Affinity Photo for Beginners | Updated for Version 2

1. Class Introduction: If you want to learn affinity photo, this is for you. Today, I'm excited to announce my brand new course, Affinity Photo for beginners. This course has been designed for complete beginners. Even if you've never done any photo editing, you'll still be able to easily follow along. We'll start off by learning the foundational skills of Affinity Photo. After watching just the first few lessons of the course, you'll already know how to make incredible edits. But we won't stop at the basics. After you learn the foundational skills of affinity, we'll build on that foundation as we learn how to make dramatic changes to your images to really bring out the best of your photos. You'll be a photo editing master by the time you finish this course, but we won't just learn photo editing. We'll also learn how to use affinities other tools like adding shapes and text as we create a flyer for a fictional ice cream shop. We're going to learn a lot throughout this course. But one thing that we'll really focus on is how to use masks. Masks are difficult for everyone, and you might not even know what a mask is. But I promise by the end of this course, you will be a mask master. Using your new understanding of masks, you'll be able to do incredible edits like replacing the sky on a dull photo or even giving your photo a brand new background. We'll definitely be learning about a lot of new tools in this course, but we won't just learn how to use each tool. We'll also learn why and when you would use them. That's why we'll complete a series of real world projects throughout this course. As we begin each project, we'll spend some time making a plan of all of the edits that we want to do. By making a plan, you'll be able to see why we're making each edit. That way, you'll know exactly how to do the same thing with your own photos. Each project in this course, has been carefully designed to bring together all of your affinity skills. By the time you finish these projects, you'll feel completely confident in your affinity abilities and you'll be ready to take your new skills into the real world. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with example photos that we'll be using throughout the course. I encourage you to download and use these photos because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of these new skills that you'll be learning. You can download these photos in the next section, and then you're ready to start your journey of becoming an affinity photo master. Let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the project and resources tab. Then click on the download link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Affinity Photo Overview: In this chapter, we're going to learn the foundational skills you need to use Affinity Photo. We'll start from the very beginning and work our way up to editing a simple photo. This is going to be a lot of fun and I know you're going to learn a lot. Let's get started. 4. Opening Photos, Saving, & Exporting: Welcome to Affinity Photo. When you first open this program, your screen will look something like this. In this video, I'm going to show you how to open up a photo, how to save all of the work that you've done on that photo, and how to export your final product. To begin, we'll need to open a photo. Let's go to the top of the screen and then click on where it says file. Then you can come on down here to where it says open. Now you can navigate to the photo that you want to open. Right here, I'm in the exercise files that are included in this course. You can download these exercise files in the second lesson of this course. Each of these folders represents a chapter of the course. Right now, we're in the Affinity Photo overview chapter. I'll go ahead and double click on that folder. Now you can see all of the photos that we'll be using throughout this chapter. If you want to open a photo in affinity, all you need to do is select it and then press open. Or if you want to open more than one photo, you can hold down shift on your keyboard and select multiple photos to open. Then you can press open. Great job. Now we've opened both of these pictures in affinity, but we only see one photo right now. That's because affinity opens each new photo in a separate tab, similar to how your Internet browser will use multiple tabs for different websites. We can jump back and forth between these two tabs by clicking on them, or if you want to close one of the tabs, all you need to do is press on the x that appears on that tab. If you're on a Mac, your x will be over here on the left, and if you're on a PC, your x will be over here on the right. I'll just click to close this one. Now we're left with the photo that I wanted to use for this video. Throughout the rest of the course, we'll take a deep dive into how to edit photos. But for right now, we're not going to go into too much detail with that because I just want to show you how you can save your work. For demonstration purposes, I'm going to come over here to our adjustments, and I'll quickly add a black and white adjustment. Now I've done an adjustment to our work. How can I save this file just like this and then come back to work on it some more later. That's where saving comes in handy. To save your work, all you need to do is go to the top of the screen to file, and then click on Save as Now you can navigate to where you want to save it on your computer. You can give it a new name, and then you can go ahead and save your work. By saving an affinity file, all the edits that you've done to your photo will be saved, and you can come back to continue editing at any time that you want. All we need to do to reopen that file is to come up to the top of the screen to file, then press open, just like we did with the picture previously. Then you can navigate to that edited picture and open it up. You can see that all of our edits are still intact. This is super useful when you're working on a big project and you want to be able to come back right into affinity and pick up where you left off. Saving is great for coming back to finish your work. But if you're done editing and you want to share your finished work, all you need to do is come to the top of the screen, click on file, and then come down to where it says port. This port menu will pop up, and it will give you a few different options that you can adjust for your photo. From here, you can choose which file type you want. By far, the most common file types are JPEG and PNG. PNG is used when your photo has a transparent background, which we'll learn about later on in the course. A JPEG is what you'll use most of the time though, because it keeps photos looking nice and sharp while reducing their file size. I'll go ahead and select JPEG for this one. You can see that the estimated file size for this photo is 1.28 megabytes, but we could actually reduce the quality slider. I'll reduce bind to 95, you can see that now our photo is 700 kilobytes, which is quite a bit smaller. This will take up less room on your computer. If you zoom in here, our photo still has quite a bit of detail and looks really good. I'd actually be surprised if you could see a difference between 100% quality and 95% quality. I like to do this to photos when I want to save space because it's really hard to tell a difference in that file size just saves a lot of space on your computer. Once you have all of these settings edited the way you want, go ahead and press port. Now you can choose where you want to save the photo and you can rename it. Then press save. After you've exported the JPEG, you can share your beautiful photo with anyone you want. That's the very basics of how to open a photo, how to save your work, and how to export it. Now that we understand all of that, let's set up for the next video. I'll come to the top of the screen to where it says file. Then I'll come down to open. I'm going to open up photo number two. Okay. And now that that's open, we don't need this one anymore. I'll go ahead and close out of this. Sure, I'll save that work. All right. And now we have our next photo. With all that setup, I'll meet you in the next video. 5. Affinity Photo's Workspace: Let's learn about affinity photos workspace. We have four main areas. We have the photo workspace in the center. We have a tool bar at the top. We have the studio panels on the right, and the tools on the left. The photo work space in the center is pretty straightforward. It's where we can see the photo that we're working on. But let's take a closer look at the other three areas. Here, we have all of the tools in Affinity Photo. We'll learn how to use these tools throughout the course. But for now, I just want to highlight one important concept, which is that each tool comes with different settings that you can modify. These settings will change up here in the toolbar. As I click on these tools, you can see these settings change. This tool bar is changing based on the different options that are available for each tool. Along with these settings that change up here, we also have this toolbar up here and we'll go over this a bit more later on. Finally, let's take a look at our studios over here. This area is very full and a little bit messy and hard to understand. But don't worry. We're really going to simplify this for this course. There are around 30 different panels in affinity photo and they offer a wide range of functionality. You can navigate between them by clicking on their name up at the top. Here's just a few of those. You might be thinking, this doesn't look like 30 panels, and that's because they're not all displayed here. You really won't use most of the panels. By default, affinity hides most of them. In fact, throughout this course, we really only need to use two of the 30 panels. The two panels that I like to keep out are the layers panel and the color panel. Let me show you how to set up your panels the way I like them set up. First, I'm going to click on one of the other panels. Then I'm going to drag it out here. Then I can press on the x to close out of it. So now we just have the color panel up at the top. I'm going to continue to do this, getting rid of all of the panels. Okay. Until we're just left with the layers panel. Then we actually don't need any of these panels down here. You might be wondering though how to get those panels back. If you ever want to add a panel, just come to the top of the screen and click on window. Now you can see all of the different panels that are available to you. Let's say you want to use the brushes panel. All you need to do is click on that and now it appears right here. If you wanted to, you could put it right up here next to the color panel. I'll go ahead and remove that though, but that's how you add your panels back in. If you ever want to completely reset the studio panels back to the default, go to Window, Studio, reset Studio. One last thing that I like to change about my studios is I want to adjust the color panel. We'll go over this more a bit later on, but I'm just going to come up to this hamburger menu here and I'm going to change it to the color wheel. If your wheel looks a little bit different than mine, sometimes it might look like a square. Just come up one more time to the hamburger menu and select the triangle. I almost always keep my panels looking just like this. Once you've set up your panels in this way, affinity will remember how you like them. Every single time you open the program, it'll look just like this, which is super nice. To make following along with me easier, I suggest that you also change your panels just like this on your computer, the way I have it set up here. Once you've done that, I'll join you in the next video. 6. Mac vs. PC: Let's talk about Mac versus PC computers. Now, I don't want this to be any controversial video pitting one computer user against another. But I do want to mention before we get too far into the course that I am working on a Mac. If you're working on a PC, affinity photo will look ever so slightly different for you. For example, we already saw that when closing a panel, Mac computers have the X on the left, and PCs have the X on the right. Or when we talk about adjustment layers later on in this chapter, you'll see that to close the dialog box, Mac computers have a red dot that you click on to close out of the dialog box, and PC computers have an x on the right side. Both of these do the exact same thing, which is close the dialog box, but the buttons are just styled a little bit differently. The biggest difference though, is with keyboard shortcuts. We won't use too many shortcut keys in this course, but there are a few important ones that we'll practice using. If you're on a Mac, you'll often need to press the keys Command or option to use shortcuts in affinity. These buttons are right next to the space bar on your keyboard. If you're on a PC, you'll use control or Alt Command on a Mac is the same as control on a PC and Option on a Mac is the same as Alt on a PC. Throughout this course, I'll say the key for both operating systems. I'll say something like press Command or Control zero. Meaning that you'll press command zero, if you're on a Mac or control zero, if you're on a PC. I really wish that the Mac and PC versions of affinity were 100% identical, that would make things a lot easier. But now you know the difference and you shouldn't have any problem following along with this course. In the next video, we'll learn how to use a few navigation tools in affinity photo. Okay. What? 7. Navigating in Affinity Photo: Let's learn how to navigate an affinity photo. If you have a track pad on your computer, then your track pad will work as expected. Just zoom in and you can zoom out in the same way. If you use two fingers, you can move around your document. Now, if you're just using a mouse, that's no problem at all. But there are a few keyboard shortcuts that would be important for you to know. One is zooming you can press command or control plus to zoom in. Once you're zoomed in, you can use the hand tool to click and drag around your document to move it. Or if you have a different tool out, you can press and hold on the space bar to bring up the hand tool, and then you can click and drag just as before. With any tool out, just press on the space bar to Zoom out, you can press command or control minus. If you want the entire image to fill your screen perfectly, you can press command or control zero. I use command or control zero, even though I'm using a trackpad. It's nice to be able to see the whole image again. If your mouse has a mouse wheel on it, you can actually use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of your document. If you'd like to use this feature, you'll need to change your tool preferences. On a Mac. This means you'll go to the top of your screen, you'll click on the name of the program, and then you'll click on preferences. If you're on a PC, you'll go to the top of the screen and press on edit, then press preferences. Once you're in the preferences menu, go ahead and select the tools section. Then you can check on Use Musewheel to Zoom. Now that we know how to navigate around in affinity, let's talk about layers in the next video. 8. Layers for Beginners: In this video, we'll learn about layers. Layers are a very important part of affinity photo because they allow you to work with multiple photos in a single affinity file. To help you understand this better, I've made this collage. This collage is made up a bunch of different photos, all placed on a single piece of paper. In this collage, I can move around any of the photos without affecting the other photos. I could even grab one of the photos and drag it completely off of my paper. But if I wanted it back again, I could drag it back on. I could even re arrange the photos so that some of the photos are underneath others. This collage is an excellent representation of how layers work in affinity photo. In affinity, we can place a bunch of different photos, which we call layers onto a single piece of paper, which we call a document. In fact, this collage I've been showing you is actually just a zoomed in screencast of an affinity photo file. Here in affinity, you can see that each of these images has its own layer over here in the layers panel. Just like with the actual collage, we can move around any layer in affinity photo independent of the other layers. To do this, I'm going to grab the move tool with the layer that we want to move selected, I can click and drag to move the layers around. We can also turn any layer on and off whenever we want without affecting the other layers. To do that, just press on this little checkmark. Now you can see that that image does not appear, but we can turn it right back on when we want to add it back in. We can even re arrange which layers are on top of each other. All we need to do is click on a layer and then drag it underneath a different one. Make sure that a little blue line has appeared underneath the layer. Then you can release your mouse, and now that layer has appeared underneath the other layer. This little blue line will indicate where the layer is going to go. Now you can see that this fire layer is underneath this car layer. We'll learn more about moving layers and removing photos backgrounds later on in the course. But I hope you're beginning to see how powerful layers are. The ability to edit individual layers without affecting the other layers is extremely useful. We'll be using layers all throughout the course. One last thing that I want to mention in this video is that you can have layers that cover the entire document. A layer that covers the entire document will affect all of the layers underneath it. On the top of our layer stack right now, I have a layer that's covering everything. This layer is a photo of a piece of plastic, if I turn it on, you can see how this layer affects all of the layers underneath it. Because it covers the whole document and it's the layer that's placed on top, it's affecting everything else. But what if we don't want the plastic to affect all of the photos in the collage, as we've already seen, you can rearrange the layers by bringing one of the layers above the plastic, you can see that this layer is no longer being affected. Remember that each of these layers is independent of the other layers, but each layer will affect all the layers underneath it. In the next video, we'll learn about a special type of layer called an adjustment layer. These layers cover the whole document similar to this plastic and will affect the color and lighting of all of the layers underneath them. Go ahead and keep this document open because we'll use it in the next video. 9. What are Adjustment Layers?: This video, we'll learn about adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are the bread and butter of affinity photo. These layers are how we change the color and the lighting in our photos. They affect the appearance of all of the layers underneath them. They're very powerful and are the most common type of layer that you'll use in affinity. We'll be using them a lot throughout this course. To see how adjustment layers work. I'm first just going to select this plastic layer and I'll press on this trash can to delete it. We won't be needing that now. To apply an adjustment layer. I'm going to click on the adjustments icon, which is this little half gray circle here. Now you can see all of the adjustments in affinity photo. You don't need to worry about what each of these do right now because for now, we're just taking a look at how adjustment layers work. For our example, I'm going to apply a vibrant adjustment. We'll learn a lot more about working with adjustments in the next video. But for now, all I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this saturation slider and bring it all the way down. What this has done is it's removed all of the color from our document. Every layer has become completely desaturated. But that's only because this vibrance adjustment layer is on top of everything. If I didn't want the word camp to be black and white, all I would need to do is click and drag it Until it's above the vibrance adjustment layer. We can also move the adjustment by clicking on it and dragging it underneath other layers. Now you can see what's being affected. The camp and fire layers are both on top of the vibrance adjustment, so they both still have their color, while everything underneath the vibrance adjustment is in black and white. This is exactly what happened when we moved the fire picture above the plastic in the last video. We could take this a step further and move the vibrance adjustment layer until it's underneath almost all of our pictures and only the hiking photo is black and white. That's because that's the only layer that's underneath the vibrance adjustment layer. Just like any other layer, we can turn this layer off if we want to see the color again and we can turn it back on, if we want to apply that adjustment again. We'll be working with layers and adjustments a lot throughout this course. But for now, just remember that adjustment layers affect the color and the lighting of all of the layers underneath them. In the next video, we'll take a closer look at how to use adjustment layers. 10. Working with Adjustment Layers: This video, we'll take a closer look at how to use adjustment layers. We'll learn about more powerful adjustment layers in the next chapter. But for now, we'll practice working with adjustment layers by applying two simple adjustments. The first adjustment we're going to apply is the brightness and contrast adjustment. The brightness slider will brighten or darken your photo. I think that a little bit of brightness looks pretty good for this photo. The contrast lider adds or removes contrast. You can see this as you slide the slider up, the dark areas of the photo get darker and the bright areas of the photo get brighter. If you move it the other way, the image becomes more flat, so the darks get lighter and the light parts get darker. I think every photo looks pretty good with a little extra contrast. I'll go ahead and move that up. As we saw before, Mac computers have a red circle on the left to close the adjustment box, and PCs have an x on the right. They both do the same thing, which is closing the dialog box while keeping all of the changes that you made. Just so you know, there's no save button. All your changes are automatically saved when you close the box. We can check this layer off to see how our image looked before and we can check it back on to see the difference that this adjustment is making. The brightness and contrast looks pretty good right now, but I think we can make this photo look even better by enhancing the color as well. Could we can apply as many adjustment layers as we want. Let's go ahead and apply a vibrance adjustment next. We have two sliders here, vibrance and saturation. The vibrant slider will make all of the less vibrant colors in your photo more vibrant. As I bring this up, you can see that duller color areas like this duller green color in the back becomes more saturated as I raise this up. It's a much more subtle slider. We also have the saturation slider, which is much more intense. Unlike the vibrant slider, the saturation slider will make all of the colors in the image more vibrant and saturated. You can see that this makes a really big difference with our colors. Think I'll raise this up a little bit. I'll also raise the vibrant slider. Then I'll close out of this dialogue box, and we can see the difference. Here's the before, and here's the after. We made our adjustments and they both look pretty good. But what if I want to change the sliders again. All you need to do is click on the adjustment layers icon over here on its layer, and then it will reopen the dialog box with all of the sliders. I think I made this a little too bright, so I'll just bring down the brightness slider. This is very useful because it lets us go back and improve any of our changes whenever we want. I want to show you the difference that both of these layers made. You can select multiple layers at the same time by clicking on the top layer, then holding shift and clicking on the bottom layer. Now I can turn them both off to see the before, and here's the after. As you know, we can turn layers on and off whenever we want. But if you want to completely delete a layer, you can delete a layer by selecting it and then clicking on the trash can as we did before, or you can have the layer selected and then press delete on your keyboard. To undo that because I did like those changes, I'm going to press command or Control Z. I've pressed it twice, so now we have both of those layers back. This was a great practice for using adjustments. In the next video, we'll take everything that we've learned so far in this chapter and we'll put it all together in one beautiful project. 