other tabs. We'll cover these briefly. Lens correction, pretty straightforward if you want to deal with distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting, etc. Details, where you can add some noise reduction or work on edge refinement, things like that.
• 3:39 Tones, this is where the actual tone curve lives. So if I click on here, I can see a tone curve. This unfortunately is pretty basic as tone curves go. You simply have an open field here where you can add the points that you want and manually adjust and then use this reset up here.
• 3:56 So it's functional, but basic. Down here, we have a black and white panel. And the black and white panel is the way that you can convert an image to monochrome. And then you could adjust it based on the colors that are available. So for example, if I wanted to adjust the foliage, I can come down
• 4:14 to the blues and I can adjust the brightness of the foliage. I could come up to the reds if I wanted to darken the sky. So there's a little bit of control here, but you have so few colors, typically in infrared to work with, that this is somewhat limiting. And unfortunately, there's not a lot of other tools available for
• 4:32 monochrome, which is why monochrome is doable here in Affinity, but somewhat limiting. All right, this is the part where we're going to talk about some of the new features in Affinity. And this is a little bit confusing because of where they're located. So we're currently in the develop module.
• 4:47 And previously, in previous versions of Affinity, you would complete the develop module, and then you would go over to the studios where you would do your color swapping. So you do your basic stuff here in develop, white balance, basic tones, and then you would go over to studio where you do your color balance.
• 5:06 And what's different now is that some of the color balance options are available in develop. I'll still go over everything that's in studio for color swapping, but we'll do this stuff in develop first, and then we'll go over to studio. So it's a little bit confusing. You can now do the color swapping in both places, but just to give
• 5:23 you a heads up of that's what's coming. Okay, let's talk about some of these new options. So we're in develop, and this is in the tones panel. You may remember that there was only a handful of options here in tones. Now there's a whole bunch more options, and many of them relate to
• 5:36 infrared or color in one way or another. Okay, so let's dive in and talk about these. The first one we're going to talk about is hue curves. So we'll look at hue curves, and this is an opportunity for you to grab this. It's kind of like a tone curve, but for hues, and you can grab this
• 5:51 slider and drag it up, and look at all the colors changing in my image. If I drag it all the way to the top, that's effectively a hue or HSL style of color swap. If I drag it all the way to the bottom, then you get the same thing. You've got a whole range of hues that you can select from along the way.
• 6:12 But in addition to that, I could also add points into this curve, and then begin to make adjustments. So for example, if I put a point here in the middle and drag up and down, you'll notice that I'm only affecting the color of the foliage and not the color of the sky. So if I really wanted to dial in the color of the sky to whatever
• 6:32 color I wanted to, let me start over and let's find a good sky color here. So let's say this right about there is a good sky color. Now I could put a point in this and I could drag it up and down and look at different colors. I can do this at the top or I could do this down here at the bottom.
• 6:48 Now just be careful because if you have too much of an extreme, you might start to see some fringing in your image. But you've got lots of options. You can add multiple points here and you can play around for very creative options when it comes to color swapping. So that is hue curves.
• 7:04 So let me reset that and we'll shut that off. Next up, we're going to look at HSL. There's now an HSL panel here in the develop module. From here, I basically have the same controls, but in a wheel format if you're more comfortable with that. So I can select global, which is all of these, and then drag the
• 7:21 hue shift all the way to one way, all the way the other way, or anywhere in between to get any kind of color that I like. So let's say I want to pick something right around here. Maybe I like that color of sky. Additionally, I could change the hues of individual elements. So if I wanted to adjust the trees, I could click blue because I
• 7:41 know that the colors are swapped and that's going to affect the tree color. And then I could make adjustments to the color of the trees, just like that. And again, be careful for fringing. You want to do this slightly, but not too much. I could also tweak the color of the sky by selecting yellow.
• 7:56 You can see how the outer ring is the color that is present. The inner ring is the original color. So if I select the original color of yellow, I'm going to affect the blue of the sky. That's how you can interpret this ring. So now that I've done that, I can make adjustments to the color of the sky.
