Super-charge sunsets the easy way in Affinity

James Paterson shows how to give dull sunset colours a much-needed boost using the powerful Channel Mixer in Serif’s Affinity Photo software

THE MISSION

Enhance your sunset photos with simple tonal tools in Affinity Photo

Time needed

15 minutes

Skill level

Beginner

Kit needed

Affinity Photo

Have you ever returned from shooting a stunning sunset to find that your photos look slightly underwhelming? Those reds, yellows and oranges in the sky that seemed so bold at the time can occasionally come out rather dull. But with a few simple tweaks we can boost the sky, enhance the tones and produce an image that looks exactly how you remember on the day it was captured.

Affinity Photo has lots of colour boosting tools and this tutorial we use a trick in the Channel Mixer adjustment. As the name suggests, this tool let’s us mix our red, green and blue channels. Each pixel in our image is initially made up of a specific value for red, green and blue, on a scale from 0-255. By adjusting the channel mixer we can change the values and shift the colours one way or another.

The Channel Mixer can do wonders for your sunsets as it boosts the colour ranges in the sky which results in gorgeous warm tones. What’s more, as the effect sits on its own layer we have the freedom to change the strength at any time, either by duplicating the layer to make it stronger, or reducing the layer opacity to make it weaker. We can also use it selectively over the sky by using a layer mask, which is useful for reducing the effect in oversaturated clouds and increasing it in the waves. Download our image ‘sunset_before.jpg’ via web link on the left to get started.