Create Striking Silhouettes

How to selectively darken a shot’s shadows to emphasise shape and form

When the sun is low it can be a challenge to capture a bright sky without losing detail in a landscape’s shadows. Instead of trying to reveal missing shadow detail in Affinity Photo’s digital darkroom, you can embrace a high-contrast lighting scenario and create a striking silhouette. By deliberately underexposing a backlit subject to produce pure black pixels, you can emphasise the shape and form of subjects such as buildings and trees. Silhouetted shapes can add a sense of drama and mystery to a photo too.

Shoot a silhouette

To capture a shot that contains silhouettes, set your DSLR camera to Spot metering mode and expose for the sky. If you’re using an iPhone, hold a finger on the sky’s area on the display until AE/AF LOCK appears. This will help you capture more of the bright sky’s highlight detail. The underexposed backlit landscape should be free of any detail and be a true silhouette. However, what may look like a black silhouette on your camera’s display could still contain some shadow detail when you view the image on your Mac, due to differences in display quality.

The photo used in this walkthrough was an attempt at capturing a silhouette of a stately home. However, there’s still some distracting detail visible in the darkest shadows.