• 8:14 So lots of options here as well, just like in hue curves, you can make similar adjustments in HSL. You can do whichever one you like, depending on the interface. They both work similarly. Okay, let's move on to the next option. The next option is very specific for infrared, and that is channel inversion.
• 8:32 Here in channel inversion, I have a couple of options. I have infrared RB, which appears to be a red-blue color swap, but the colors are slightly different than what you'd see in a channel mixer of red-blue done in affinity. So I'm not sure if it's an exact red-blue color swap, but that's what this suggests with RB.
• 8:52 And then there's another option called RGB, which gives you a slightly different variation. But again, I've compared this to doing different color swaps in the channel mixer, which you'll see later on. And I don't know exactly what this RGB swap is doing, but you get a nice result.
• 9:09 Couple things to note, you only really have two options here. The third option is negative, which is not useful for us. But we have these two options, and they look pretty good. So if you're looking for something quick, and you want to do it in the develop module, and you like the
• 9:24 resulting colors, you can certainly select this. For channel inversion. The downside of this is that this appears to be a shortcut to the channel mixer, which comes later, which, and it's nice that that is available here in develop, but the downside is that you only have these two options.
• 9:40 So it's very limiting at this point. It would be great to see affinity add more options to channel inversion, and maybe even explain to us what they are, what they're doing specifically, if they're just a straight swap, or if there's something else going on. In addition to using those three panels to swap colors, now there's
• 9:59 other panels that can be used to enhance colors as well. So let's talk about some of those. Let me take my channel inversion, and we'll select this RGB option. So first up, we have saturation curves, and this is another curve tool that allows you to adjust the saturation within your image.
• 10:16 So first up, I have luminance versus saturation. This allows me to select the saturation level, depending on the luminance of the image. So for example, if I wanted to reduce saturation in the shadows, sometimes I personally find that the color saturation in the shadows is too much.
• 10:32 I could reduce that here, and then I could go to the midtones at a point and bring up the saturation in the midtones. So I get a little bump of color, but keep the shadows more subdued. I could do the same thing with the highlight. I could move that up to increase the saturation in the highlights,
• 10:47 or I could bring it down to reduce the saturation in the highlights. So you've got a lot of flexibility here. You can add a variety of points to make adjustments. In addition to luminance, you can make adjustments against saturation, or you could adjust it against hue. So I could go to a specific hue and decide that I
• 11:05 want to increase only the saturation of that hue. So for example, let's say I wanted to increase the saturation of the sky. I could put a dot in this blue space, and I could increase that, and that would increase the saturation of the sky while retaining the saturation of the foliage, or I
• 11:20 could adjust that separately up or down. So you have a little bit of control over which areas of the image you want to adjust the saturation for with saturation curves. Okay, let's shut that off, and then let's look at selective color. Selective color is a way for me to enhance the colors in an image
• 11:39 based on the other color that's there. So I can select the color and adjust it. Let's say I wanted to make an adjustment to the sky. I could select blues or cyans, and then I could begin to make adjustments, very subtle adjustments happening to the sky. So this is one way for me to tweak the
• 11:56 colors that are available in an image. Next up is color balance. Color balance is another way to alter colors in an image, but instead of based on color, it's based on tone. So I can select the shadows, midtones, or highlights. So for example, maybe I want the shadows to be more of a red tone,
• 12:14 and maybe I want the highlights to have a little bit more of a yellow tone. So I can make all of those adjustments here. This is another way to sort of do split toning, to add a little bit of style to your image and a little bit of character. And finally, we have split toning. Now, split toning isn't new.
• 12:30 It was here before, but it didn't make a lot of sense to use it because you would be basically applying split toning before you did a color swap. So it didn't make sense in infrared photography to do split toning in the develop module and then go to do a color swap. But now that you can use these other tools to swap your colors here
• 12:49 in the develop module, you could then do split toning here in the develop module as well. You can also do split toning in the studios as well. So you've got a choice to do it in either place. But with split toning, you can add additional character to your image. So if I wanted to go into the highlights, and I wanted to maybe
• 13:06 make the highlights a little bit more yellow, I could adjust this to yellow and then increase the saturation. And then I want to look at the shadows, and maybe I want to make the shadows a little bit more blue, then I can increase that in the saturation additional style to my image.