11. Practice Makes Perfect!: Let's practice what we've learned. We're going to start from the very beginning in this video and go through the whole process of editing a photo together. The first thing we need to do is open a photo. I'll come to the top of the screen and press on file. Then I'll press open. Then in this chapter is exercise files, I'm going to click on the photo that says practice makes perfect. Then I'm going to open that up. To make this photo look a little better, let's apply a couple of adjustments to it. First, I'll come to our adjustments and I'll apply a brightness and contrast adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and brighten this photo and I'll add a bit of contrast. That looks pretty good. Here's what it looked like before, and here's the after. Next, I want to adjust some of the colors. I'll come to our adjustment and apply a vibrance adjustment. I'll start by bringing up the saturation. I don't want to take this too far so that her skin looks too bright, but maybe about there. Then with the vibrance adjustment, I'll go ahead and increase this. Here's what the colors look like before, and here's the after. I think before I'm finished, I want to adjust the brightness and contrast adjustment a little more. I'll click on its icon right here to open that up. Then I'm going to brighten this photo a bit more. Yeah, that looks better. I think I need to reduce the contrast. Sometimes I personally take the contrast a too far because contrast just makes photos so better, but it's important not to take your adjustments too far. I think this looks really good. I'll go ahead and select both of these layers by selecting the first one, holding down shift and selecting the last one. Then I can turn these off to see the before. Here's the after. Wow, that looks so much better. With just two adjustments, we've completely transformed this photo. Next, I'm going to save my work so that I can work on it later on. I'll come to the top of the screen to file. Then I'll click on Save as. I'll go ahead and rename this practice. Then I'll press save. Now I can go back at any time and re open this affinity file. That could be useful if I decide I don't like how it looks. But right now, I think this looks really pretty. I'm going to go ahead and export this. I'll come to the top of the screen to file, and then I'll come down to export I'll make sure that I'm saving this as a JPEG. Then I'll go ahead and bring the quality down. Right now, this is 4 megabytes. Let's go ahead and bring that down. Now it'll only be 1.6 megabytes. Then I can go ahead and export it, and I'll go ahead and keep that named practice, and then I can press save. Great work on completing this first chapter of the course. It's so exciting to see what you've already learned. In this chapter, we dabbled a bit with adjustments, but in the next chapter, we'll learn how to use even more adjustments. Okay. 12. The Most Important Adjustments: In this chapter, we're going to learn about the most important adjustments in affinity photo. Now, that's a pretty big claim. There are a lot of adjustments in affinity, but a lot of these adjustments have overlap and they do very similar things. We're not going to cover them all. Instead, in this chapter, I'm going to show you the best bang for your buck adjustments. The adjustments that are the most simple to use well still being very powerful. Let's get started. 13. White Balance: Let's learn about the white balance adjustment. First, let's apply the adjustment. I'll come to the adjustments icon here, and then I'll apply the white balance. The white balance adjustment is meant for fixing images that have color cast issues. Most of the time, the yellow blue slider we have here is all you'll need to worry about. But sometimes manmade light sources can have green or magentitans to them as well. When in doubt about whether your photo needs to have the white balance corrected, try moving the slider back and forth to see what looks good. As I make this warmer, we can see that really doesn't look right. But as I make it cooler, it actually seems like her skin tone is more natural and the atmosphere around her looks more natural. This is what it was before, and I think that's looking a lot better. We can also try adjusting the tint slider, even though I don't think we should move it too far. Here's going toward magenta and here's going toward green. I think I'll move it slightly toward green because this tree behind her doesn't look green enough in the original photo. I think I'll move the white balance a little more toward blue. With that done, now you can see what this looked like before, and here's the after. That looks so much better. Sometimes it can be tricky to see if a photo needs the white balance adjusted. But just applying the adjustment and playing with the sliders a little bit can usually give you a pretty good idea on if this will improve your photo. If it's not improving it, don't worry about using it. But this is a great tool to have in your tool belt. In the next video, we're going to learn about a very exciting adjustment, the HSL adjustment. 14. HSL: This video, we'll learn about the HSL adjustment. The HSL adjustment is similar to the vibrance adjustment, but it's better. Let me show you how this works. I'll apply in HSL adjustment. In this dialog box, we have three sliders, hue, saturation, and luminosity, otherwise known as HSL. Each of these sliders has a different purpose for adjusting the colors. For the hue slider, this will completely shift the colors. You can see as I drag this around, all of the colors shift. To place it back in the center, I'll double click on the node. Next, we have saturation, which we've seen before in the vibrant adjustment. As I increase the saturation, all of the colors get boosted and as I decrease, it desaturates the colors all the way until they're black and white. Last, we have the luminosity slider, which makes colors lighter or darker. For this photo, I think I'll bring the saturation up a little bit. But here's where things get interesting. What makes this better than the vibrance adjustment is that you can edit each color group separately. For example, we could increase the reds in this photo and decrease the blues. To get into each of these color ranges, you need to select its color channel. I'll start by going into the red channel. As I go into each of these colors, the very first thing I like to do is bring up the saturation slider so that I can see what's being affected. You can see in this photo that the red slider is mostly affecting her skin and the wall behind her. I think I'd like to increase the saturation but not quite that high, just to boost the reds. I can also adjust the hue slider. Now, for skins, this can get pretty tricky. But if you adjust it a little bit to the left, you start to add a bit more yellow and green to the skin. As I shift it a little bit to the right, it starts to add more magenta. If the skin is looking at off in color, this is a good slider to use. I think I'll adjust it just a tiny bit over to the left. Next, I'll go into the yellows and I'll bring this slider all the way up. What might be surprising is that all of the green plants have quite a bit of yellow in them. This actually happens a lot in nature where you see green grass or green trees. A lot of it is actually yellow and green. I'm going to go ahead and increase the hue to bring out the color of the plants. But I'm going to shift the hue of these yellows to make them even more green. You can see that as I shift it to the right, the plants become more red. As I shift it to the left, the plants become more green until they eventually turn blue. I don't want to take this too far because you can see this is starting to affect her skin and her hair. That's one thing to be careful of with the yellow channel. Often, the skin tone is red and yellow. I'm just going to shift this over just like that. Next, I'll go into the green channel, and I'll bring the saturation all the way up. We can see that this is affecting the other parts of the plants. I'll go ahead and increase that saturation as well to boost those colors. I think I'll go ahead and make this a little bit more green by shifting the hue over to the left side. In addition, I think this is the first time I want to use the luminosity slider. I don't often raise the luminosity because it tends to wash out your colors and make them a little bit unnatural looking. But I think I will darken a bit just to add a little bit of depth to those areas. Here's what we have going so far before and after. You can see that by individually adjusting each color, it's already starting to boost the colors. Let's move on to the cyan channel next. I'll increase the saturation slider. You can see that this is mostly affecting her clothing. I think her clothing is a pretty big focus in this picture because she's really dressed up quite fancy. I'm going to go ahead and increase that saturation. But I don't think I want to adjust the hue. I want this to how it's supposed to look for this photo. Then I'll go over to the blue channel and raise this up. You can see that again, this blue is mostly affecting her clothing. I'll go ahead and increase that saturation as well. Last, I'll come to the magenta channel and raise this up. Not all photos have all of the colors. In this case, the magenta is really just showing that one area on her clothing. I think I'm going to double click to reset that back to zero, and I'll leave that alone. At this point, I've adjusted every single color channel. Now we can see the complete before and after. The colors have really become much brighter in this photo. But it might be a little bit too intense. This is something that beginners to affinity photo have a bit of trouble with, and even I still have a bit of trouble with this. Sometimes I get so excited about my adjustments that I make them really bold, but it doesn't actually look that natural. A quick trick to just keep yourself in line a little bit. Is lowering the opacity of your adjustment layer. Lowering the opacity will help your layer to appear a little bit more transparent so that your adjustments aren't quite as intense. You can do that by coming right here to where it says opacity and make sure you have that layer selected. Then you can click and drag on the word opacity to lower the opacity of your layer. As I lower this, you can see that the opacity of that layer becomes less and less visible. Another way to adjust this is to click on this arrow and use this slider. But I find it faster just to click on the word and drag. I'll go ahead and lower this down just a little bit to make my adjustment a little less intense. In addition to lowering the opacity, keep in mind that if you ever want to go back and change anything about your adjustment, you can click on the icon to open up the dialog box again. However, one thing to keep in mind when you reopen your dialog box, especially in the HSL adjustment, is that the last color channel you had selected will still be selected. Honestly, I find this very frustrating because I'll often want to go back and just lower the overall saturation. But when I do that, nothing happens, and that's because the magenta color channel is still selected. Just make sure that you're in the right color channel, and then you can go ahead and make any adjustments that you need to. We're all done with that. I think this photo looks really nice. In the next video, we'll learn about how to make beautiful black and white images. 15. Black & White: Let's learn about the black and white adjustment. So far, we've been working with color. But what if you don't want color in your photo? Let's go ahead and apply a black and white adjustment. Okay. So just like that, we have a black and white photo. But you can see that the dialog box has quite a few sliders in it, so we can actually do a bit more customizing. Each of these sliders represents a color, and you can adjust how dark or bright different colors look in your photo. For this farm photo, you can see that we have a red barn, lots of green nature and a blue sky. As I adjust these sliders, we can keep that in mind. I can make the red parts brighter or darker, which is mainly just affecting the barn. I'll go ahead and brighten that a little bit to make it more of a focal point. Since I made the barn brighter and I want this to stand out, I think I should make all of the surrounding areas darker. This will create contrast and really help it to stand out more. You can do this opposite as well by making the barn darker and everything else lighter. But in this case, I think I'll just go ahead and keep the barn looking nice and bright. Then we can move on to yellow. So as we saw before, yellow often can affect a lot of nature colors. So a lot of the green and nature is actually a bit of yellow as well. To make this barn stand out more, I'll go ahead and darken the grass. Next for the green, I can bring this up and down. And we can see that again, this is affecting all of the nature parts of this photo. I'll go ahead and bring this down a little bit. Next, we have Cyan, which you can see is affecting the sky. As I make this lighter, a lot of the detail of the cloud starts to disappear. As I bring it darker, you can see a more intense ominous looking sky, which I think looks pretty cool. I'll go ahead and bring the slider down. For the blues, this is also affecting the sky. I think I'll go ahead and make that darker as well. Let's see if this photo has any magenta. I'm not really seeing anything, so I'll go ahead and leave that just set to its default 100%. Now we can go ahead and see, here's what our image looked like before, and here's the after with our beautiful black and white adjustment. This was super simple to customize each of the colors, and I think that this is a lot better than just bringing down the saturation. We're able to really pick out what areas we want to stand out. In the next video, we'll move on and learn about the levels adjustment. 16. Levels: This video, we'll learn about the levels adjustment. There are a lot of lighting tools in Affinity Photo. We've already learned about the brightness and contrast adjustment, which has two sliders, one for brightness, one for contrast, and it's very simple to use. But my favorite lighting adjustment is actually the levels adjustment. The levels adjustment does a great job of balancing simplicity and control. So unlike the brightness and contrast adjustment, the levels adjustment gives you a lot more control and has quite a bit more sliders, but it's not too difficult to use. I find that I'm gravitating toward this one quite a bit as I'm editing photos. The levels adjustment allows you to adjust the bright parts of your photo and the dark parts of your photo separately, which is very useful. When you first open up the levels adjustment, you're greeted with this dialog box. At the top, we have a histogram, which represents the distribution of colors and light in your photo. The red green and blue is the colors while this white part represents all of the lighting. Then underneath that, we have five different sliders. We'll go over each of these sliders in this video and why you would want to use each one. First, we have the black level slider. As I bring this over, You can see that the dark shadows get even darker, we're adding black to the darkest parts of our image. It's creating a beautiful contrast. You might notice that here, it looks the best. If you look up at the histogram, that lines up exactly with this darkest part of our image. All of the darks are represented over here and all of the lights are represented over here. As I dragged that in, we've closed into this darkest part of the histogram. And that's actually where it looks the best. This is a very useful starting point and you can continue to adjust in that range. But usually, you'll want to pull your black level over until it's touching this edge of the white. That's the black level slider. Next, we have a white level, which is the opposite. This adds white to the brightest parts of the image. Again, I think I'm going to drag it to about there. Right where it starts to touch the white part of this graph. I find this really helpful and it's just a nice guide to keep in mind, if you're having a little bit of trouble with these first two sliders. The next slider is the Gamma slider. This slider will brighten or darken the mid tones in your image. This slider works as an extension of the black and white level slider, and it might act a little bit differently than you think. When we pull the black level slider over to the right, it's darkening the photo, which is the same thing as when we pull this gamma slider over to the right. It begins to darken the mid tones of the image. When we pull the white level slider over to the left, it brightened the image, and that's how the gamma slider works as well. This gets brighter to the left and darker to the right. I think this image actually looks pretty nice with a little bit of darkness, so I'll pull that over. Last, we have two more sliders, the output black level and the output white level. These sliders are the exact opposite of the black and white level sliders. Instead of adding black to the image, the output black level actually takes away black. As I pull this over, we start to get a more flat grade out image. The same thing happens as I pull the output white level slider over, we start to get a darker duller image. I tend to not really touch these sliders for the most part, but they actually do have a use later on in the course when we learn about compositing. But for now, I would say to not really touch these sliders as they do take away contrast and flatten out your image. Mainly, you're just going to worry about these first three sliders. In this case, I think it really improved the image. Here's the before. Here's the after. I love adding contrast to images, and I think this looks so good. If you feel that this looks a bit too strong, remember that you can always lower the opacity of your layers to reduce the effect. All right. Great work on this chapter so far. Now you know how to use four very important adjustments, the white balance adjustment, the HSL adjustment, the Black and White adjustment, and now the levels adjustment. For these last two videos of the chapter, we'll use all of these adjustments to complete two projects. We'll start with a black and white project in the next video. 17. Black & White Practice: In this video, we'll complete a black and white project together. Let's start by adding a black and white adjustment. For this image of the rabbit, I want to make the rabbit stand out from its background. Right now, it's really blending into the background. Just like with the farm picture from earlier, we can make the rabbit nice and bright against a dark background, creating contrast, or we can make the rabbit darker against a nice and bright background. I think generally I like to make things brighter to stand out. For this image, I'm going to make the rabbit look nice and bright and the background look a bit darker. For each of these sliders, I'm just going to slide them down and up to see what the difference is. This is affecting part of the background. I'm going to drag this down and I'll also drag down the yellow, and I'll drag the green down just a little bit. I don't want to drag it so much that it's a black background because that looks a bit unnatural. But I'm just trying to do a little bit of darkening for the cyan. It looks like this is affecting the rabbit a little bit. I'll go ahead and bring this up. The blue slider is also affecting the rabbit and I'll bring that up. It looks like the magenta is affecting this part of the rabbit's ear. I had to slide that up and down quite a few times to see what was being affected. I'll go ahead and bring that down. I wanted to use this picture because it was harder to see the colors than the farm image. In this picture, we have brown, green, and gray. All of those color sliders were a little bit tricky to predict what was going to change. In the farm picture, we had a very clear red, green, and blue area. It was a lot easier. But for this one, we just needed to slide the sliders to see what parts of the photo were affected. This is usually what you need to do, and that works great. No worries if you're not exactly sure what part of the photo will be affected by each slider. We can easily just slide the sliders back and forth to check. To finish off this project, let's apply a levels adjustment to adjust the lighting. The black and white adjustment allowed us to affect each color by itself. But now with the levels adjustment, we can affect all of the highlights at once and all of the shadows at once. This gives us more control as we affect the image. I'm going to bring the black level slider over to add a little bit more contrast and I'll bring the white level slider over to brighten up the photo even more. Okay. And with that, I think we're done. Here is the before and after of this beautiful black and white project. The next practice project will be a little bit more of a challenge and we'll use three different adjustments to fix it up. 18. Multiple Adjustments Practice: Let's use the adjustments that we know to fix up this photo. Right now, this photo looks very dark and dull. Let's start with the lighting to brighten it up so that we can see what's going on a little bit better. Go over to our adjustments, I'll apply a levels adjustment. I already know that I want to brighten this up. I'm going to start by moving the Gamma slider over and you can see how that just brightens everything overall. Then I can come in here and adjust the black white level. You can see the histogram already has the black level really pushed over to the edge. If I move this over, it very quickly gets very dark. But I do think I'll bring it over just a little bit to 1%. Then I'll move the white level over. And you can see that makes a really big difference. I'll move it to right about there. Now we can see so far, here's what it looked like before, and here's the after. Now that the picture is brighter and we can see it better. I can tell that we have quite a bit of blue going on in this image. I want to use a white balance adjustment to fix that color cast because there's a lot of blue. I'm going to bring it over to the orange yellow side to add some warmth. I think I also want to add a bit of green since there's quite a bit of green going on in this picture, and I think that looks pretty good. Now here's the before and after. I think her skin looks a lot better now. To finish this off, let's add an HSL adjustment to boost these colors. My goal for the image is to draw more attention to our subject and less attention to the background, especially this area that's really far away. Starting in the main color channel, I'm going to increase the saturation overall. That looks pretty good. Then I'll go into the red channel. It looks like the red channel is affecting her skin, the dress, and a little bit of the flowers around her. I'll increase the saturation. But I think I want to change the hue of the dress. Using the hue shift slider, we can make it more purple or we can make it more orange. I personally am a big fan of orange. I'm going to nudge it over to the left just a bit. I think I might have raised the saturation a bit too high, so I'll just scale that back a little. Going into the yellows. The yellow channel has a lot of this greenery surrounding her, I think I actually want to desaturate that a bit. I'm also going to nudge it over more toward blue. I think I also want to darken this area. Using the luminosity slider, I can make this into a darker green. I think I like how that looks. Let's go into the greens next. Similarly, I'm going to shift this over more toward blue. Maybe not quite so far this time. I'll desaturate, wow, you can see what a difference that makes. Maybe I'll just desaturate a little bit. I'm also going to nudge the luminosity over to darken those greens. With all of those greens desaturated, you can see our model really stands out. Moving on to the cyan channel, I'll raise this up. Not much is being affected that I can see maybe the background a little bit. I think I'll go ahead and leave that slider alone because I'm not seeing too big of a change. Then I'll go to the blues and raise this and we can see the flowers are being affected. I think I want the flowers to look a bit different. If I bring it over to the right, they turn a bit more if I bring it over to the left, they look more pink and I really like that. I'll bring it about there. I think I will raise the saturation just not quite so high. Last, we have magenta, which should affect the flowers and a little spot of her hair, I guess. I'm just going to raise up the saturation and nudge them over to the left to make them look a little bit more pink. I'm noticing a few areas back here that look a little strange, and I think that might actually be in the cyan color channel. I'll go back to that and desaturate and darken this channel. I think that looks a bit better. With that, I just did a lot of color adjusting. Let's see if that looks good. Here's the before, and here's the after This was a little bit of a different approach. I didn't brighten and saturate every single color. It was a bit more strategic by brightening up our subject and the flowers and then desaturating all of the green. I think this made a really big difference. I do think that I do want to lower the opacity of this layer. I'll just bring that down to make it less intense. Now I can go ahead and select all of my layers by holding shift and clicking. Now you can see the complete before and after. All right. Wow. Great work on this project. Look how much you could already do. These adjustments are so powerful. They're so useful and can improve your photos so much. In the next chapter, we'll take everything that we know about adjustments and learn how to apply adjustments to just part of a photo. I'll see you in the next chapter. 