PL5: Control line

[platypus (Canon & Mac (Intel and M1))]

@Ralf_Brinkmann

Unfortunately, the moderators of the webinars did not make it clear where the control line must or can actually be.

The lines can really be where you want or need them, even outside of the image (= hen house)

Put both lines

• outside of the image for “masked global adjustment”
• inside the image for a combined “masked gradient”

As for wisdom…

[OXiDant (Peter)]

@Ralf_Brinkmann

control line can exclude houses on hills or trees and buildings that reach into the sky or that I can influence the mask with chroma and luma and that I can set negative lines and points.

Control line and both selectivity sliders to 0% and you have a plain gradient mask.
The eyedropper is then useless.
Same to the control point (selectivity to 0%) become a circulair gradient.

So the “control” of the point and line is color control and luminance control.
That’s the main and key understanding of this feature.
You control the bandwidth/range of the minus and plusses looks alike of the point of selection. Which is almost the same as feathering controle.

Just take some colortest sheets and play with those features to see the effects.

@Ralf_Brinkmann

My problem with understanding is that in all other cases the mask or marker has to be where the problem is. This “problem” must be covered or inside the lines

Yes, regulair mask are local on brushed or drawn sections.
What you do with a control point or line is basicly pin a point on a point in the colorspace of the image. Hue, saturation, lumination.
And all pixels which looks a like that pinned point are tagged by that mask.
Dragging the outer circle (by a controlpoint) smaller means less viewdistance to select those pixels.
(mask is getting darker outside this circle.) dragging the circle wider you see more but it’s fainting like using a flash light in pitchblack. Shine on your feed and everything is brightly lighted. Shine more ahead and the flashlight shows more and at a wider range but less bright in the distance. More subtle lighted.

The controline has the dotted line to create that subtle lighting.
Set the line in the corner and the dotted line in the opposite corner and you have a very soft selection of the hole image.

[uncoy (Alec Kinnear)]

@Joanna

This also shows that the gradient on the control line is not relevant in this case because the tones under it have been excluded by using the selectivity sliders to focus on the sky tones where the pipette has been placed.

Very nice example Joanna, with the house on the hill. This control line is very powerful voodoo and makes control points much more useful.

Together with the chroma and luma sliders it makes me feel that perhaps we don’t need layers to do high end post-production in PhotoLab. For really advanced post-processing, it’s always possible to process a a few starting versions (shadows, mids, highlights for a primitive example) of the same RAW and then blend them in Affinity Photo which is designed from the ground up for this kind of advanced layer work. 99% of my own post-production wouldn’t require this though.