• 13:22 Now, in addition to these new changes in tones here in the develop module, there are new preset options that exist down here. And these are nice, but they are very confusing. And the reason they're confusing is because these presets in the develop module are different than the presets in adjustment layers.
• 13:42 And the presets in adjustment layers, you don't get to those presets through anything called presets. You get to them in another way entirely. So the presets are nice, but you have limited ability to control them and manage them. And the naming conventions are pretty terrible right now.
• 14:00 So just be aware of that. It can be very confusing to use presets, but these are of limited value for infrared, because they can't really use any of the options that we just talked about above. Next up, we have masks. Masks is an area of real weakness in Affinity. It's really fallen behind competitors.
• 14:17 Many other raw editors are really getting advanced in their capabilities with masks, which are making them very powerful tools. The masks that are available for infinity, there's an object selection mask, which is a little clunky. And then you've got a pixel mask, which is like brushes, gradients, luminosity, and hue.
• 14:35 So you've got the basics here, but the interface isn't great and they're a little bit clunky to use. Now what we want to do is take this image and develop it and move out of the develop module, out of that equivalent of Photoshop Camera Raw, and move on to the other parts of the edit, including the color swap.
• 14:53 So let's go here and talk about the output options a little bit. And this is tricky, so this is something you kind of have to pay attention to. There's different options for how you want to output this to the next part of the program. We can do a pixel layer, which basically would render the image as
• 15:09 a bitmap, so that you just basically have the pixels, much like you would in a Photoshop after you have come out of Camera Raw and into an image. Then we have Raw layer embedded. And this is sort of the equivalent of smart objects in Photoshop, where you would take and save your raw image as a smart object,
• 15:32 which would allow you to go back to, in Photoshop, it's back to Camera Raw. Here it's back to the develop module, and open up this as a raw file as it was, and make all of the changes you would in develop. So it gives you the flexibility to go back and forth between develop and the other studios that are available here in Affinity.
• 15:51 But the downside is that it comes with enormous file sizes. And I'll get to some of those details later. With the pixel layer, you could still come back, but you're limited to not the raw file, you're limited to the bitmap file. So not as big of a file size, still big, but much more limiting.
• 16:10 And then finally, you have the option of a raw layer linked. And I think this is probably the preferred option, because what this does is it gives you access to go back to the raw version, but it does not embed it within the file itself. So you don't have these enormous file sizes.
• 16:28 I'll do a comparison a little bit later, and we'll talk about the actual file sizes. But I think that linked gives you the most flexibility in terms of getting back to the raw without those large file sizes. The issue that, of course, then becomes you have to maintain both files, the Affinity file and the raw file.
• 16:48 And you may have to make sure you don't lose those. So I will select the linked version and I'll click on develop. Now, once I'm in develop, we are in what are called the studios within Affinity. And there's a number of them listed at the top. In fact, I'll click here, the studio
• 17:04 manager to show all of them that are available. So we have Vector. Vector is for drawing vector images. So sort of like Illustrator, if you will, here in Affinity. Affinity is like trying to be all aspects of the Adobe Creative Cloud in one program, which is powerful, but it creates a little
• 17:26 bit of a chaos at times within the interface. So I'm going to turn off Vector. And then Pixel is the photo capability. And so this, we definitely want to have this turned on. Layout is for like graphic design layouts. Slicing could be for taking images and slicing them up for a website.
• 17:46 You have an AI option, retouching and color grading. I'll get into those in a little bit more in some detail. Then you have typography and compositing. So you can pick whichever one of these you like, or you can create your own. So for now, I'm going to focus on Pixel and color grading will be
• 18:01 the two panels that I'm looking at. Here in Pixel, this is more like the interface you would see in Photoshop. There are four different methods that we can use to swap colors, and Affinity has all of them. So let's go over those. The first one will be an adjustment layer using the channel mixer.