19. Applying Adjustments to Specific Areas: Let's say you have a photo where you really want to brighten up the model, but keep the rest of the photo the same. How do we only affect part of the photo? Knowing how to selectively apply adjustments is the key to great photos. Lucky for us, affinity has a nifty trick for applying adjustments to specific areas. You're going to be amazed at how simple this is. Let's get started. 20. More Than Erasing: This video, we'll take a look at how to remove part of an adjustment. For this example, I'm going to come down to our adjustment, and I'm going to apply a recolor adjustment. Now, this isn't a very common adjustment that you'll use, but this is just to make it easier to show you what we're going to do in this video. I'll close out of this dialogue box. Now you can see that this recolor adjustment has made our entire image, this red color. But let's say that I don't want the center of this image to be recolored. What can we do? Well, let's just erase it. I'll grab the eraser tool right here. Then I'll go ahead and click and drag to erase over the center of the image. But let's say that later on, we want to bring that red color back. How do we? Unfortunately, there isn't an unerased tool, but affinity has given us a different tool that we can use, and we actually already have a hint on the screen for what we should do. Do you see our recolor adjustment layer? Right next to it, we have this little icon here with a white area and a big black spot in the center. That black spot represents the area that we just erased. In fact, that black spot is telling affinity not to display the recolor adjustment and that blackened area. What if there was a way to make that area white again to fill in that black spot. Could we bring back part of the recolor adjustment that we just erased? Yes. Yes, we can. All we need to do is use the paintbrush tool to paint in white paint over that black area. We'll cover the paintbrush tool in depth in the next lesson. But for now, you can just watch. I'm going to select the paintbrush tool. Then I'm going to make sure I'm painting in white paint, and I'll go ahead and paint to reveal the recolor adjustment again? Now the icon next to the recolor layer is totally white, and the recolor adjustment is visible everywhere on the photo again. But here's where things get really interesting. Not only can we bring back erased areas by painting in white. We can actually erase areas by painting in black paint. I'm going to switch my paint color to black, and now you can see that I'm erasing the recolor adjustment. So now we've seen that the paint brush can erase parts of an adjustment and bring back erased areas. The paint brush can be used as an eraser and an un eraser. It's two tools and one. Knowing that you might wonder why you would use the actual eraser. If you could just use the paint brush for both. Well, to be honest, the paint brush is so powerful that you'll actually end up using it in place of the eraser for the vast majority of the time, which is pretty cool. The only tricky part to remember is which color of paint to use. Black and white paint is the language that Affinity speaks, and it might take you a while to remember Affinity's language. Like to remember it by thinking about how everything at night is black and you can't see anything. In the daytime, everything is bright and white and visible. Black paint will hide your adjustment, just like the blackness at night hides things, and white paint will reveal your adjustment, like how bright white sunlight will make everything appear visible in the daytime. Go ahead and keep this image open. We're going to use it in the next video. I'm just going to delete this recolor adjustment. The next video, we'll learn how to control the paint brush better. Then after that, we'll practice using the paint brush to apply adjustments to specific areas. Okay. 21. Paintbrush for Beginners: Let's learn how to use the paint brush. First, let's get out the paint brush. You can find this tool right over here. Every time I bring up the paintbrush tool, I like to add a new blank pixel layer, which you can do by pressing on this button. This will add an empty blank layer and you can use this to paint on top of rather than painting directly onto your image. Right now, we have a white loaded into our paint brush, but you can change this color from the color panel. Right within here, you can change this to any color you want. You can click and drag on this little circle right here and you can change it to black by coming to this side of the triangle, and you can see that update right here. You can also change it to a bright red color if you want and any color in between. To change the hue from red, you can click on this outer circle here and bring it around the color wheel to choose a new color. I'm going to change my color back to white. You might be wondering why there's a black circle behind our white circle. That black circle is just a secondary color that's loaded into our paint brush. You can access that color at any time by pressing x on your keyboard. This will automatically switch between those colors, and you can press x again to bring up the white. This is super useful, especially when you're erasing and unraing like we were doing in the last video. You can have your color set to white to erase and you can have it set to black to erase. Before I talk about these next settings, I'm just going to change my color to this nice purple color. Now, let's talk about a few of the settings up here in the context toolbar. There are a lot of different settings you can use for your paint brush, and I'm going to show you the most important ones. First, let's start with width. Width is the size of your paint brush. Right now, we have a pretty large brush. If I wanted to, I could change the width right here. I could click this and then drag down on this slider. Now we have a much smaller brush. We could also click and drag on the word width, just like we clicked and dragged on the word opacity earlier to change the brush size. But the way I usually change my brush size is by using the bracket keys on my keyboard. These keys are found next to the letter P. You can use the right bracket key to increase the size of your brush, and you can use the left bracket key to decrease the size. This is a super easy quick way to change the size as your painting, and I find myself using these bracket keys quite a bit. So far, you know how to change the color and you know how to change the size of your brush. But there's a few extra settings here that can really change the look of your brush. I'm just going to make my brush larger again. Then I'm going to show you what hardness is. Right now, hardness is set to 100%. That means the edges of our paint brush are very hard and sharp. But if I drag this all the way down to 0%, we now have a very soft brush. The edges are so fuzzy and feathered and it can really help if you're trying to blend what you're painting. I'll often have my brush set to 0% if I'm doing a little bit more of a free form flow painting, and I'll have a harder brush if I'm trying to maybe write a word down or something like that. Another setting you might want to change on your brush is you might want to change how much paint is being applied to your canvas, you can use opacity and flow to change these settings. But I would only recommend using one of these at a time because they do totally different things. If you lower the opacity, and then you begin painting, you can see that only a very small amount of paint is being applied. If I lift up my brush and paint again, more paint is being applied. Every time I lift up my brush, I'm getting more and more paint, but you have to lift up your brush to do this. I'll raise that back up to 100 and lower the flow. Flow is a bit different and I find myself using flow a lot more often. Because with flow, you don't need to lift up your paint brush. You can just continue to paint in the same area to make it darker and darker. I find this to be a little bit more natural feeling as someone who has used paint before. The more you go over an area, the more color will be added. I find myself using flow quite a bit. I'll go ahead and bring this back up. I think I'll just leave the hardness down for now. All of the settings that we've talked about here are very useful and you'll probably find yourself changing these settings for a different situations. It can take a while to get used to all of these different settings and find what works best for you. But after using the brush throughout this course, you'll feel a lot more comfortable with it. That's how to use and customize the brush, but I still have one more tip for you. I personally use a walkm tablet when painting. I find it easier to paint with than a mouse or trackpad. Now, buying a tablet is definitely not necessary for this course, but it can be helpful if you find yourself doing a lot of painting while editing. This is the one that I have from Amazon. Tablets can be a little bit pricey, so again, it's not necessary, but it is helpful to photo editing. Now that you know all about using the paint brush, we'll use it as we do some example projects in the next videos. Okay. 22. Lightening Part of a Photo: Let's lighten up part of a photo. In this photo, I want to draw more attention to the girl jumping and help separate her from her background. To do that, I want to brighten her up. Let's start by applying a levels adjustment. First, I want to brighten her, so I'll go to the gamma slider and pull it over to the left. That's quite a bit brighter, but now the shadows look a little bit washed out. I'm going to bring the black level over just to bring the shadows back. I think I'll also adjust the white level just to brighten things up even more. Right now, our entire image is getting brighter, but I only want the girl to be brighter. I'm going to paint in black to remove the adjustment from the surrounding area. I'll grab my paint brush. Then I'll make sure that I'm painting in black paint to hide this levels adjustment. I'll use the bracket keys on my keyboard to increase the size. Now I can go ahead and paint in black, and you can see that the adjustment is being removed. Now I've removed the adjustment, but I think I accidentally removed too much. Now the girl isn't quite as bright as I wanted her. I'm going to paint in white paint on our model now to add the adjustment back to her. With a smaller brush, I'm just going to come in here and make sure that all of her hands and her her backpack, just to make sure all of these areas are nice and filled in. Remember that if you ever paint too much, you can switch your color by pressing x on your keyboard. This is a super fast, easy way to quickly erase and un erase from your adjustments. I think this is looking really good. Here's the before and here's the after. It looks like I painted a little too much right there. I'll switch my color back to black by pressing and I'll just remove that brightening from that area. Okay. All right. Let's see how that looks. Here's the before, and here's the after. Our model looks so much brighter and that was pretty easy, right? Just a little bit of painting on the adjustment can make a really big difference. Let's do another practice in the next video. 23. Adding a Bit of Saturation: Let's add a bit of saturation in this video. I love this beautiful picture, but I think that the skirt could use a bit more color. It looks too muted right now. Let's add an HSL adjustment. I'll go to the adjustments and apply that HSL adjustment. Whenever I need to carefully paint an adjustment onto an area like we're going to do in this skirt, I like to make the adjustment a little more extreme than I normally would so that I can better see where I'm painting on my adjustment. I'm going to go ahead and increase the saturation quite a bit so that the difference is more obvious. Now, we only want one small area to have the adjustment applied to it. Do we really have to paint away all of the rest of the image just to have the skirt a bit brighter? That's so slow. Well, we actually don't need to do this. We just need to invert the adjustment, press command or control. Now you can see that the adjustment isn't being applied to anything. If you look over here in our layers panel, you can see that the adjustment has a black mask applied to it, meaning that it's fully not visible. By the way, this black and white area that you can see on our layer is called a mask. We're going to talk a lot more about masks later on in this course. But I just wanted to let you know that this is called a mask and you'll hear me call it a mask as we go along. Like I said, the mask right now is black, meaning that it's fully not visible to reveal it again. All we need to do is paint and white on this layer. I'll go ahead and grab my paint brush, and then I'll change the color to white. Then I can just zoom in and begin to paint. Remember that you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to adjust the size of your brush. If you ever paint too much, you can always press x on your keyboard to switch your color to black so that you can erase from the adjustment. Then you can press x again to begin painting in white. My strategy when painting an area like this is to use a small brush to paint an outline around the entire area. Then I'll go back with a bigger brush and fill in the middle. I just finished my painting. I think this looks really good, but a bit too saturated. Now we can go back and click on our adjustment icon to open up the dialogue box, and I'll just bring down the saturation. I think I like how it looks about there. Let's see how this looks. Here's the before and after. Now, it does look like she's sitting in some shadows. Maybe I should lower the opacity of this layer just to reduce that even more. Here is the before and after. Beautiful. Good work on this practice. We'll do another one in the next video. 24. Darkening Part of a Photo: Let's darken the edges of a photo. I want to darken the edges of this photo to help our subject and the fruit that she's picking to stand out a bit more. Let's start by adding a levels adjustment to darken. I'll go ahead and bring the gama slider over to the right side to darken this. Now that everything's a bit darker, I'm going to balance that by bringing the white level over, you can see that that just adds a bit of contrast, but the edges are still nice and dark. After darkening with that levels adjustment, you can see that the whole photo got, but we don't want the center to be darkened. What should we do? Well, let's go ahead and erase the center. I'll grab the paint brush. And to hide this levels adjustment, I'll make sure that I'm painting in black. Then I'll begin to paint over our subject. This might seem a bit strange at first. As we paint in black paint, our photo becomes brighter, and if we paint in white, our photo becomes darker. That's because painting in white or black on an adjustment has absolutely nothing to do with making the photo brighter or darker. White and Black are simply affinities language for erasing or un erasing parts of an adjustment layer. Since this adjustment layer is darkening the photo, painting in black will erase that darkening and make the photo brighter. I know that's a little confusing, but that's why we're practicing. The more we practice this, the more natural it will feel to you. Let's take a look at our photo. Here is the final before and after. I love the contrast that this adds to the photo and it really helps our subject to stand out. In the next video, we'll learn how to gradually paint on an adjustment using flow. 25. Adding Gradual Light: Let's add gradual light in this video. By using a low flow paint brush, we can gradually paint light onto areas. In this picture, I want to brighten up the face and add even more brightness to the hair so that we can see the detail better. Let's go ahead and add a levels adjustment. Whenever I know that I'm going to use a low flow paint brush, I like to make a very extreme adjustment. That way I can paint it on and build up the effect more and more. Let's make a very bright levels. I'll bring the gamma slider over quite a bit. I'll bring the white level over a little bit to balance it out, I'll bring the black level over slightly. Since I only want to paint this on a few small areas, I'm going to invert this adjustment with command or control. Now our adjustment is being applied to nothing. It's fully black. I'm going to grab the paint brush tool and I'll make sure that I'm painting in white paint. Then I'm going to bring the flow down quite a bit. Now that we have our very low flow, I can gradually paint on our subject. I'm just going to lightly go over the face. I'm only going to paint on it one time. I think that gradual light looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. But I don't want to brighten the lips too much. They're starting to blend with the face. I'll switch my color to black and using a small paint brush, I'll just paint this off of the lips. Switching back to a white paint. I'll press x on my keyboard. Now, I'm going to gradually build up light in a few areas. I like to do this with hair by painting on all of the highlights that I see. On all of the bright areas of hair, I'm just going to go back and forth with my small paint brush to add even more light to those areas. This is going to add some nice contrast to these areas. The dark parts will look even darker because the bright parts are so much brighter. Then I'm just going to go in here and add a bit more light here and there, and I'll add a bit more light to the beard. Now we can see here's the before and after. This is a very subtle change, and I like how much control we have to paint the light only where we want it. Now that you know a lot more about painting adjustments, we're going to do a bigger project in the next video. 26. Applying Layered Adjustments: In this video, we'll paint on multiple adjustments. We aren't limited to painting on just one adjustment. We can do as many adjustments as we want. I'm quickly going to write out a plan for what we're going to do in this video. I have a new pixel layer here, and I have a paint brush with full flow and hardness. In this picture, as usual, I want our subject to stand out from the background. I'm going to darken the whole background. I also think that I want the grass to appear a little bit more green. I'm going to add some green to the grass. I also want to brighten up our subject to help her to stand out even more. We'll go ahead and brighten her. I really like the detail on her shirt. I'm going to make sure to add contrast here so that we can see all of these beautiful details. Now we have a pretty good plan. I like to think things through like this before I dive into a big project. We're going to use quite a few layers, and I just want to make sure that I'm going in the right direction. Let's start by selecting the background layer. Let's go ahead and darken the background. I'll add a new levels adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and darken the gamma slider by bringing it over to the right side. Another trick you can use if you want to darken an area is to use the output white level slider. Since this grays out your brightest parts of your image, this will also add some nice darkness. I just want to bring this a little was down. Right now, this levels adjustment is darkening the entire photo and I want to remove it from our subject. I'm going to make sure I have my paint brush out. Then I'm going to lower the hardness all the way. I'll go ahead and keep the flow up. Then I'm going to change this color to black so that I have black and white paint here. I'm just going to paint in black paint over our subject to remove this dark levels adjustment. I'll just turn this layer off to make sure that this looks good. Now we have a beautiful dark background. Let's check in with our plan. We darkened the background. Next, I think I want to do the HSL adjustment. I'll go ahead and add that in. Now we're going to adjust the grass. I want this grass to be a bit more green, a bit less yellow. To do that, I'm going to go to the yellow channel. You see how this is affecting most of the grass. I don't want it to appear this yellow. I'm going to bring the huge shift slider over toward green. I think I also want to desaturate this. I don't want it to stand out as much as it is right now. I think I'll also darken this. This is only supposed to affect our grass. But as you can see, there's more yellow in this picture. The whole image is getting a bit washed out, especially our subject. I'm actually going to invert this adjustment with command or control. Now it's being applied to nothing. I'll go ahead and paint in white paint on our black mask so that this is only affecting the grass where I want it to. I want to be extra careful around our subject because I don't want her to become green. I won't paint this over this area back here, even though these are green trees. I like that they have a bit of yellow to them from the sun shining on them. I think this looks pretty good. Here's before and after of making the grass more green. Next, let's use a low flow to paint brightness on our subject. I don't want to brighten every area, the same amount. I mostly want to brighten up her hair and her skirt. I'll go ahead and add a levels adjustment, and then I'll bring the gamma slider down to Brighton. I think to add some more contrast back in, I'll bring the black level slider over a little bit. I don't want the shadows of her skirt and hair to become washed out. Since I'm only applying this to a small area, I'm going to invert this adjustment with command or control. Now with white paint and a lower flow, I'll just bring that down. I can go ahead and apply this gradually to a few areas. I'm going to add some brightness to her hair so that we can see more of the texture here. And then I'm just very lightly going to go over her face. Then I'll go ahead and brighten up her skirt. With a smaller brush, I'm going to go over the highlights of her skirt, a little bit extra. Anywhere where I see a brighter spot from the wrinkles or anything like that, I'm just going to add a little bit more brightness to that area. This will be subtle, but here's the before and after of that. And as one last adjustment, I want to add more contrast to our model, especially to her beautiful shirt. I really want to see all of those details stand out. I'll add another levels adjustment. This time we're trying to add contrast. I won't worry about the Gamma slider, but I will bring the black level in to darken the shadows, and I'll bring the white level in to brighten up the highlights. I don't want to bring the white level too far over or we start to lose detail. You see how these highlights are now blown out. I'm just going to bring it over a little bit. Then I'll press command or control I to invert this so that I can paint it just over her shirt and maybe a little bit on her face. I'll bring the flow up all the way. Then with a bit of a larger brush, I'll go ahead and paint this over the details of her shirt. Here's the before and after of her shirt. I think that looks really nice. Now with a lower flow, I think with a larger brush, I'll just click once on her face. Maybe one more time. This will just add a little bit extra contrast so that we can see all of her facial features a bit better. Here's the before, and here's the after. It's very subtle, but I do think that that does add something special there. I think I've added everything that I originally wanted to for our plan. Now it's time to go back through our layers and make sure that they look good. For example, I think that I missed a few spots around her legs for the green grass. I'll go back to the HSL adjustment and with white paint and full flow. I'll go ahead and use a smaller brush to add those areas in. It's important to remember that you can always go back to adjust any of these layers. I think that looks a lot better. As a reminder, make sure that when you're going back to adjust any of these things, to have the right layer selected. It's a super common mistake for new users to not have the right layer selected while painting. Double check every time to make sure you're painting on the right layer. Now that I'm looking at all these adjustments again, I think I want to bump up the contrast even more on our last adjustment here. I'll click once on this levels adjustment here. I think I'll bring the black level over a bit more. Just to highlight the shirt. And I'll bring the white level over a little bit more as well. With that, we are done. What a huge project. I'll select all of the layers by holding shift and clicking on the last one. Now you can see it complete before and after. Now you're really starting to edit like a pro. Painting on adjustments is so powerful and so fun. I really hope that you enjoy this chapter. In the next chapter, we're going to learn about some very important tools to know. 27. The Most Important Tools: In this chapter, we'll learn about some very unique and important tools. We'll cover quite the range of tools here from learning about shapes to adding text and more. This will be a fun, different chapter. Let's get started. 