Just press B for the Paint Brush Tool, and make sure you have 0% Hardness while painting so your brush strokes will be soft and unnoticeable. You can refine where your curves adjustment is being applied by painting in black on the parts of the photo you don’t want this adjustment applied to. We don’t want everything brighter though, so we are going to bring the middle of the curve down. Increase the brightness of our shadows by lifting the bottom left of the curve up. To fix this, we’re going to apply a Curves Adjustment. Then I’ll increase the Saturation a little bit.Īt this point, some parts of our photo are looking a little too dark, especially our castle. To help the colors pop even more, I’ll apply an HSL Adjustment. With this adjustment, I’ll add some red into the Highlights, and then add some purple into the Shadows. Next, we’ll apply a Split Toning Adjustment. I’ll increase the Brightness and the Contrast a little bit.

Then apply a Brightness and Contrast Adjustment. To enhance the effect, we’re going to apply a couple of adjustment layers. If we change our layer’s Blend Mode from Normal to Subtract, then we’ll start to see the effect we’re going for. Right now our photo is looking pretty strange. Then we’ll come up the top to Filters, Detect, Detect Edges. The first thing we need to do is duplicate our background layer, which we can do by pressing Command J (Mac) or Control J (PC).

Drawing in affinity photo