• 18:18 There's a couple of different ways that you can work. You can use adjustments, which will give you the adjustment layers to work with. And you can open these up, or you can click on the layer view, which would be more like the Photoshop view you might be familiar with. And from here, you could actually double click
• 18:34 on your image and go back to the develop module. So that's how you would get back to making changes if you wanted to come back to basic and make adjustments here. We'll click on develop and we'll go back here. So from here, you can either make adjustments in that adjustment panel, or you can click on this half circle icon at the bottom,
• 18:53 which is where we get adjustments. And so we want to look at the four different methods of swapping colors, and I can do all four of those through these adjustments. So the first one we'll do will be the channel mixer. So I'll open up the channel mixer and it'll open up this panel.
• 19:09 And from here, I can make your typical infrared adjustments. So in the red channel, I could set this to be zero, tab down to the blue channel, make that 100. Then I could go over to the blue channel. We'll make red 100 and blue zero. So there we go. I've made my swap, if you will.
• 19:30 If I want to save it to avoid having to do all that typing in the future, I could go to add preset and I could put in a name for this preset. So I'll call this IR swamp and I'll hit OK. Let's say I wanted to do another variation of this where I split the green channel. So I could come into the green channel and I could make red 50%.
• 19:51 Green zero and blue 50%. Now I've made a slight variation and I could save that as a preset. So we'll call that IR split, which is what I call splitting. That's my shorthand for splitting the green channel. Okay. So I've created a couple presets and you can see over here in the layers that the channel mixer is available.
• 20:11 I can hide it and turn it off and turn it back on. And we'll move on to the next method for swapping colors. We'll come down to the adjustments and I will select HSL. This will bring up the HSL panel. This one is super easy. I can simply take the hue shift when it's selected, when it's on
• 20:27 the global setting, not one of the individual channels, but on global. And I can drag it all the way to 180. You can see all the color choices that are available on that journey or to negative 180 and select some of those. Those tend to be more prettier colors, if you will, of the foliage.
• 20:45 So I could pick any of those. That full 180 shift gets you something very similar to the channel mixer we look, adjustment that we looked at, or I could pick anywhere in between. And there we go. I've made a color swap using the HSL. And we'll go on to our third method, which is invert.
• 21:03 So I can select adjustments and we will find the invert, which is right here. So now I've inverted everything, but I don't want to invert everything. I just want to invert the colors. So that means I have to change the blend mode. So coming up here to normal and scroll down to the different
• 21:21 colors, I could use hue or I could use color. Either one of those will be fine. And now I've done a color swap with the hue adjustment. So that's our third option for swapping colors. Finally, the fourth option is to use LUTs. So if we come down to the adjustments and select LUT, now I can
• 21:42 identify a LUT that I want to apply to this image. So I will load a LUT. So I'll load up one of my PRO Infrared LUTs and I'll grab amber and we'll open that up and then apply that. And there we go. So now I've used a LUT. So those are all four methods that we can use to color swap an image in Affinity.
• 22:02 So it does have great support for all of those methods. Now let's talk about those presets we created earlier and some different ways that you can navigate this interface. And now I'm going to go over to the color grading studio. So this is again, it's just another way to view the capabilities that exist here within Affinity.
• 22:20 I think color grading is kind of a bad name for this panel or the retouching and the color grading. Really, this is where the presets live. And so it might have made a lot more sense to call it presets. It's kind of confusing to within the individual panels to add a preset, but then there's nothing called presets.