28. New Documents: Let's learn how to make a blank new document. Before we learn about the tools in this chapter, I want to show you how to make a blank document. A blank document will be very useful in demonstrating these upcoming tools, and it's a great skill for you to have because it lets you start off with a blank canvas to work on. To create a new document, go to the top of the screen to file, then press new. There's a lot of buttons in this window, but here are the ones that are the most important. First, you can change your pre set category. Each of these categories will create a document that's perfect for a specific situation. For example, in the print category, you can choose between documents that are different sizes, and all of them will be perfect for printing on your home printer. For press ready, these are documents that are ready and formatted to be printed on a commercial printer. In photo, these documents will be the typical sizes for printed photos. In web, this will be sizes that websites will commonly use. And these last two, I don't really use, but if this is important to you, we have a category for commonly used device sizes. This will have screen sizes of devices like iPhones or iPads. Last, we have architectural, which uses sizes that are commonly used in architecture. If I click on one of these categories, it will bring us down to that section, and then you can choose your document size from there. This is a way to jump around to the sections. But as you can see, you could just scroll on this to get to each of the sections two. Once you find a size that you like, you can click on it, and then move on to down here. Down here, we have a few more specific settings we can change. If you don't quite like the size of this, but it's pretty close, you could click in this box and type in a new number. The document will automatically update up here. Let me do a more dramatic difference to show you. Now you can see I made the width much wider. This shows you the exact dimensions that will appear once you create your new document. You can also change the document units if you'd like. Right now, we're using a document from the web category. By default, it's using pixels. But if you wanted to, you could also see what this equates to in inches, or millimeters. Another section you can alter is the color section. This will automatically update depending on which preset you use. In most cases, this will say RGB, but it might say CMYK, which is for commercial printers. You can change that there if you need to. You can also check on transparent background if you like. This is perfect for if you're making a design that has a transparent background rather than a white background. For our purposes, I'm going to go to the print category, and I'll go ahead and choose A four Then I'll press Create. Now we have a blank canvas to work with where we can add text and shapes or even photos. For example, to add a photo, you can come to the top of your screen to file, then place Then you can select a photo you'd like to place. Press open. Now you simply can click and drag to add your photo to your document. But I'll go ahead and delete this so that we can have a blank document ready to use for our next video. We'll learn more about layers, shapes, and text in the next videos. 29. Working with Layers: This video, we'll learn how to work with layers. For demonstrational purposes, I'm going to select the rectangle tool and make three rectangles and give each of them a unique color. We'll learn more about shapes in the next video, but these will work well for demonstration purposes. To move each of these layers around, you can use the move tool. The move tool is super useful for moving shapes as well as resizing them, and we'll take a look at that in a minute. But right now, as you move the shapes, you might notice the shapes snapping to each other. You see these red lines guiding my shapes around. This is because I have the snapping feature turned on up here. This allows me to line the shapes up perfectly, and we can even center them in the document if we want to. You can turn off snapping if you want to move your shapes around more freely. Once you like how your shape is positioned in your document, you can lock it in place by pressing the lock icon. This will prevent you from accidentally moving your shape, but you can still select and move the other shapes that aren't locked. If you want to unlock your shape so that you can move it again. You can just press on this lock icon right here in its layer. Now you can move the shape again. As I mentioned before, you can also use the move tool to resize and reshape your layers. You can do this by using all of these little nodes on the edges. You can click and drag on these nodes to reshape and resize your layer. This is a very free flowing, easy way to resize your layer. But if you want to lock it proportionally to where it started, you can press on shift. Now your layer is locked in this proportional shape. Again, just hold down shift as you click and drag and it will stay perfectly in proportion. If you want to rotate your shape around, you can use this node right up here. Once your cursor turns from your normal cursor into these two arrows, you can click and drag to rotate your shape around. If you want your shape to turn exactly in 15 degree increments, you can hold down shift, and this will lock your shape into those exact angles. You can have your shape be exactly 90 degrees or exactly 45 or exactly back to where you started. Holding down shift is such an easy way to keep things very proportional and in line with each other. I find myself using the shift key quite a bit as I use the move tool to resize and move things around. If you want to make a copy of your layer, all you need to do is have your layer selected and then press command or control J on your keyboard. I like to remember this like J four jump, you have a duplicate layer jumping out of the original layer. It's a shortcut that you just need to remember because it doesn't make much sense. If you can't remember it, all you need to do is right click on your layer and then press on duplicate. If you want to delete a layer, I think we've already done this, but you can have your layer selected and press on the trash can, or you can press delete on your keyboard. Now that we know how to resize, duplicate, move our shapes around. I think it's time to look at the layers panel a little bit more to see some of the options that you can customize. All you need to do is come up to this hamburger menu and you can see quite a few different options. In this course, I'm going to have my thumbnail set to large thumbnails so that they're easier to see. But you can shrink down your thumbnail size if you have a lot of layers you're working with, and you just want more room to see them all. Another option you can change is you can actually get rid of these little symbols that are on the left side of your layers. Just click on the Hamburger menu again and then turn off show object type. You can do this if you just want to simplify your layers and only see your layers here. I'll go ahead and turn that back on. One more thing that you can change is the background of your layer. You can change the thumbnail background to checkerboard background, and I believe this is the default. This will just show you that your layer has only this yellow part in it and the checkered background represents the transparent part. I personally find this a little bit distracting. I'm going to go back to thumbnail background and turn off checkerboard background. But you can leave that on if you'd like. Those are a few important tips for working with layers. Now that we understand layers a bit better, we'll take a closer look at the shape tools in the next video. 30. Shapes: Let's learn about the shape tools. To start off, I'll make a rectangle by selecting the rectangle tool, and then I'll go ahead and click and drag to create a rectangle. Affinity actually has many more shape tools, but where are they? Well, to open more shape tools. All you need to do is click on this little gray triangle. This will open up all of these different tools that you can select. Just so you know, this actually occurs a few more times down the tools. If you see a little gray triangle, just click on it, and now you can see even more tools that affinity has. Back to the shapes. Once you have all of these shape tools opened up, you can go ahead and select one. I'll go ahead and select the Ellipse tool, and then I'll go ahead and click and drag. To make a perfect circle, remember our trick from before, hold down shift on your keyboard, and this will create a perfectly proportional circle. This can happen with any of the shape tools. If we go back to our rectangle tool, and then I hold down shift before I start clicking and dragging, we can create a perfect square. This works with every single type of shape, hold down shift before clicking and dragging to create a perfect shape. Some of our shapes have different customization tools up in the context toolbar. For this rectangle tool, for example, we can switch the corner type. I'm going to switch my corner type to rounded. Now you can see we have a beautiful rounded rectangle, and we also have this new orange circle that appeared. If I click and drag on that orange circle, I can adjust how rounded the corner is. This orange dot only appeared after we changed the corner type on the rectangle, but some shapes have this built in automatically. For example, if I click on the arrow tool and then click and drag out an arrow, you can see that we actually have a few orange dots placed around our shape, and each of these dots can change a part of the arrow. As I click and drag on this one, we can make this a little bit skinnier or fatter. We can also change this part of the arrow. And this part. Whenever you see these orange dots, you can go ahead and click and drag with them to see what's being affected. I want you to keep in mind, though, that these orange circles are only visible if you have the shape layer selected and you have the shape tool out. If you have the move tool out, these dots disappear. To get them back, make sure you have a shape tool selected, and then you can go ahead and alter these. Just as you saw me do in the last video, you can also change the colors of each of these shapes. With the shape layer selected, you can go ahead and choose a new color by just changing the color in the color wheel. You can quickly do this with all of the shapes, just selecting their layer and then changing the color. And that's how to access and customize these shape tools. You can go ahead and play around with a few of these different shape tools on your own, if you'd like to see how you can customize and change them. In the next video, we'll learn about the text tool. 31. Text Tool: In this video, we'll learn about the text tool. First, let's go ahead and select the text tool. Once you have that selected, all you need to do is click and drag and this will create the size of text that you're going to create. Then you can just type out whatever word you want. You can use the move tool to resize and position your text. If you want to change the font and look of your text, you can press on the text tool again, and then you can change your font to whatever you want. To see this update in real time, make sure you have your text highlighted. Then you can go through the list and see your text change. Just as we've done before, anytime you have a layer selected, you can change its color up here in the color panel. Okay. I'll go ahead and use the move tool to move that over here. Now we can create another text box if we'd like, select the text tool again and then click and drag to create your text. Then you can type whatever word you want. I'll go ahead and resize and position it using the move tool. Now that we've moved on and I have started working with a new layer. You might wonder how we can go back to this layer to alter its text. All you need to do is get out the text tool again, and then you can just click in the box and change the word. If you want to change a specific part of your word, you can just highlight one part of it, and then you can change anything you want about it. Or you can use the move tool to select the entire box and change everything at the same time. That's the basics of the text tool. Now we know how to make shapes and texts. In the next video, we'll work with an exercise file to learn about some special layer effects that you can use. 32. Layer Effects: Let's learn about layer effects. Layer effects allow us to add special effects to an entire layer. To start, let's select the rectangle layer. Then to add a layer effect, all you need to do is press on this F x icon. This dialogue box will open and show you all of these different layer effects that you can apply. Let's start with a simple blur. I'll click on the Gaucian blur option and then check it on. Then I'll just move this box over and our document over so that we can see it with the Gaucian blur selected and checked on. All we need to do is raise the radius to blur that rectangle. We'll go ahead and close this dialogue box. As you can see, that was nice and simple to add that effect. Let's add an effect to the text next. I'll select the text layer and then press on F x. This time, I think I'll go ahead and add an outer shadow. I'll select that option and check it on. Here we have quite a few options that will all affect how the shadow appears. First, we can raise the radius, which will make the shadow appear larger. If we increase the offset, this will move the shadow to one side, if we raise the intensity, this will make the shadow much harsher. You can also change the color if you want by clicking here and adjusting the color. You can also adjust the angle so you could have the shadow coming from a different direction if you'd like. In general, when I'm applying an outer shadow to things, I like to raise all of these sliders and then adjust them afterward so that we can really see the difference that it's making. Then I'll go ahead and close out of this dialogue box. You can also add multiple layer effects to a single layer. To do this, I'll select the star layer, and then I'll press on F x. I'll just move the document over so that we can see our star. First, I'll go ahead and add an outline. Then I'll check it on and increase the radius. You can change the alignment. By default, it's set to outside, but center can also look nice. If you put it on the inside, this is what it looks like with much sharper outside edges. I'll keep mind set to center. You can also change the color here. I'll go ahead and select a new color. That looks pretty nice. Okay. Now I've applied my first layer effect of an outline. Then I'll go ahead and add an outer shadow. I'll click on that and check it on. Then I can go ahead and raise all of these sliders and adjust them. I'll close out of this and recenter my document with command or control zero. Now you can see that all of our layers have layer effects supplied. If you ever want to go back and edit the effect, all you need to do is press on the F x icon that's on that layer. Then it will re open up those options and you can continue to adjust the effects. Okay. So that's how to use layer effects. There are quite a few different ones that you can mess around with to see what they all do, and they're all pretty simple and easy to add to text and shapes. Go ahead and keep this document open because we'll use it in the next video. Okay. 33. Layer Groups: This video, we'll learn about layer groups. To start off, we'll use a shortcut that we already know to duplicate the star layer. Do you remember the shortcut? It's command or Control J, J as in jump. Then I'll select the move tool and move the star so that you can see both of them. With so many shapes and text boxes, how can we stay organized? Well, affinity has a nifty little way of letting us put our layers into groups like folders to keep things organized. To do this, we just need to select more than one layer at a time. You can select strings of layers by selecting the first one, then holding shift and clicking on the next one. Or if you want to select individual layers that aren't all in a row, you can hold down command or control to select more than one layer, and you can also keep holding command or control to unselect layers. In this case, I'm going to select the stars. I'll select the first one, hold down shift, and select the last one. Now we'll group them. To make a group, all you need to do is press command or control G, G as in group. This is a lot easier to remember than as in jump for duplication. Now we have our stars in a group. We can open and close this group by pressing on this arrow here, and then it drops down and you can see all of the layers that are within that group. With layers group together, this gives a couple of advantages. First, it takes up less space in our layers panel over here. In addition to that, if we have our group selected, we can use the move tool to move all of the layers at the same time. If you want to move just one of the layers independently, all you would need to do is click on that layer, and then you can move it like normal, or if you have the group selected and you click. All you need to do is double click on that layer, and now you can move it individually. It's very important to make sure that you have the right layer selected. It's pretty easy to be messing with a different layer, and then you want to go back and move the stars around and accidentally have the group selected. Just make sure that you have the exact right layer selected before you do anything. To remove a layer from a group, all you need to do is click on that layer and then drag it until this blue line appears. Then you can release it and now it's outside of the group. To add something to a group, you can click on the layer, and then drag it until the group is highlighted like this. Now the rectangle and star are both part of this group. Using groups is very useful as you get more and more advanced with your editing, and you have lots of layers in the layers panel. We'll learn even more about groups and a special ability that they have in the next video. Okay. 34. Child Layers: In this video, we'll learn about child layers. Child layers are a special layer group where one layer lives inside of another layer, it's parent layer. This is very useful for a lot of reasons, and we'll explore a few different scenarios in this video. First, let's take a look at how we can use child layers to crop a photo. Right now, we have this model photo and it's placed underneath this circle. Let's say that I wanted this photo to be cropped into this circle shape to make the photo appear inside of the circle. We need to make the photo a child layer to the circle. To do that, let's click on our model layer and then drag it so that it's on top of the circle layer. Once it's on top, you can go ahead and release, and now you can see that our model has been cropped into the circle shape. The parent is the circle, and we can open and close this group using this arrow here and see our model. Let's try doing the same thing, but this time we'll place this image into this heart shape. With this heart model selected here, I'll go ahead and drag this on top of the heart. Where did it go? We can see that it's a child layer to the heart, but it's not visible. Well, if I select my move tool, we can see that the model is over here. It's not going to appear inside the heart. Child layers are only visible where the parent layer is visible. I'm going to move this child layer over here, and now you can see her appear in the heart. Once you have this parent child relationship with your layers. There are different ways of moving all of the layers. Similarly to a layer group. If we have the parent layer selected, we can move the parent and the child layer at the same time. But if you wanted to adjust the layer that's inside of the parent layer, this child layer, you would need to select its layer, and now you can go ahead and move this layer around. Again, it's always important to make sure you have the right layer selected so that you're achieving your goals. If I wanted to shrink this down, I need to make sure that I have this layer selected. If I wanted to adjust the heart, I would need to make sure that I have the heart selected. A one last example, I want to keep everything visible here on this little birthday picture. We're not going to worry about any cropping this time. Instead, I want to change the color of the balloons without affecting the photo beneath it. I'm going to select the balloon layer, and then I'll put an HSL adjustment on top of that. If I move the hue shift slider to adjust the colors, you can see that both the boy and the balloons are being affected. But I only want the balloons to be affected. If I move the HSL adjustment beneath the balloons. Now you can see that the boy is being affected, but the balloons aren't. Because of the order of layers here, there really isn't a way to not affect the boy unless we use child layers. I'm going to click on this HSL adjustment and drag it on top of our balloons to create a layer group. Now, the HSL adjustment is a child layer to the balloons, so only the balloons will be affected as I move the hue shift slider. Even though the HSL adjustment is technically on top of everything else in this document. Only the balloons are affected because of child layers, which is super helpful. As we saw with layer groups, you can always remove a layer from a group by dragging it above and out of the group like this. That's just something to keep in mind. You can always adjust these layers after the fact. Child layers are so useful, so we'll be using them throughout the course. In the next video, we're going to take a look at cropping images. 