Cyan & Red photo effect in Affinity Photo

There’s a photographer in Instagram that makes some very interesting images with a distinctive cyan-red look. Let’s see how to recreate it in Affinity Photo. The photographer Alper Yesiltas is better known for photographing the same window for 12 years until the building was demolished

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Story Of An Unknown Window We all desire to know how we are perceived and how we are understood by others. We want to act by fully perceiving the reflection of our existence in others' eyes, and therefore by controlling the impression we have on people we encounter for the very first time. However, very few of us can achieve this as it takes some time. The first words that come to mind (warm, distant, introverted, extroverted) after meeting new people are not enough to fully define their reflection. Consider the reflection as a painting. Although we look at the final version, in fact, paintings comprise many small and big details. These details are not created at the same time in a minute, they are born in the course of time, they slowly find their places within the big picture, and they eventually are presented to the audience. The first impression that Mona Lisa leaves on us is actually the consequence of a 15-year thinking period. Let’s say, the painting represents the world we see from our window, and the painter represents the window itself. As I said before, it is not possible to define the world we see from the window with only a couple of words, as it constantly changes. Moreover, even if you desire looking at the same exact view you saw the first time, you have to wait for some time to capture it again. In this waiting period, you'll see so many views of the world, so to speak, the world shows you all its views just like a painting (Let's remember that Da Vinci also saw the exact same image of Mona Lisa that sparkled in his mind, just after the world rotated around the sun for 15 times) Accordingly, after experiencing for some time, you will need more profound expressions, like "it is empty, everything is balanced, unjust, etc." to define the world. You will not be content with the simple words like "sunny, windy, hot" any more. People also deserve more profound definitions than we associate them at the first sight. (Thx @aylinyslts !)

A post shared by alper (@alperyesiltas) on Jan 26, 2018 at 9:53am PST

He has many other nice photos, and something common to all of them and that makes his Instagram profile very cohesive, is the cyan-red color look

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How many summers old are you?

A post shared by alper (@alperyesiltas) on Jan 18, 2018 at 10:29am PST

It looks great for the right kind of photo, gives the image a very moody feeling, and is a fresh take completely different to a warm-colored vintage look. The good thing is that it’s very simple to produce this effect in Affinity Photo, thanks to the Channel Mixer adjustment layer.

So open your image in Affinity Photo:

Add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer and select the Green channel. Move the Green slider 20% towards right and Blue channel 80% towards right:

Just making this tweak will give us the effect we want.

From here on you can add your own tweaks, like a curve to create a faded look or increase the saturation. Here I adjusted curves, brightness/contrast, and added a vignette.

You can also reuse this effect, with any tonal adjustment if you convert it to a LUT. Go to File > Export LUT. In the dialog that opens, enter a name and choose .3dl which, based on my own experience, is more reliable and keeps all color mappings when exported.

To reuse, you can add a LUT adjustment layer and import the LUT you just created. Here’s the LUT for you to download and use:

[eriodownload url=”https://elio.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/cyan-red-elio.blog-lut.3dl.zip” category=”Downloads” action=”click” label=”Cyan Red LUT” value=”0″]Download Cyan Red LUT[/eriodownload]

With some tweaks based on the situation, this effect can be used for many different images.