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Of all the darkroom techniques to have made an impact on digital photography, solarization is perhaps the most instantly recognizable. First championed by Man Ray in the 1920s, solarization involved flicking on the lights in the darkroom while exposing a print. This partially inverts the tonal range of the image.
Normally, the tonal range would run from dark areas to bright areas. In digital imaging this is represented by the histogram, which groups dark pixels on the left of the graph and light pixels on the right. If we think of the range of brightness in this linear way from left to right, then imagine chopping the range in half and flipping one half around. This is what solarization does. It inverts half of the tonal range, while leaving the other half to follow the usual linear path from dark to light. Normally, it’s the darker half of the range that is inverted, while the lighter half remains closer to normal (it can be the other way around too, just make an upside down V in step 2-3).
You can see the effect clearly here in the pattern on the model’s dress. The tones that were originally close to black have been flipped to bright white, while the brighter tones in the back of the dress remain closer to normal. The effect is relatively easy to achieve in Affinity Photo with a combination of adjustment layers.
We can then fine-tune the image to get the final look that we desire by adding in further layers to control the strength and spread of the effect…
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