35. Cropping: Let's learn how to crop an image. To crop an image, we first need to select the crop tool, which you can find right over here. Once the crop tool is out, cropping your image is as simple as moving in these nodes to bring in your crop. Then you can press apply. There's a couple of really cool features of this crop tool. The first one is that cropping is non destructive. You might think that all those areas that we just cropped out don't exist anymore, but that's actually not true. If you select the crop tool again, you can crop those edges back outward and then press apply to reveal them again. Another great thing is that after you've cropped your image, you can also unlock your layer over here, and then use the move tool to move your image around. You can even resize it to make it larger and adjust your crop that way. I'm just going to bring in the edges like this. Let's take a look at another feature of the crop tool. I'll select the crop tool again. Let's come up here to the context toolbar because I want to show you a few things up here. The first thing we can change is the mode. Right now, by default, it's an unconstrained mode, but you can actually change this to custom ratio to lock the crop to a certain ratio. For example, maybe I want this image to be a four by six ratio. Now we have a four by six ratio, and as I drag in these edges, it will stay locked in that ratio. In addition to changing the ratio. There's another option you can change up here called overlay. By default, we have this third grid here, which is really helpful for centering things. But you can also change this if you'd like to these other options. We have the golden spiral and diagonals. But generally, I like mindset to third, or if you don't want any lines, you can switch it to none. I'll just change mine back to thirds. One last thing that I want to show you is that you can straighten images using the context toolbar up here with the crop tool out. Just click on straight in. Then you can click and drag a line for what should be straight in your image. In this case, I think the lines on the air balloons should be straight. I'll go ahead and click and drag a line. Once I release, the whole image will tilt in that direction to make those lines straight. You can actually do this as many times as you want. Just click on straight in and then click and drag a line to straighten out your image. You can also do this without the context tool bar by covering your cursor over the corner until your cursor turns into two arrows. Then you can click and drag to rotate your document. I'll go ahead and press apply. As you can see, the crop tool is super easy to use and has quite a few useful features that can really come in as a quick and basic way to edit. We're almost done with this chapter. In the next video, we'll use what we learned in this chapter to complete a project together. Okay. 36. Ice Cream Shop Flyer (Part 1): In this video, we're going to create a flyer for an ice cream shop. We'll complete this project by using everything that we learned in this chapter. To start off, let's create a new document. I'll come to the top of the screen to file, then I'll press new. For this project, I'm going to go in the print category and choose the A four size. Then I'll press Create I want to start this project off by making a little bit of a plan here on my document. I'm going to create a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to grab my paintbrush tool. I'll go ahead and increase the hardness and flow all the way. I have a nice hard brush to write with. Then I'll go ahead and decrease my brush size using the bracket keys on my keyboard. Now I'm just going to draw out my idea. My concept for this is to create a flyer for an ice cream stand. I'll name the stand after me, and you can feel free to name it after yourself if you'd like. At the top here, I'll add some fancy text that says, Allie's ice cream shop. To make it look more like a fancy logo, I'll make the name of the stand a bit larger, and I'll make the rest of the text a bit smaller and off to the side. Underneath that, I think I'll add a layout of different pictures. Maybe I'll make a square over here with a few circle cropped images, and then maybe a larger one over here. In all of these boxes, I'll put pictures that look like an ice cream shop. Maybe I'll have some actual ice cream and some customers enjoy the ice cream, something like that. While we're at it, having fun with all of these shapes, I think I want to frame out this text using a rounded rectangle. If you remember earlier, we made a rectangle and then altered its corner type. We'll do something like that here. Of course, we'll add in more details as we go. But this is the general idea for what we're going to do in this video. I always like drawing a rough design so that I know where I'm going with my design beforehand. With this layout, I think we can create a really beautiful flyer. I'll go ahead and turn off this pixel layer. Let's start by adding the main text. I'm going to grab the artistic text tool. Then I'll go ahead and click and drag out some text. I'll start by just writing the name of the shop, which I want to be a bit larger. I'll go ahead and type this out in all caps. Then I'll go ahead and highlight this text and choose a font. Over here in our fonts, you can change this to whatever font that you want. I think I'm going to use something a little bit curly and fancy for this first word. If you don't have this exact font, that's okay. Just use whatever you want. Over the many years of using this program, I've downloaded quite a few extra fonts to this program, and I'm not exactly sure what the default fonts are anymore. Any curly fancy font will do just fine for this. I'm thinking this word is a bit hard to read, but I do like how the A looks. I'll highlight the rest of this text and change it to a simpler font. With our first word done, I'll grab the move tool and move this whole text box over here. Then we can create our other words that are going to be a bit smaller off to the side. I'll grab the text tool again. I'm just going to drag out a bit of a smaller size text. Then I'm going to type out ice cream shop. I think I'm going to make this all caps as well. Then I'll press return or enter on my keyboard to drop down to the next line and type out shop. I actually like how this text is looking, but feel free to change it to any other font if you'd like to make these words line up with each other better, I'll grab the move tool, and I'll just shrink down this text box until this looks like it's about the same height. I want these to line up better, and I think I'll just use the arrow keys on my keyboard to bump this down slightly. I think that looks pretty nice. I'll move this word a little bit closer. You can see the snapping was helping me out there with that line. I think that looks really nice. To finish off this text area, let's add a rectangle behind the text. I'll go into my shape tools by clicking on this little gray triangle here. Then I'll select the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag this over our text, and I'll make sure that this is at the bottom of our layers. Let's go ahead and change the color to a nice light pink color like strawberry ice cream. To make this a little more interesting, let's change the corner type of this rectangle to rounded. But and we can alter this as much as we'd like. We can really bring it in to make it super rounded or we could make it a little more squared off. I like how it looks very rounded, so I'll leave it like that. Then I'm going to make sure that this is centered in our document. To do that, drag it until this green line appears all the way down your document. Then to make sure all this text is centered. I'm going to select the word alleys and then hold down command or control and click the other one. Now we can drag all of this so that it lines up perfectly in our rectangle. All of this snapping is really only working because I have this snapping option turned on. If these lines aren't showing up for you, make sure that you have that clicked on. This is looking really good so far. The next thing we're going to do is add in the shapes for all of our images. If I click on this pixel layer here, you can see that I wanted a layout that looked something like this. As we drag out our shapes, I'll keep that in mind. I'll just turn off this pixel layer. Now we can begin, starting with the rectangle tool. I'll go ahead and click and drag out a longer skinnier rectangle here to leave room for all of those circles. Then lined up with it on this side, I'll create a larger square. Then I'll go into my shape tools again and select the ellipse tool. I want to create three perfect circles underneath this rectangle. To create a perfect circle, remember that all you need to do is hold down shift and then click and drag. To make all of these circles the exact same size, I'm just going to duplicate our first circle twice. With that circle selected, I'll press command or control J to duplicate it. Then with the move tool selected, we can move all of those circles. After some dragging around, it looks like those lined up perfectly with my rectangle. If yours didn't work out quite as nicely, which is very possible. It happens to me all the time. You can hold down shift to select all of these circles at the same time. Then you can resize them together, but make sure to hold down shift so they stay as perfect circles. Then you can click and drag them to shrink them down. I do think I want to shrink these down a little bit, and I'll move this rectangle inward to line up with those. Then I'll go ahead and drag this square outward and down to line up with the bottom of those circles. I think this looks pretty nice. Now I have the basic layout that I want to do for this ice cream shop flyer. I want to make sure that everything is perfectly centered. I'm going to delete our plan layer first. I'll just press delete on my keyboard for that. Then I'm going to select everything at the same time by holding down shift and clicking. Then I'm just going to drag this so it's perfectly centered in our document. This means we'll see a green line going vertically and a red line going horizontally. Now that we know everything is lined up and our shapes are all laid out, we're ready to start adding our images into these shapes. But this is turning into a very large project. I think I'll go ahead and end this video here. In the next one, we'll continue on with this project. 37. Ice Cream Shop Flyer (Part 2): This video, we'll complete this ice cream shop flyer project. Let's go ahead and add in our images. To do this, I'm going to come to the top of the screen two file, and then I'll press place. Within the most important tools folder of our exercise files, I have another folder called ice cream Shop Flyer. Go ahead and open that up. We have so many images that I want to include in this project, so that's why I made their own folder. Go ahead and select the first one and then press open. Then I'll click and drag with this loaded into my cursor. This is the very first image of my ice cream shop. Look how adorable it is. We're right on the beach and we have so many customers. It's very successful. Please ignore this little sign here that says Kelly's. That should say alleys because it's my ice cream shop. Moving on. Since this is a very important picture for our advertisement, I want to put this in the largest rectangle. I'll just move this over here so that it's in line with that rectangle. Then to crop that into this square. We need to make this picture a child layer to that largest rectangle. I'm going to click on this layer and drag it so that it's on top of that rectangle layer like this. Then I'll release. You can see that it's perfectly snapped in to that rectangle. I think I want to resize it a little bit, maybe zoom it in a bit. I'll go ahead and resize it here. I think that looks pretty nice. With that cropped in place. Let's continue this process for the rest of the pictures. Let's go back up to the top of the screen to file, then down to place. I'll select the next picture, and I'll click and drag this right here. By default, it's been added as a child layer again to that rectangle. But for this one, I want this to be a child layer to the other rectangle. I'll click on this layer and drag it on top of the other rectangle. Once I've released that, I can go ahead and resize this. This picture fits pretty well here. I'll just make sure that it's lined up nicely. Now you can see the delicious ice cream that we serve at my ice cream shop. All continuing this process up to file and place again. We'll get this third one and place this one into this first circle here. Again, by default, it's been placed as a child layer. I'll click on that layer and drag it on top of this circle. Now you can see it's been placed as a child layer here. I'll go ahead and increase the size. That looks pretty good. Again, let's do this again, file place. We'll select this picture, which has a lot of delicious ice cream in it. I'll just click on the first layer and we can see the whole picture here. There's a lot of different ice cream to choose from in this picture. This one is shaped in a perfect circle already. I think I want to use this one. I'll go ahead and line that up down here. Then I'll make it a child layer to our second ellipse. It looks like I chose the wrong one. In the process of duplicating these layers, they got a little out of order. I'll just click and drag this on top of the other ellipse. Perfect. Now it's a child layer. I'll just shrink it down so that we can see that beautiful dessert. I'm trying to line it up, but snapping is making it a little difficult, so I'll turn off snapping for now, so I can more freely move this. I'll make it a little bit smaller so that we can see the pretty candy confetti that's going around it. That looks pretty good. One last picture, file, place, and I'll select this one. Then I'll select our top layer and drag this one out. In this picture, we have this girl holding an ice cream cone and her mom is holding her up and we have this arm. There's a lot going on here. As I crop this in, I want to focus on the little girl and the ice cream. I'll go ahead and drag this on top of our ellipse. Then I'll make sure it's cropped so that you're mostly focused on her and the ice cream. I think that looks pretty good. Now that I have all of these photos placed. I'm noticing that this picture looks quite a bit darker and more contrasted than the rest of the pictures. Before we move on, I want to edit this picture so that it matches the rest of the pictures better. The rest of the photos have a very light and airy feeling. Let's try to fix this. First, I'll make sure all of our groups are closed. Then I'm going to select the layer with the girl on it and go into our adjustments and apply a levels adjustment. I want her to appear brighter. I'll move the gamma slider over to the left to start. You can see this is editing all of our layers, which I mostly just wanted to affect her. To do that, I'm going to click and drag this on top of the circle and this will add it to her group. You can see as I turn this off and on, it's only affecting her layer. Now we can see how this picture compares to the other ones. I might have made it a bit too light, so I'll drag the gamma back a little. That's looking pretty good. I do want to desaturate it a little more because this orange is standing out a bit too much. I want pink to be the focus here. I'll go into our adjustments again and add an HSL adjustment. Because that levels adjustment, which is a child layer was selected, this has automatically been placed as a child layer, which is perfect. I want to decrease the saturation of this orange. I'll go into the red channel and then I'll decrease the saturation. I think that picture has a much more light and airy look to it. Here's the before, and here's the after. At this point, everything that I originally planned to put in this document has been placed, and I think it's looking really nice. Now it's time to add a few finishing touches. First, I want to add some color and texture to this plain white background. To do that, I'll select the rectangle tool. Coming into our tools, I'll click on the little gray triangle. Then I'll select the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag this. I'm starting above the document outside of it. Then I'll click and drag until this rectangle fills the entire document here. This has been placed as a child layer and I want this to appear underneath everything. I'll go ahead and drag this all the way to the bottom. There we go. Right now it's this pink color. I think I want to make it a bit lighter so we can still see our main sign there. That looks pretty nice. Now you can see we just added a little bit of color there. Before moving on, I just want to lock this layer in place so I don't accidentally move it. Since this is just a solid background. I'll go ahead and press the lock icon with that layer selected. Let's go ahead and add some texture to this background as well. I'll go up to the top of the screen two file, then. Now I'm going to place this last picture. I'll click and drag this out. Okay. Because it's vertical right now, I want this to match up to our picture better. I'll hold down shift while rotating to make it a 90 degree angle there. Now you can see we have this beautiful texture. I think this is a wall cement texture or something like that. But it could look like some ice cream or something. We're going to use that. I see a bit of a seam here that I don't want. I'll just make this a bit larger so you don't see that. We've added our texture, but I want the color to still show through. What I'm going to do is actually lower the opacity of this layer. Now you can see the texture is a bit softer and the color is peeking through. I think that looks pretty nice. I'll go ahead and lock this layer. At this point, I like how the texture looks. If you want to, you can click on this rectangle layer again and you can still alter its color. If you wanted it to look a little bit, a little more saturated, you could move that now. A one very last step. Let's add some layer effects. I want to add some nice borders and maybe an outer shadow to a few of these shapes. Starting with our pink rounded rectangle here, I'll select that layer and then press on F x. This is the main image with the logo and name of our shop. I want this to be quite bold and stand out. To do that, I'm going to add a border. Click on outline and check that on. Now I can increase the radius to add a border I have to bring it up quite a bit. I think I want the thickness of this border to be similar to the thickness of the name here. I think this looks pretty good for that. This is something that I forgot to mention earlier in the layer effects video. But if you want to see a before and after of your layer effects, all you need to do is uncheck this square right here. Now you can see that before and after. Sorry about forgetting to mention that, but that's how you can quickly preview the difference. Next, let's add an outer shadow to this ice cream shop sign. I'll select outer shadow and check it on. Then I'll increase all of these sliders. I think I want the radius to be larger so we can see it. I'll reduce the offset a little bit and make this a softer intensity. I'm going to select the hand tool because all of this is a bit distracting, all of the blue outlines. With the hand tool, those disappear. Now you can see the before and after of that subtle outer shadow. As one last layer effect, I want to add an outline to all of our pictures. Here's a nice little shortcut for that. If you want to add a layer effect to multiple layers at once, we can select all of the layers that you want to change. Just closing up all of their groups here, I'll select the first picture, hold down shift and select the last one. With all of these layers selected, I'm going to group them with command or control G. With all of those layers in a group, we can apply a layer effect to the entire group. I want to add an outline to all of them. I'll click on outline and check it on. Now as I raise the radius, you can see that all of our pictures are being affected and they all have the exact same thickness of this outline and they're all the same color. This is a very quick easy way to add an effect to multiple layers. I want this to look a little bit softer than the main sign. I'm going to change the color to white. I'll drag this little circle here down to white. I think I want to make this a little bit thinner because I don't really like how it's looking right now. I'll just reduce this radius a little bit. With that, I think we've created a very pretty flyer. It looks super cute. Great work on this project, and we're done with the entire Tools chapter. In the next chapter, we're going to learn about some special personas that Affinity Photo has to offer. 38. Personas for Beginners: You've probably noticed by now, but affinity is a big program, a really big program. In fact, there are so many tools in affinity, that affinity has hidden some of the tools so that you don't get overwhelmed by having too many tools on your screen at a time. Affinity organizes these extra tools into different work spaces called personas. Each persona has a unique set of tools and panels that you can use within that workspace. To enter a persona, all you need to do is click on its persona icon at the top left. As an example, I'll click on the Liquefy persona icon, and you can see that our workspace instantly changes. Now we have a brand new set of tools and panels to work with. So far in the course, we've only worked in the photo persona, which is where you'll do your work 99% of the time. However, we also have the liquefy persona, develop persona, tone mapping persona, and the port persona. I really like how affinity uses these different work spaces because a lot of these tools are useful some of the time, but not all of the time. Having them neatly tucked away is really nice for organization, but you can easily access them whenever you need to. Now that you know what personas are, throughout this chapter, let's learn about why you would use each one. Let's get started. 