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

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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.