You know what? Except for Photoshop that I use for panoramas (the adaptive wide angle filter is very useful for them), for resizing images and for matching colors since i have started use NIK I always use it.
Here are a couple of examples, using mainly these tree filters among the extremely wide number of them available: Pro Contrast, Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast. Using these filters I have adjusted the following images in no more then a couple of minutes!
Personally, for me the most SW is overkill for me. I like the software simple and just do what I want. It seems that Color Efex Pro is doing that for you. And all the time working at the computer is probably beter spend with going out and taking photos.
I have forgotten to say that I use my photos to make foto albums of my travels. I realise that my retouched photos are not perfect, but for my purpose (the photo albums), believe or not, the quality is more than enough. The clouds and the flowers were blown out even in the original image, but the flower in the foreground (always in my opinion) are far better after the retouch.
Good work with Affinity. Bear in mind that I have not said that one can not achieve similar, or even better results with other SW. I have just pointed out that with a free and easy to use SW, like NIK, the results are quite good.
The second image shows one of the advantage of shooting RAW - you have a much better chance of avoiding clipped highlights like the sky here. You might think it is overkill for your intended use with the images but really basic RAW conversion does not take that much effort. I also have to say that I prefer the unedited flowers...but that might be just me.
You know what, that still looks a bit washed out on my computer (that's what happens when you edit on an iPhone I guess) so here it is again with a bit more contrast (dehaze this time) and increased exposure.
I like your photos, Claudio, but certainly you must realize that jpg is only 8 bit, while raw is 16 bit (actually, it can be converted to an 8 bit jpg or an 8 bit or 16 bit tiff). That means far better pictures with far more information. I see this in both pictures. Hence, your photos exhibit banding and posterization. If you can't see it, great - but others can. Nik produces some great filters, but they work even better on 16 bit tiff files. For example, doing just a little luminous masking, or even a double raw conversion (mere seconds) your white flowers would have been perfect. Notice the white clouds! _mask.htm
Hi Claudio, I'm with you 100%. I like your photos and they look great for your purpose. I use "Darken/Lighten Center" in Color Efex Pro. If the effect is too strong, I back off the opacity slider. Cheers!
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One costume can take on 200 different color-schemes using the color effect. The "real" effect of the color is equal to the original color plus half of the added color effect. This means that change [color v] effect by (200) will do nothing since adding half of 200 to the original color would result in 100 being added to the color value, which will loop the color value back to its original color.
"Change color effect" will have a little apparent effect on sprites colored black, as black is a desaturated color rather than its own hue. To see the color effect on a black sprite, increase its brightness first. Similarly, sprites colored white will have little noticeable effect when the "Change color effect" block is used.
In Scratch 3.0, the saturation and brightness of a sprite's color have a minimum when a color effect is applied, meaning that the saturation and brightness of a sprite may change when applying a color effect.[1]
Specifically, the saturation value of a sprite's color cannot be less than 9% after a color effect is applied. If a color effect is applied to a sprite with a saturation of less than 9%, then the sprite color's saturation will be increased to 9%. This is also true for a brightness of less than 5.5%.
In Scratch 2.0 and beyond, when the color effect is set to Infinity or -Infinity, the sprite will lose all color and saturation, making the sprite appear grayscale. The new brightness of the sprite is based on the original sprite's brightness and saturation.
In Scratch 1.4, the value cannot be greater than 1073741723 or 230-101; attempting to input a value larger than this will cause the fisheye effect to not have any effect on the sprite. The minimum is -100,[2] which makes the costume take up part or all of its bounding box and have transparent and colored streaks emanating from the center, as shown in the picture on the left.
Increasingly the whirl effect will cause an oval to appear, confined by the bounding box of the sprite. Any numbers larger than 1.949674230519541040, however, will affect the sprite differently. If a sprite appeared as four squares with colors blue, green, yellow, and red, respectively, it will appear differently depending on the operating system and browser.
In Scratch 1.4, its absolute value cannot be greater than 1,073,741,823 or 230-1. If this limit is reached, the rendered costume will revert to its original state. Backtracking by "changing" the effect by a negative number of "setting" it to a lower value will result in the effect functioning normally again.
There is no fixed limit for the pixelate effect. It should be noted that each costume will have a point at which increasing the pixelate effect will have no effect on the rendered image (when it disappears or is a uniformly colored rectangle with the original dimensions of the sprite/stage). If this effect is set to a negative number, the absolute value is used.
One costume can take on 100 different transparencies using the ghost effect. The minimum value is 0 and the maximum is 100.[4] Once the effect is equal to 100, the sprite is completely transparent and cannot be seen, but it still can be detected in some ways. This is useful for hiding sprites that still need to be detected, like an invisible platform in a platformer.
If this effect is set to a negative number, the absolute value is used. The largest possible value is 5105. This means that the largest amount of duplicates of a costume that can be generated with the mosaic effect is 262,144.
In the early July 2013, Adobe updated Flash to version 11.8, removing hardware acceleration for Pixel Bender, which was used by Scratch to render graphic effects smoothly.[6] After this update, it was noticed by many Scratchers that the lag increased greatly when running graphic effect scripts.[7] Not only was Scratch affected by the lack of hardware acceleration, but almost all Flash applications using Pixel Bender also experienced the same issues and complications.[8]
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