39. Liquify Persona: In this video, we'll learn about the liquefy persona. Before we jump into the liquefy persona, we need to do one thing in the photo persona to prepare. With our photo opened up in the photo persona, I'm going to duplicate our image layer. I'll press command or control J to do that. The reason I always duplicate my layer is so that I'm not destructively editing my original photo. That way, once I'm done liquefying, I can come back in here and turn this on and off to see the before and after. With that duplicated, I'll come up here and click on the Liquefy persona. As you can see, the liquefy persona is pretty similar to the photo persona. We have tools over here on the left, we have a context toolbar up here and panels on the right. The very first thing that I always do in the liquefy persona is I turn off the show mesh option. I find this grid overlaid on our image a bit distracting, so I'll just check that off. So there are a lot of tools in this persona, but there are just three tools that you'll use 99% of the time. The first tool is the push forward tool, which is open by default. This tool lets you push pixels around. If you have a larger brush, you'll push more of the pixels at once, creating a more dramatic effect. I'll just do that with command or control z. With a smaller brush, you're able to do more detailed work. I'll just show you how I typically use this tool. Generally, I use this tool to smooth out bumps in clothing, just to make things a little bit more even. After I've smoothed all the little bumps, I'll use a larger brush to reshape the whole thing. I think I'll bump this shoulder out just a little bit and push that out a little bit. I'll do this on the other side as well. Pushing and pulling to smooth out all of the little bumps and wrinkles we have here. You don't want to take this too far or you'll start to get ripples like this. I'll just undo until that disappears. There we go. You can also use this for the hair, which is pretty useful. If you want a bit more volume in the hair, you can click and drag out. Just to bump that out a little bit. As you go, you can use the reconstruct mesh slider to see the before and after. If you click it in this direction, you'll see what the image looked like before, and here's the after. You can continue to slide it this way to make your effects even more dramatic, but I generally don't do this. You start to get strange areas like this. I'll just bring that back to 100%. There's a couple more tools that you might use. The first one is the pinch tool, which makes things appear larger. You can find the pinch tool right here. All you need to do to make things appear larger is to click and hold on an area. I'll make my brush a little bit larger and I'll click and hold to make this yarn appear larger. You can see that before and after of that, how the yarn just looks like it's a bit more voluminous and full. You can also do this with other areas of the photo, small areas like the eyes. Just click and hold to enlarge an area. I'm going to do this with command or control Z. The last tool that I want to show you is the punch tool, which makes things appear smaller. You can click and hold on the tops of these kitty needles to shrink them down. Since she has snow in her hair, this is fun. With a smaller brush, you can click and hold and it appears like the snow starts to melt, which is fun. Once you like how your image looks, you can press apply, and now you're back in the photo persona. Because we made a duplicate copy, I'll check this off to see the before, and here's the after with our edits. Now that we're back in the photo persona, you can continue to edit this photo with adjustment layers. This is what my picture looks like now, and I really didn't make any extreme changes, even though I could have. That's because I have pretty strong feelings about altering someone's natural appearance in a photo, especially without their consent. Please be careful as you use this persona. You don't want to make too many changes to people that severely alter how they look. Personally, I only use this persona for the types of things that you saw me do here, evening out the bumps on the edges of the clothing or making objects in the photo larger or smaller, or even giving the hair more volume. My rule of thumb is that if you could have changed it in a few seconds before taking the picture, like smoothing out the jacket or adjusting the hair, then that's totally fine to change. But making her eyes bigger is not actually possible, so I would definitely avoid doing that. Now you know the basics of the liquefy persona. In the next video, we'll take a look at using the export persona. 40. Export Persona: Let's learn about the export persona. Now that we've learned about the liquefy persona, I'm going to jump over here to the last persona, the export persona, because it's a little easier than the middle two personas. Go ahead and open that up. The export persona gives us advanced exporting options. However, as a beginner, you'll probably never need to use the export persona, honestly, I rarely use it. But I'll still show you my two favorite parts of the export persona in case these two options are useful to your workflow. Over here, we have the slices panel. This is where we can choose parts or slices of our photo that we'd like to export. By default, there's already one slice made, which is a slice of our entire photo. But let's say that you want to export a specific part of your photo and not the whole thing. For that, you can use the slice tool, which you already have open by default. All you need to do is click and drag to make a slice. Once you release your mouse, you can see that a slice has been created. You can make another slice by clicking and dragging, and you can continue to do this making as many slices as you'd like. You can also adjust your slices by selecting it in the slices panel, and then adjusting these nodes on the side, similar to using the move tool. Once you have your slices made, you can also rename them. You can rename a layer by double clicking on it. I'll rename this first one, curving umbrellas. And I'll rename this one, single umbrella. Then you can export your slices. I'll go ahead and put it in this exports folder here. And now they've been exported. Now you can see that they've been exported into that exports folder. That was cool and all, but here is my favorite part of the export persona. Let's say that you edited this photo and then need to export all your slices again. Well, affinity can actually do this for you automatically. All you need to do is turn on continuous. I'll just go back into the photo persona to show you this. I'll apply a black and white adjustment. Now our photo is in black and white, and without doing anything, coming back to our folder, you can see that all of our images have automatically changed to black and white. This can save you time by constantly keeping your exported file up to date every time you make a change. But normally, I just export my photo again. That's just simpler for me. However, now you know that this is possible to do if you're interested in that. So that was a very brief video because I don't use this persona very much, but I just wanted to give you that little overview. In the next video, we're going to learn all about the tone mapping persona. Okay. 41. Tone Mapping Persona: In this video, we'll learn about the tone mapping persona. This persona has one main purpose which is to edit HDR photos. HDR means high dynamic range. HDR allows us to capture detail in bright highlights and dark shadows by combining multiple images together, while taking the best bright and dark spots from each image. In this sunset photo, we have a very bright sky and dark foreground. Capturing detail in the shadows and highlights can be tricky for cameras, but HDR can save the day. The first step to making HDR images is to take about three to five photos of your subject, giving each photo a different exposure. I took three photos of the sunset on my phone while setting the exposure for different areas in the scene each time by tapping on different parts of the scene while taking the photos. Once you have all your images on your computer, you can turn them into an HDR photo in affinity. To do that, come to the top of the screen to file, then press new HDR Merge. I like to keep these automatic settings turned on. Here we have automatically a line images, which is good in case I might have moved a little in between each photo, and also this option here that says perspective also can help to make the photos line up better. Once you have this dialog box open, all you need to do is click on Ad. Then you can navigate to where you have all of your photos saved. In this case, we have a tone mapping persona folder. Then we can go ahead and select all of them by clicking and dragging, or you can hold down shift on your keyboard to select them all. Then go ahead and press open. Once all of those photos have been added, you can go ahead and press on. This process takes a little bit of time as Affinity tries to figure out how to line up these photos and how to take the best bright spots and dark spots from each photo to create a beautiful HDR image. Now all of my photos are combined, and we're automatically taken into the tone mapping persona. We won't spend too long here because I like to do my adjustments in the photo persona where we can have all of our different adjustment layers. But the only slider you might want to use in this section is the local contrast slider. The local contrast slider can give that classic HDR look by bumping up the contrast. You can see here's what it looks like when you really bring it up. My one tip is to be very careful when using this slider. A little local contrast can be nice for your photo, but it can quickly become a little bit cringe. I'm just going to bring that down. Maybe I'll just use 2%. Once you've done that, you can press apply and you'll be brought right back into the photo persona. Now we can continue editing our HDR image, however we'd like. First, I think I want to darken the left side of the field over here and lighten up the right side of the field just to even these two things out. First, I'll come to my adjustment and apply a levels adjustment. Let's start by darkening that side of the field to darken, I'll first start with my game a slider by bringing it over to the right side. We can also add a bit of contrast here by bringing the black level over I think I'll bring the white level over as well. Then I'll invert this adjustment with command or control. Now we have a black mask applied to this adjustment. I'll go ahead and grab my paintbrush tool and I'll make sure that I'm painting in white paint. I'll bring down the hardness all the way. I'll go ahead and paint with a pretty low flow here so that I can gradually add this effect. Then I'll go ahead and increase the size of my paint brush using the bracket keys, and then I can begin painting. I'll just start by clicking and dragging over this area to gradually add a bit of darkness here. I think I'll also darken this area right here just so that it's not drawing so much attention. Now we can see the before and after of that darkening. Next, I'm going to lighten this area of the field. I'll go ahead and apply one more levels adjustment. This time, I'll go ahead and lighten the Gamma slider will move over to the left side. Just so that I can see the area I'm affecting, I'll go ahead and move my document over like this. We can see I've just brightened up that area. I think I'll go ahead and add a bit more contrast to by bringing the black level over, just not too far there. I'll bring the white level over as well. Then I'll press command or control to invert this adjustment. Then I can gradually paint in white over the area that I want to brighten up. I'll go ahead and select both of these layers so that you can see the before and after of just evening out the lighting on the field. Last, I think I just want to add a bit more contrast overall in the foreground. I'll go ahead and add one more levels adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and bring the black level over and the white level over Then I'll press command or control to invert this. I'll go ahead and increase the flow a bit. Then I will paint over the field. Now you can see the final before and after of our beautiful HDR image. I think this looks so much better than any of the three images that we started with. Now that we understand this persona, let's prepare to learn about the last persona in the next video. 42. What are RAW Photos?: In this video, we'll learn about raw photos. The last persona that we'll learn about is the developed persona, which allows us to edit raw photos. But what are raw photos? The photos you normally take on your phone have had a lot of edits done to them without you even knowing it. Raw photos are images that have not had these edits done to them already giving you much more flexibility in how you edit the image. Raw images are also larger and have more information stored in them, allowing you to bring back more detail from the shadows and highlights of your image. This is different from a JPEG, which will compress all of the information in your photo. With a JPEG, this makes the file size much smaller, but also makes it so you can't recover as much detail from the shadows and highlights. Just look at this difference. We can recover much more detail from the shadows in this example. Smartphones and cameras can both take raw photos. If you want to take a raw photo, your device has these settings available. Just Google how to take raw photos on whichever device you have. For taking your own raw photos, here's a tip. It's easier to make photos brighter to recover detail in shadows than it is to recover blown out highlights. Keep that in mind when shooting your photos. In other words, it's better if your photos are too dark rather than too bright because it's easier to make photos brighter than it is to make them darker. I thought it was important to give you a bit of background on raw photos before jumping into the developed persona. Now that you know about raw photos, let's learn about the developed persona in the next video. 43. Develop Persona for Beginners: Time to learn about the developed persona. To get into the developed persona, we need to open a raw photo. Go ahead and go to the top of the screen to file, then press open. Then I'll go ahead and click on our developed persona exercise file, and I'll go ahead and open that. Once that's opened, you'll be taken directly into the developed persona. A raw photos open right here in the developed persona. When I'm in the develop persona, the first place I go is over here to this basic tab. This panel is full of powerful sliders that allow you to really customize the lighting and color of your image. It's divided into sections. We'll go over each of these as we edit the image. First, we have the exposure sliders, which focus on light. Now, this first exposure slider is very extreme. As you raise it up, the photo gets a lot brighter and as you bring it down, the photo gets a lot darker. And you can see as I move this slider that the histogram up here changes. I'll go ahead and bring this up just a little bit so that I don't overdo it and push our highlights over the edge. One of these other brightening sliders is the brightness slider, which is much easier to use because it brightens much more gradually. That's because the exposure slider makes every part of the image brighter. Well the brightness slider just brightens the mid tones of your image. It's not going to harm the highlights as much. You can see as I bring this up. It's just a much more gradual way to brighten or darken. I'll go ahead and raise that all the way. And last, I skipped over this one, we have the Black point, which adds just a bit more blackness to the image, similar to the black level slider and the levels adjustment. This image already has quite a bit of black, so I'll just leave that slider alone. If you ever want to see a before and after of a section, all you need to do is click on this checkmark right here and you can see what it looked like before, and here's the after. Next, we have the enhanced sliders, which affects contrast and color. First, we have contrast, which adds more of a difference between the bright and dark parts of the image. You can see this as I pull this up. The dark parts of the photo get darker while the bright parts of the photo get even brighter and you can also reduce the contrast by pulling it the other way. I think every image looks good with a little bit of extra contrast. I'll go ahead and race the slider just a little bit. Next, we have clarity, which I generally don't like to use with people because the clarity slider adds a lot of edge contrast, which means that every edge gets a lot sharper. For people, this can emphasize any lines, wrinkles, or bumps on the face, and it just doesn't look very good. To rest a slider, you can double click on the node, and it will return to its default state. Next, we have two color sliders, saturation and vibrance. Saturation will make all of our colors more intense. As I pull this up, you can see that. I think I'll just raise this a little bit. The vibrant slider will make the more muted colors more saturated. As I bring this up, you can see that's much more subtle. I'll just go ahead and bring that up a bit. So far, this image looks a lot better, but we can do even more to improve the photo. I'll go ahead and check on the white balance section. This section is just like the white balance adjustment, and it lets you adjust the temperature and tint of your images. I don't think that this image needs any of these adjustments. I'll go ahead and check that off. Now this next section is very important. This is the shadows and highlights section. Here we can adjust the shadows and highlights individually, and it can really help you customize the lighting. First, let's take a look at the shadows. In this image, our shadows are very dark. But if I increase the shadow slider, you can see that a lot of the detail in her coat is revealed again. I think I'll just bring this there. I think this is an incredible difference. This is the power of raw images. You can bring back so much detail. Now for the highlight slider, generally, I like to bring this down to make the highlights a little less bright. This will bring back a lot of their detail. As I bring this up and down, you can see the main areas that are changing are her white shirt and the sky. To add detail back to her white shirt, I'll go ahead and bring this down quite a bit. After I've adjusted the shadows and highlight sliders, I'd like to go back and adjust everything up here in the exposure section one last time to make sure that I like how bright everything is. I think I can go ahead and brighten this exposure slider even more. Now that our highlights are a bit darker. With all of that basic panel done, you can go ahead and develop the photo. Then we can continue to work in the photo persona and add any other adjustments that we'd like. My goal in the develop persona is to get my raw photo looking about 90% good. Then I'll do any fine tuning that I'd like in the photo persona. My primary concern in the develop persona is to make sure that all of the highlights and shadow areas have as much detail as I can get back. Now that we're back here, let's add a few adjustments to enhance the image. First off, let's fix up the lighting even more with a levels adjustment. I'll start by increasing the contrast. You can see in our histogram here that I can bring the shadows over quite a bit more to add blackness back into the image. But because we've brightened the shadow area so much, this isn't making her coat too dark like it was before. I'll also bring the white level slider over. Now that our subject is nice and bright, Let's darken the edges of the photo to draw the eye in. I'll add another levels adjustment, and then I'll go ahead and darken this. I'll bring Gamma over to the right. Then I'll go ahead and bring the output white level down to add some extra darkness. Now, I'll just invert this levels adjustment with command or control. Then I can grab my paint brush and I can paint in white paint to reveal this adjustment on the edges of our photo. Here's the before and after of adding in those dark edges. If I select both of these layers by holding down shift, you can see the complete before and after of the lighting. I think now that the lighting looks good, we can go ahead and fix up the colors. The first thing I'm noticing is that her lips are very saturated. Let's start by desaturating the lips with an HSL adjustment. I'll go into the red channel since her lips are red, and then I'll decrease the saturation quite a bit. I just don't want them to look like they're glowing. Then I'll invert this HSL adjustment with command or control. I can go ahead and paint with a much smaller brush over the lips to reveal this decreased saturation. Here's the before and after of that. With that fix, now we can adjust the rest of the picture. I want to adjust the skin and the grass separately. Let's go ahead and start by adding an HSL adjustment. Then let's adjust the skin a little bit. First, in the red channel, I'll go ahead and adjust the hue slider to see if this makes the skin look better. If I nudge it over here, the skin starts to turn a bit more green. If I bring it over here, the skin turns more of a magenta red color. I don't want to alter this too much, but I do think a bit more redness looks nice for this picture. Then I can increase the saturation a little or decrease it depending on what looks better. I actually think I'll leave this alone. Now that the reds have been adjusted, I'll go into the yellow channel as well, since there tends to be yellow in skin. I can adjust the hue slider again. You can see that this doesn't affect the skin too much. Just a few areas on the skin are being affected. I'll double click on this. I think I'll go ahead and leave the yellow channel alone for this. To make sure that the skin adjustment is only being applied to the skin. I'm going to make sure to invert this adjustment with command or control. Then I can paint in white over the skin. As I was painting, I did notice we have a bit of green going on here. I think I'll go ahead and click on the HSL adjustment and see if the yellow channel is what's being affected there and it is. I'll go ahead and increase the saturation and then bump the hue shift slider over a little bit to the right side to add more redness there. I think we'll keep the saturation raised as well. I think that just looks better, removing a bit of that green that's reflecting from the grass. And last, let's do the grass. Personally, in this image, I find the grass to be a bit too bright. I think it's taking away from our subject. I'm going to add another HSL adjustment. This time, we'll go ahead and start in the yellow channel, since the grass has quite a bit of yellow in it. I'd actually like to reduce this yellow. I'll start with the hue slider and bring it over to the left just to add a bit more blue to it. Then I'll decrease the saturation quite a bit. I think I'll also decrease the luminosity just to darken the area. To make sure that only the grass is being affected, I'm going to close out of this. Then with my paint brush, I'm going to paint in black paint to remove this effect from our model here. I'm mainly just painting over the skin to make sure that no blue has been added there. With that, we can select all of our layers and see the complete before and after of all of the edits that we did in the photo persona. This looks so good from where we started. This is just incredible. You wouldn't be able to make this huge of a difference on a JPEG. Raw images just hold so much information. We were able to recover so much from the shadows and highlights, and it just turned out so good. In the next video, I want to show you a few extra features of the developed persona that could help you in specific situations. 