• 22:38 It's not clear where they live. You have to kind of find them under these adjustments. So kind of a bit of a confusing nomenclature on the part of Affinity here. So if I'm in color grading, I've got all of these adjustments that I looked at. If I come to channel mixer, well, I can see right down here at the
• 22:54 bottom, I can see IR swap and IR split. Those are two presets that I created earlier. They're here in this adjustment panel, but they're presets. There's also a few that come with Affinity. You've got basically another channel swap and a different variation here. So you've got some different channel mixer presets that come with
• 23:13 Affinity, but you can certainly create all of your own. And this is a much faster way to process infrared images rather than manually adding any of the methods. You could do the same for channel mixer, HSL, Invert, or LUTs. You could create those, save any one of them as a preset, and then
• 23:31 grab them here under this adjustment panel. The same for HSL or Invert or LUT. All right, let's talk about some of the issues that I have with Affinity. It is, of course, free, so that's great. And that kind of takes the edge off a lot of this stuff. This is a powerful but complicated program
• 23:52 that includes numerous non-photography tools. Again, it's trying to replicate most of what's in the Adobe Creative Cloud. So if you're looking for an alternative for all of those things, illustration, design, photography, typography, layout, a whole bunch of those tools, you could use this
• 24:09 for free and have a lot of those capabilities. The downside is if your focus is on photography, you're not going to need a lot of those things. And you're maybe sacrificing some of the more advanced photography tools, like say masks, for the benefit of having this wide palette of tools that are available.
• 24:26 We talked a little bit about the limits of monochrome or black and white photography. If you come into adjustments, you can see that there's some presets here, but these are all just variations of that one black and white adjustment layer. So for example, if I clicked on default, you could see it's just
• 24:41 going to open up the black and white adjustments and create a black and white adjustment layer, which is just like the black and white tool over in the develop module. That's really it. There's not a lot of presets or styles that are available for monochrome. So you're kind of stuck with this one limited
• 24:56 tool, which is why I wouldn't recommend Affinity for. If your primary purpose is to edit monochrome infrared images, the masks are very limited in Affinity. You've got the masks in the develop module. You have the layer masks that exist here in this pixel or color grading area. These are very similar to a layer mask you'd see in Photoshop.
• 25:19 So you could go in and do some work there. But again, these are very limited compared to the tools that exist in a lot of modern, regularly updated raw editors. While Affinity is really good for a quick infrared image, if you want to do more manipulation in terms of tweaking, in terms of
• 25:36 dodging and burning and adjusting color temperature and various capabilities within an image, it's going to be a little bit harder to do here. Affinity's proprietary file format has an AF extension with potentially very large file sizes. One might say that these files are large AF.
• 25:53 It's a proprietary format with no published SDK. That means that third parties can't write tools to open these files. So you're locked in to using Affinity if you want to edit these files in the future. I did some tests using these various options that were available for how you can embed it in better Lincoln image.
• 26:13 So I took a raw image that was 51 megabytes and I saved it using these various settings. When saved as a pixel layer, the resulting AF file was 170 megabytes. So more than three times the original size. There doesn't appear to be any compression. There's no option for compression when
• 26:31 you save an image, so you get what you get. So from 51 megabytes to 170 megabytes. If I embed the raw image into the AF file, now the file size mushrooms from 51 megabytes to 222 megabytes. So that's more than four times the size of an image using their proprietary format. You get the flexibility of having the raw
• 26:55 image there, but an enormous jump in file size. Finally, I took the raw layer linked option and save that as a file. And the resulting AF file size was one megabyte. So this is the most efficient option, taking your original file size, in this case, 51 megabytes, and then a saved AF file that references it for one megabyte.
• 27:16 Now, of course, you've got to make sure you keep both of these files to allow this to work in the future. If you lost the raw file or if they got misplaced in different locations, you might have some trouble there. So you've got to keep the files together, but that would be the most disk space economical method of saving your images.
• 27:32 In summary, Affinity is a free raw editor that can edit infrared images. However, it's best suited to dabbling in infrared. It's not ideal for editing a large catalog of infrared images with complex masking needs. A quick note on these updates to Affinity. It's really great to see new features
• 27:51 added specifically for infrared photography. I would love to see those continue, specifically more options in the channel inversion and maybe better release notes that describe to us exactly what those do. Additionally, I would love to see the masking continue to improve and the interface improve around how presets are handled throughout
• 28:09 the program, because it's still a little bit confusing. But overall, it's great to see this attention and the direction that the tool is at again. Have you used Affinity for editing infrared images? What do you like or dislike about it? Let us know in the comments. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography
• 28:24 journey, like, subscribe, or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.