44. Develop Persona for Intermediate Users: Let's go over a few more features of the developed persona. In the last couple of videos, we talked about how the developed persona is perfect for raw images. My first tip for you is that you actually can use JPEG images in the developed persona and use all of those sliders on a JPEG. With this image open, this JPEG image, I'm going to come up to the top of the screen and click on the developed persona to bring it into the developed persona. Now, you might be thinking, why would I want to bring a JPEG into the developed persona. Well, there are a few features within the developed persona that can be pretty helpful for certain issues that your image might have. This image is actually a perfect example of one of those issues. Because this is a selfie image. A lot of times your lens can get distorted and whatever's very closest to the camera will appear quite large. In this case, her nose and chin are angled at the camera in a way that makes them look larger than they would naturally be. You can actually fix this in the developed persona. Normally, we stick to the basic panel. But to fix this lens distortion issue, let's go into the lens panel. When you bring a photo into affinity, lens correction is automatically applied. But sometimes, as you can see in this picture, this isn't enough. We can use some of these manual controls here to try to fix these issues. As I click and drag on these sliders, we can see the difference that these lens corrections can make. As I increase this, her head gets even larger, but as I decrease it, it starts to appear a little bit more natural because we're increasing the distance between our subject and the lens. I think this looks pretty good. I think I might pull it back just a little bit more. I'll go ahead and use some of these other sliders to see if this will help as well. With the horizontal slider. We can shift the camera from one side to the other, and you can see how shifting it can affect how these arms look here. If I pull it over here, her arm looks a bit smaller on that side, but now this one looks larger. I don't think that looks right for this picture. I'll go ahead and double click on that node to reset it. You can also do this vertically, having her look down at the camera or up at the camera, which could be a little bit helpful in this image. If I have her look up at the camera, this will shrink down the size of the lower part of her face a little bit more. I think I'll just reduce that a little bit, but I do think that helped. You can also affect the rotation. I'll just undo that. Last, you can affect the scale, which is basically cropping your image in. I want to get rid of these transparent edges. I think I'll go ahead and scale that until those edges disappear. Now I have one last tip for you, and that is how to see the before and after of all of your edits. We've already seen that you can check and uncheck these little panels to see the before and after. In the basic panel, you can do this for each one of these little sections. However, that doesn't really help if you want to see the complete before and after. To do this, you can come to the top of the screen and you can select these different view options. You can use this one to see a split view. You can use this slider to see the before and after. You can also do a side by side view so that you can see your entire image, and you can see the difference that everything you've done has made. I use these options quite a bit in the develop persona to make sure that I didn't overdo any of my edits. To be honest, I think that's about all I want to show you in the developed persona. Even though there are quite a few different tools and panels in this persona. Most of these tools you won't actually use because the photo persona has the exact same tool, and working in the photo persona gives you layers which are super valuable. With that, let's do a practice project with the developed persona in the next video. 45. Develop Persona Practice: Let's finish off this chapter with a practice project. You won't use most of the personas very often. But if you do take raw photos, you'll use the developed persona quite a bit. In this last video of the chapter, let's practice using the developed persona and the photo persona to take a raw photo from fresh off the camera all the way to exporting. To start, let's go ahead and open our image. I'll go to the top of the screen to file, then open. Then I'll go ahead and select our last image here and I'll press open. Because this is a raw image, it will open automatically in the developed persona. Now, as you can see, we have quite a few issues with this image. We have a very bright area right here, and our main subject is really in the shadows. This is going to be quite tricky to fix, but that's why I chose it as our final project to show you what's possible in the developed persona. To start, let's come over here to the exposure area. Let's try to brighten up our subject. I'll bring the exposure up just a little bit, but you can already see that some of these highlights are getting very bright. I want to be careful with that. This picture also seems a little bit gray to me. I'm going to add a bit of black by pulling over the black point. Last, I'll bring the brightness all the way up. Now we can start to see our subject before she was so dark and you really couldn't even see any of the detail on her clothing. But now she's bright enough that we can start to focus on our subject and improve the colors, which brings us to our next section. Let's start by adding a bit more contrast. I'll just pull this up a bit. Again, I don't like using clarity with people, so I'll move past that one. Let's add a bit of saturation. Now you can see as I raise this that our subject is slightly getting brightened up, but there are some areas in the background that are really becoming bright. I think I'm just going to pull this over a bit and we'll do a bit more color work in the photo persona after. I'll also bring up the vibrant a little bit. I think this looks pretty good. Moving right along. I don't think we need to worry about the white balance this time. Let's just jump straight into the shadows and highlights. Now, this is where we can really make a difference as we target these separate areas. As I bring down the shadows, you can see that this really darkens things and as I bring them up, we can really start to see detail in her clothing here. I do think I want to raise it, but maybe not quite so much. Now for the highlights, we have this area here that's pretty blown out. I don't want this to be such a distraction. I'm going to pull down our highlights. As I pull this down, you can start to see some details come back in this building and the street. That's so interesting that raw photos have so much information like that. I'll go ahead and drag it all the way down. And now we can go ahead and see our before and after. This is such a big difference. Before it was so dark, you could hardly see our subject, and now you can see her face very clearly. But I think there's more work I'd like to do. Let's go ahead and develop this. Then in the photo persona, we can do a bit more specific work. With our photo developed, let's layer on some adjustments to improve the lighting first and then we'll go ahead and take care of some of the colors. Starting with the lighting, I'll go ahead and add a levels adjustment. I think I want to start by brightening up the photo a bit more. I'll pull the gamma slider over to the left to do this. The more I brighten it, the more washed out our subject becomes. Let's go ahead and add back in some contrast by moving the black level over. I think we can actually pull this over quite a bit. Then let's go ahead and pull over the white level just a little bit. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. I think I want to add even more of a contrast. Let's go ahead and do this one more time. I'll layer on one more levels adjustment. This time, I'll go ahead and brighten it again, and then I'll pull over the black level. Now I've added a second levels adjustment and selecting both of those, you can see that before and after. I love the extra contrast in detail we have here. She was very gray out before and now you can start to see a lot more of sharpness in the details. Now that the overall levels looks really good, I want to brighten up our subjects face a bit more. To do this, let's go ahead and add one more levels adjustment, and we're going to paint this right on her face. I want to brighten up her face, so I'll start by pulling the gamma slider over to the left and then so that we don't lose too much contrast, I'm going to pull the black level over. You can see the more I pull this over, the more we can see the lines of her eyebrows and her lips. That looks pretty good. With that done, I'll go ahead and invert this layer with command or control. Now that we have a black mask applied, this levels adjustment is not showing anywhere. I can go ahead and grab my paint brush and paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal this brightness on our subject's face. I'm just going to pull up our flow all the way so that we can really see where we're painting. Now you can see what this looked like before, and here's the after. This is quite subtle and I think I overpainted a little. I'll press x on my keyboard to switch to Black I'll just remove this from the areas I painted too much. This brightening helps, but I think I want to add a bit more contrast on her face. Let's add another levels adjustment. I'm trying to be careful to not overdo it by layering on multiple levels adjustments, we're really able to customize them and delete them if they become too much. This is just a safer way to work so that you don't overdo things. For this one, I'm trying to add contrast. I think I'm actually just going to pull over the black level. Then I'll close out of this and invert this with command or control. Now I'm going to paint in white paint to add contrast to the face. Now, I don't want to bring this everywhere or her face will become quite dark. I'm actually just going to use a small brush and I'm going to paint it over her eyebrows. Her ses of her eyes. Maybe over her lips a little bit, just to emphasize those areas. I want her facial features to look a little bit more defined. Now, this looks very intense to me. I think I'm going to decrease the opacity here. But you can see that by doing that, we've really helped to define her facial features better. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we've done a lot of work on her face, let's zoom back out and take care of the rest of the photo. I want to draw attention to our subject. Right now, she's very dark and the background is very light. I think I want to reverse that a little bit and darken the edges to create a vignette effect. I'm going to go ahead and add another levels adjustment first. We'll go ahead and darken the edges. I'll pull the gamma slider over to the right side to darken. Then I'll bring the output white level over as well. Now you can see how dark all of these areas became. I'll go ahead and invert this with command or control. Now that we have a black mask here, I'll use my paint brush to paint in white paint. I'll go ahead and lower the flow so that I can softly paint just where I want this. Okay. I just darkened all of our edges. Here's what that looks like. Now that we darkened all those edges, I really want to brighten up our subject more to help her to stand out even more. I'll go ahead and add one more levels adjustment. This time we're brightening, so I'll bring the gamma slider over to the left side so that we don't wash her out, I'll bring the black level over a little bit. Now we can paint this on the subject. I'll press command or control again to invert this layer. Now with a low flow, I'm going to paint in white over our subject. I think all of these adjustments have made this look so much better. I want to show you the before and after of our lighting. I'll select all of these layers and now you can see what it looked like before. Here's the after. We can really see our subject better now. She's clearly the focus of this image. I think this just looks so nice. Now it's time to move on to the colors. There's not a ton that I want to change in the colors, but I do think that we could add a little bit more color to her face. I'm going to select the top layer. Then I'll apply an HSL adjustment. Then in the red channel, I'm just going to increase the saturation. You can see how this already has given her face a bit more color. To make her skin appear a little less green, I'm going to pull the huge shift slider over just a little bit. Okay. You can see that before her skin just looked a little bit more pale and washed out. Now we've added a bit more blood flow and color to her face. In the yellow channel, I'll go ahead and increase this as well. Now the yellows are a bit more saturated. I think her skin looks a lot better like this. Here's the before and after of her face there. I think I'll just leave it on the whole image. Now I'm going to go back and fix these trees. They look extremely yellow and bright and I don't want them to stand out quite this much. I'm going to go in and apply another HSL adjustment. And we're already in the yellow channel. I'll go ahead and adjust this yellow color back here, we're going to be painting this on the trees. Don't worry too much if her skin changes here. I'm going to bring the hue over more toward green. Then I'm going to desaturate the trees and darken them. You can tell I like to do this a lot. I've done this in quite a few pictures now, but I do think that we need to emphasize our subject more and just decrease how neon yellow that looked. With that done, I'm going to invert this layer with command or control. Then I can paint this over the green areas behind our subject. On our black mask, I'll paint in white paint, and you can see how this just desaturates those areas and brings more attention to our subject. This area still looks very bright to me compared to the other areas of green. I think I'm actually going to switch my color to black and remove this effect from these trees to even out that coloring. I'm really proud of this project. I want to show you the complete before and after. Now we're ready to export. I'll come to the top of the screen and click on file, and then I'll go down to where it says port. Here we are in the export box. You can see that this would be 7 megabytes if I exported it like this. But remember that if you ever want to reduce the file size, you can always reduce the quality just to around 95% and that really lowers down at the file size. Then we can go ahead and export Great work on this project. Now you know how to take a raw image and completely transform it into a finished project. You know all about all of the personas that we've covered in this chapter. Now that you know all that. In the next chapter, we're going to learn how to clean up and retouch photos. 46. Retouching for Beginners: This chapter, we're going to learn some great techniques for retouching photos. We'll do a little bit more work with lighting and colors, but we'll also learn how to remove unwanted blemishes or objects from your photo. We're going to have so much fun as we bring out your photos natural beauty. Let's get started. 47. Shaping Light: In this video, we'll talk about shaping light. Lighting is such a powerful way to shape the photo. It can draw the eye into an area with lightening and darkening the surrounding area can also help to achieve this. Let's start there with this photo. First, we'll lighten up our subject. Right now, she's really blending into her surroundings. Let's go ahead and add a levels adjustment and we'll brighten her up. Now, whenever I need to carefully paint on an adjustment, I like to make the adjustment a little more extreme than I would normally so that I can more easily see where I'm painting, and then I'll go back and make it less extreme after I'm done painting. Let's start with a gamma slider. Since I want to brighten her up, I'm going to make this very extreme and pull it over quite a bit to the left. Then I'm going to invert this with command or control. Now that we have our black mask here. I'm just going to grab our paintbrush tool and I'm going to make sure that I'm painting in white paint on our subject. I'm also going to increase the flow to 100%. Then I'll begin to carefully paint around our subject. Remember that if you ever paint too much, you can press X on your keyboard to switch your color to black, and then you can paint away whatever you over painted. A reminder, my strategy for this is to paint around all of the edges of our subject and make it look really good. Then I'll just fill in the center area. Now, this painting is a little bit tricky with the loom. Just paint around it the best you can, don't worry about making it perfect. We're just trying to focus on making our subject a little bit brighter. Right now it looks very extreme and obvious. But if you miss a spot, it's actually okay. We're not going to brighten her so much that it really matters that much. Just try to do your best as you're painting around, not to over paint around the outside edges. But if you paint on the loom a bit, I think that's okay. I've now painted over everything. We can go ahead and check in here. Here's the before and after of my painting. I didn't worry about all the flyaway hairs. I think that that's okay if we don't brighten every single little hair. But the main part of our subject looks really good and bright. I'm just going to click right here on our levels adjustment, and now we can do the real version of this. I still want her brighter, but I'm going to pull the game a back quite a bit because that was a bit too bright, and I think that looks pretty good. Then I'll go ahead and bring the black level over and the white level. Now you can see the before and after of that. Now that our subject is brighter, let's darken everything else. I'm going to come down here and add one more levels adjustment. This time, because I want to make things darker, I'm going to go ahead and move the gamma slider over to the right side. Then because I just want this to be applied everywhere that our subject isn't. I'm going to go ahead and invert this layer with command or control. Now the darkness is hidden. I'm going to grab my paint brush tool. Then I'll go ahead and paint in white paint to reveal this darkness with a larger brush and a lower flow. I'm just going to paint on the edges to darken them up. I'm going to avoid painting on this weaving here because I don't want it to look like one area is very dark and the other is very bright. I want this to still seem like it's in focus and nice and bright. Now you can see the before and after of that darkening. So far, I think this looks really nice. We've been able to brighten up our subject and darken the background. Now that we have the eye drawn more into our subject, we can use even more light layers to draw more attention to the most important parts of the face. Let's start by brightening up the face overall. I'm going to add another levels adjustment. I'll go ahead and pull the gamma slider over to the left to brighten up the face. I'll also bring the black level over because you can see the shadows are starting to get a little bit grayed out. Then because I only want this to be applied to the face, this small area, I'm going to invert this layer with command or control. Then I can paint in white paint over the face to brighten it up. I'll go ahead and paint this on the neck as well. Now that we've lightened up the face, another way to draw attention to an area is to add more contrast. We have a lot of light on the face, so we can add darkness to areas that we also want to add contrast to like the eyes. To do that, I'm going to add another levels adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and darken the gamma slider by moving it toward the right. Then I'll invert this layer with command or control. Now I can just paint it over the areas that I want to enhance because these areas are so surrounded by light, adding more darkness is just another way to add contrast. So now you can see that before and after of adding in that darkness to her facial features. To finish this off just for fun. Let's say that I want to enhance this necklace. Right now, we have a dark necklace on a dark shirt. I could go about this one of two ways. First, I could brighten up her shirt, if I want this necklace to stay dark, or I could lighten up the necklace against this dark shirt. Be I'm already seeing some beautiful highlights in shine on this shiny necklace. I think I'm going to opt for that route of brightening up the necklace. Okay I'll add another levels adjustment. Okay. Then I'll go ahead and brighten this up, and I'll come back and adjust this more later. This is just going to help me as I paint. I'll invert this by pressing command or control. I'll just use my bracket keys to shrink down my brush. I'm going to paint and white paint over the necklace to enhance it. Now, this necklace is pretty dark and in some cases, the beads are so dark, it's really hard to tell what their shapes are. Just do your best guessing. It's okay if it's not perfectly perfect in this case. Remember, you can always switch your color to black if you've painted too much. So far, I've brightened up that necklace. I'm just going to click on the levels adjustment so we can adjust this even more. I'm going to reduce the brightness that I've added. Then I'm going to increase the white level to add a lot more shine because the white level makes the white parts even brighter. This is really just enhancing the highlights of this necklace. To add a little more contrast, I'll just bring the black level over as well. Now you can see that before and after of this necklace. Now would be a great time to go back and clean up any edges that are standing out. I'm going to switch my paint to black. Then I'm just going to erase some areas that have leaked onto her skin. I love that you can always go back and adjust your adjustments and your painting at any time if you made a mistake. That was a lot of layers. I'm going to select them all by holding shift and clicking. Then we can see that before and after. I think this looks so much better now. You can really see the subject and focus on her better. Now that we've brought her into the light, you can use as many levels adjustments as you want to shape the perfect lighting for your photo. Even though we've already used some of these techniques in previous videos, I think it's good to keep all of these powerful techniques in mind. In the next video, we're going to learn more about bringing colors to life. 48. Bringing Colors to Life: Let's bring some colors to life. We've already looked at colors earlier, but coloring is very important. We'll review and expand on what we've learned in this video. Let's start off by adjusting the overall colors in this photo. I'm noticing right away that the colors are quite dull in this photo. I think livening them up could really help to enhance the beauty of this natural photo. Starting right here, let's go ahead and add an HSL adjustment. I'll just move our picture over so that we can see the whole thing. Starting in the main color channel, I'll go ahead and increase the saturation. The more I increase this, the more I can see what colors are already quite saturated. For example, as I drag this up, one of the first things that starts to glow are these green trees. Then comes the road and this mountain back here. I think I'll just raise this a little bit just to boost the colors. Next, let's go into the red channel and see what's being affected here. The red channel actually affects a lot of this picture, mainly the road and these red rocky cliffs over here. Because this is such a large part of this photo. I think I actually want to affect these separately on a new HSL adjustment. I'm just going to reset this back to zero, and we'll come back to that. Next, let's go into the yellows. As usual, these green trees are being affected. Now, we have a couple of options here. We could make them a little bit more blue green like we usually do. Or we could blend them into the rocks, which for this photo actually looks pretty cool. I think I'll just pull it over a little bit toward red, and I think I'll keep the saturation up. Next, let's go into the green channel. I'm not really seeing much there. I'll go ahead and reset that in the site and channel. We have her skirt being affected here. We also have this area over here being affected. But let's go ahead and focus on the skirt since this is our main subject. I do think that I want to increase the saturation here. The more I increase the saturation, the more you can start to see the little floral pattern here, which I think looks pretty nice. We can also shift this hue slider to change the color of the skirt if we want it to be a little more green or a little bit more purple blue. But I think I like it how it is, so I'll just leave it there. Next, in the blue channel, as I pull this up, you can see we have quite a bit of blue fringing going on. I think I'll actually decrease the saturation on this so that this doesn't stand out so much. In Magenta, we're mainly affecting that mountain back there. We can shift the hue and see if that makes a difference, and it does make a little bit of a difference. I think I'll pull it over more toward the red side and just keep the saturation about where it is. Let's see before and after of our work so far. I really like how everything looks except for this area right here. When I increase the saturation of that cyan, it's making that area stand out in a bad way. I think I'm actually going to grab my paint brush. Then I'm going to paint in black with a low flow over that area to start to remove that. I think those are supposed to be green trees back there, but now they look a little bit strange because of all of that that's been added back there. Maybe I'll increase the flow a little bit more as I paint. Just to remove that. Let's see how that looks. Here's the before and after. I do think that looks better. Now that we've done that, I think I want to help the rocks to stand out even more and to become more vibrant and red. Let's add another HSL adjustment. Going into the red channel here. Let's go ahead and increase the saturation. I really like how these rocks are looking as I increase the saturation. Maybe I'll change the hue a little bit. If I shift it to the right, they turn more purple. I don't think that looks right. But as I shift it over to the left, they start to turn more of a yellow orange color, which I think looks pretty nice. I really like how those mountains are looking. But I think the road looks quite strange. Roads like this are usually quite gray and not very colorful like this. I'm going to go ahead and mask this off of the road. To do that, I'll make sure my paint brush is still selected. Then with black paint, I can remove this from the road. While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and remove this effect from our model here. Again, with low flow, I'm just going to softly paint over this orange dirt over here to reduce its redness. All right. Now we can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after. I think those mountains just look really beautiful now. I'm a little bit concerned about this stripe here. It looks like it's being surrounded by blue and that might have come from this first HSL adjustment. I'll turn that off to see that, yes, it does look like it's glowing a little bit. I'm going to select our first HSL adjustment and with black paint, I'm just going to paint over the stripe. I think this might just be part of the road, and there's nothing we can really do about that right now, that strange, darker strip, I'll just leave that alone. But here's what we have so far, and the colors are really starting to pop. Next, I think I want to work on the road a little bit more. It still has a bit of a purply red tint. I'm going to add another HSL adjustment. This time, in the main color channel, I'm just going to desaturate these colors. Now, I don't want everything to be desaturated, only this small area of the road. I'm going to invert this HSL adjustment by pressing command or control. Now that we have a black mask and this HSL adjustment is not being applied to anything. I can paint in white to reveal it just on the road. Be careful not to paint on your model here to avoid doing that. I use the bracket keys on my keyboard to make my brush a bit smaller as I paint around her. Remember that if you ever paint too much, just press X on your keyboard to switch your color. Now that I've decreased that saturation, I think this road looks a lot better, but the yellow line in the middle now looks like it's black and white. To bring that back, I'm going to use black paint to cover that up. I'll just use a very small brush, and I'll paint a little bit here to bring back that yellow color. To finish this off, let's focus back to our subject here. I want to increase her saturation just to help her to pop a little bit more. Let's add one more HSL adjustment, and I'm just going to increase the saturation here to give her more color. Then I'll go ahead and invert this with command or control eye. Now I can paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal that saturation. I'm mainly going to paint this on the girl's skin and make sure not to forget her legs. Now we've painted that on the girl, and I think she looks a little bit sunburned. Let's go ahead and reduce that saturation just a bit. We can also tweak the hue if we want to. We can bring it over more toward green or red. I think I'll just bring it a little over to the right. With that, we are done. Let's go ahead and select all of these layers so that we can see that before and here's the after Using multiple HSL adjustments really allows you to fine tune all of the colors in your photo beautifully. Great work. Now we're done reviewing light and colors. In the next video, we're going to learn a powerful new tool for cleanup. 49. Clean Up: In this video, we'll learn one of the most magical things you can do in affinity photo, which is to remove unwanted things from your photo. I already have everything set up right now and I'll show you how to do this in a minute. But here's what we'll be able to do in this photo. You see this little piece of nature right here that doesn't belong. You can simply paint over it. And it's gone. Magic. If you see the before and after, you can see just how amazing this is. Let me reset my Affinity studio and then I'll show you how to do this. To set up and use this amazing tool. The first step is to add a blank pixel layer. We'll use this blank layer to paint on. Next, we'll get out the tool. This tool is called the painting brush tool, and it's actually hidden under the other healing tool right here. This is the healing brush tool. Just click on the little gray triangle to open up all of the tools, and then you can go ahead and select the painting brush tool. We have our layer, we have our tool out. Now let's go ahead and paint. And nothing happens. This is a very common mistake. I make it all the time. We actually have one more setting that we need to change whenever we get out this tool, and that's up here in the context tool bar. We need to change it from current layer to current layer and below. I really wish that current layer and below was the default since I need to change it every single time. But it's not. Don't forget this step. Now we can go ahead and paint to remove any blemishes that we see. By painting on a new pixel layer, you can turn this layer on and off at any time. This editing isn't destructive. You can always undo and remove from this layer if you've painted too much or your painting looks strange, which is very important. If we were doing this directly on this layer, then there would be no way to get that information back. In addition to that, by having a new pixel layer, you can also lower the opacity at any time to gradually bring blemishes back. Now, that might sound a little strange, but this actually comes in handy, especially if you ever want to paint over wrinkles on a face, and then bring them back a little bit to keep that natural skin texture. You've seen this magic trick. How does this magical in painting brush do this? Well, the brush takes information from the surrounding area. So wherever I'm painting, I'm telling Affinity that that area does not belong in this image. And it will take any surrounding information it has and it will fill in that area. Because it's taking surrounding information, that means it could be tricky in a few cases. For example, here we have a pile of sticks. If I want to remove one of the sticks in the center, it only has the surrounding area to sample from. It's not going to do a very good job of removing all of that and creating nice smooth sand. Instead of just diving right into the center of this pile of sticks, one way to get around this is to start from the outside edges of the pile, where we still have some nice area to sample from. Then slowly work your way inward to the center of the pile. As you're painting, you might get areas of repetition like this. If that happens, it'll look pretty obvious that some kind of editing was done to the photo. Just make sure to paint over it to remove it. If you're trying to paint over it and it's not working, I would suggest painting over the entire area. If you paint over everything that's been repeated, then affinity won't be able to sample that area anymore and it will stop with the repetition. Okay. Here's an example of that. I just painted over an area and it repeated twice. I'm going to go ahead and paint over both of those, and now it's unable to sample that and it will disappear. The in painting brush is quite magical, but it can definitely take some practice to get right. To finish this video off, I just want to give you a super important tip. In painting always be done underneath your adjustment layers. Let me show you why. Let's say I have a black and white adjustment layer, and then I do a very wrong thing and add a pixel layer on top of that to paint. Now if I begin to paint, affinity will be sampling and removing all of the blemishes. But it's using this black and white layer to sample. Right now, that looks like it's just fine and nothing's wrong with that. But let's say that later on, I decide I don't want this black and white adjustment anymore. If I turn this off, you can really see this problem because it's sampled from the black and white layer. Now we have this permanently ruined area and we have to start all over. Even if we wanted to keep the black and white adjustment, but we decided to alter some things about it. Those little areas would still be distorted. Make sure you always keep your pixel layer underneath your adjustment layers. If I have this pixel layer here and I put the black and white layer on top, then with that pixel layer underneath, I can still go through and paint. Now if I turn off that black and white layer, you can see that that was just fine. Just to explain this in one other way. When we change this to current layer and below, that means that affinity uses this pixel layer and all of the layers underneath it to sample from Because this black and white layer is on top, it's not affecting anything that we're sampling here. Just make sure to always have your pixel layer underneath any adjustments, and we'll continue to practice this throughout this course. But this is something very important that you remember so that you don't waste any time. To help myself avoid this, I will always paint before adding any adjustments. That way, all of my adjustments automatically are applied on top. This is something that I just keep in my workflow, like I said, we'll be doing this together throughout the course. This is a very exciting tool and I hope you have fun playing around with it. It can definitely take a little getting used to, but it is the easiest and quickest way to remove blemishes. It's worth learning. In the next video, we're going to learn about filters. 50. Filters for Beginners: Let's learn about filters. I'm going to reuse this exercise file for this lesson. Filters are very similar to adjustment layers, but they typically affect things other than color and light, like how adjustments do. One example of a filter effect is a blur. To show you this, I'm going to have this fire layer selected. Then I'm going to come down to our filters and apply a Gaussian blur. You can see all of the blur filters are right up here in this first section. We're going to learn even more about the Gaucian blur filter in the next video. But for now, I'm just going to bring up the radius. Now you can see that that layer that we had selected is now blurred. If we come over here to the child layers, you can see that the filter actually has its own layer that can be turned on and off. Because we had the fire layer selected, that's the layer that became the parent layer and the Gaucian blur was placed as a child layer underneath that layer. This is different from adjustments which automatically have their own separate layers on top of everything. Any of the filters will automatically be applied as a child layer to the layer that you had selected, and similarly to adjustment layers. You can also click on the Gaussian blur little icon here to reopen its dialog box at any time. Again, similar to adjustment layers. You can also paint on these layers to remove the effect. If I grab my paintbrush tool and paint in black paint, I'll just increase the flow here. You can see that I can remove from this blur, and if I paint in white paint, I can bring it back. You can see that filters are very similar to how we use adjustment layers. One difference is that filters typically use a lot more computer power than adjustment layers. For that reason, I try to apply filters near the end of my work while editing a photo. Otherwise, my computer might slow down while editing. But if you're only going to apply one filter to an image or if you have a very fast computer, this probably won't be much of an issue for you. That's the basic of filters. Now that you understand how they work and how they're applied, we'll take a look at two common filters in the next lessons. 51. Gaussian Blur: Let's learn about the Gauciu blur filter. There are times you will want to blur your photo and the Gauciu blur is the easiest way to do it. I'm going to go ahead and apply the Gauciu blur filter. Then I'm going to raise the radius all the way up. The more you raise the radius, the more blurry your image will become. I just wanted to quickly point out that for the Gusciu blur filter and for all other sliders you see in affinity. It only looks like you can raise it this much to 100 pixels, but you can actually click in this box and type in any number that you want. You can see now this is blurred by 300 pixels. That's just a quick little tip I wanted to throw in there for you. One setting that I always check on when using this filter is preserve Alpha. You can see we have this checkerboard here creating transparent edges. But if you turn on preserve Alpha, the blur will be taken all the way to the edges and you won't have any of that transparency. That's pretty much it. There's only preserve Alpha and the radius slider that you need to worry about in the gaussian blur filter. Now I want to show you a few ways that you can use this filter in more realistic edits. The first is to create a blurry vignette effect. This photo, we have our subject here, she's being surrounded by quite a few people and buildings, it might be a little tricky to focus on her. One way to add more focus to her is to add some blur around her. This is similar to how we add darkness around our subject to draw the in. To start this effect, I'm going to bring the radius up and I'll bring it to around nine pixels. Then I'll invert this gaussium blur layer. You can see that we have that selected already. I'll just press command or control to invert this. Now we have a black mask applied to our gaussian blur. We can go ahead and grab our paint brush tool, and we can go ahead and paint in white paint around our subject to reveal the blur. I'm just going to lower the flow of this so that I can gradually build up this effect. Then I'll begin to paint in the blur. With a smaller brush, I'll go ahead and paint closer to our subject. One trick I have for you to make this look more realistic is to remove this effect parallel to where she's standing. When cameras focus, they focus on a certain point of depth, right now, we're focused on our subject, and so we should also be focused on the ground that's parallel to where she's standing. With even lower flow, we'll go ahead and reduce this effect for the area a little bit behind her and a little bit in front of her. I'll also make sure to paint in black paint all over our subject so that she stays in focus. Now you can see this blur effect. Here's the before and after. Now, I think this looks pretty extreme. I'm going to click on the little icon here and the layers, and I'll just reduce the radius. But this is still created a nice effect, blurring the background details so that our subject stands out more. Another example of using this blur is to blur some sloppy in painting on a photo. Here's our other example file for this lesson. Let's start by doing some in painting. I'll add a new pixel layer. Then I'll grab the in painting brush and change it to current layer and below. Then I'm going to go ahead and remove some of the trees in the background, and I'm just going to do a very sloppy job here. You can see that didn't turn out very good. There are some trees that are halfway still there, and it just doesn't look very good. One trick you can do is you can add a gauciu blur to blur that area. I'll go ahead and add a Gauciu blur. This has been added as a child layer to that pixel layer. Now if I bring up the radius, that painted area will become extra blurred, but it looks a little strange next to all the other trees that aren't blurred. One trick you can do is you can actually take this blur and bring it above every layer, and now everything will be blurred that you have in this document. I'll just check on preserve Alpha. Then I'm going to press command or control to invert this layer and we can go ahead and paint in white paint over the area that we want to blur. Just make sure to change your brush to your paint brush. Then we can go ahead and paint in white. Now you can see the before and after. Here's the before of that sloppy painting and how blurring it now looks. This is especially helpful to do when your background is already blurry. That way you can blend things together very easily using the gaussian blur. Those were the two examples. There are a lot of ways to use a blur filter and you can really be creative with it. In the next video, we're going to learn how to sharpen a photo using filters. 52. Sharpening: Let's learn how to sharpen. Sharpening is the opposite of blurring your photo. It makes your photo pop more. A little sharpening is good, but too much can look bad. I like to add subtle sharpness to areas where we want people to look at more. I usually do this to the eyes in photos. There are a lot of filters to sharpen an image, but the one that I like to use best is the high pass filter. This filter gets great results and is easy to use. To use this filter, all you need to do is raise the radius. Once you start to see the object that you want to sharpen, your radius is raised enough. If you take it too far, the whole image will have sharpness applied, and that won't look very good because we'll have too much skin texture and noise that become sharpened. I like to just raise it just enough to start to see the eyes. In this case, I'm just going to raise it one pixel. You might be noticing that we have this gray overlay, which we definitely do not want to keep. The way to get rid of this is to change the blend mode. We haven't really talked about blend modes because they're pretty advanced. But all you need to remember with sharpening is that the blend mode that I like to use is called soft light. Soft light and sharpening both start with S. If that helps you remember, that's great. I'll just go ahead and select that. Then I'll zoom in here and we can see the difference. I'll just drop this down so that we can see our high pass filter, and now we can see that before and here's the after before. After. I feel like I'm at an eye doctor office. Can you see the difference? The difference is so subtle that you might not actually see it. If you want this sharpness to look more extreme, here's what I would do. First, take the high pass filter and bring it above your layer so that it's on top of everything. Then to make sure that the sharpness is only being applied to the eyes, I'm going to press command or control eye to invert this layer, and then with my paint brush, I'll paint in white so that it's only being applied to the eyes. I have full flow and hardness so that my effect will be fully applied. Then I'll go ahead and paint over the s of the eyes. I also like to emphasize eyelashes. I'm just going to paint over this eyelash area on top and bottom. I tried to avoid painting on the whites of the eye because that tends to emphasize any red lines or noise that's there. Now that I have the eyelashes and rises beautifully painted over, all we need to do is duplicate this high pass filter. I'll go ahead and press command or Control J three times. Now I'll go ahead and hold down shift to select all of these layers, and I'll press command or control G to group them. This is just to keep our layers organized. Now if I zoom in here, you can see the before and after. You can especially see it in the eyelash area where the dark eyelashes are popping against her lighter skin tone before, after. This also brings out some beautiful detail in the irses. It lets you see all of the colors a bit more. I think that looks pretty good. You might be wondering, why not just make the radius bigger rather than duplicating all these high pass filters? That is a great question. With this filter, the radius slider works a little bit differently than you might think. With filters like the gaussian blur filter, the more you raise the radius, the stronger the blur becomes, but that's actually not how the high pass filter works. With the high pass filter, the more you raise the radius, the more areas in the picture become sharp. It's not actually increasing the amount of sharpness, it's just sharpening more areas. To actually increase the amount of sharpness. The only way to do this is to duplicate your layers so that the effect compounds on each other and becomes more strong. If that's a lot to take in, just remember that multiple small sharpening filters is better than one large sharpening filter. Okay. And with that, now you know how to blur and how to sharpen great work. To finish off this chapter, we'll do a retouching project together from start to finish. Okay. 53. Retouching Project - Make a Plan: Let's bring together all of our retouching skills and make this photo look fabulous. Okay. Let's start off by creating a plan. I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then using my paint brush, I'm going to make sure I have full flow and hardness so that I can draw on this document to show you our plan. I'll just use a brighter color and use a smaller brush. The first thing that I want to do for this photo is I want to crop it in. Right now, I feel like our model is in an awkward position, she should be pushed over more to be centered, or we should just get rid of some of this to bring her more into the rule of thirds. I think I'm going to start by cropping it in here. Then after that, we'll go ahead and do some cleanup. There are a few things that need to be cleaned up, including this wire right here and potentially a few of these strange branches that are sticking out coming from nowhere. Once our image is all cleaned up, we can start to work with some adjustment layers. Starting with lighting. I think there's a few things we can do with lighting, doing some overall levels for the whole picture. Okay. And we can also brighten up our subject and darken the surrounding area. After we've completed the lighting. I think that would be a good time to work on the colors. I can see right away that this image is very warm toned. I'm thinking we need to cool it down with some white balance adjustments. Just to practice what we've learned, I think we'll finish everything off by doing a blur around the outside to draw attention to our subject. There's already quite a bit of blurring in this picture, but I have a feeling that adding a bit more blurring could make this look even better. That's our plan. This is a loose plan, and this is just to help us get on the right path. Anything could change as we go. In the next video, we'll get started on the very first thing of our list, which is cropping in our image. Okay. 54. Retouching Project - Crop & Clean Up: Let's crop and clean up this image. Our first step is to crop the image. I'll just turn this pixel layer off so that we can see our whole image, and then I'll go ahead and select the crop tool. I mentioned that I want her to line up with the third line better. She lines up with that. I'm just going to bring it in until her eye matches up with that line, and I think that looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and press Apply. If you wanted to, you could also crop in the top or bottom. But I think I'll leave mine as is. Since that was so easy and quick, I decided to also add our next step into this video, which is to clean up areas in this image. The main areas in purple that I circled where this wire right here and these branches down here. I'll go ahead and start by turning off this pixel layer. Then I'll go ahead and add a new pixel layer on top and I'll just bring that beneath our plan layer. As I go, I'll leave the plan layer on top of everything so that we can always turn it back on and refer to it at any time. With this new pixel layer, we're going to paint on top of it. I'm going to come over here and select our painting brush. Then I'll make sure to set the context toolbar to current layer and below. Now with a nice small brush, I'll go ahead and paint over this wire. Then I'll go ahead and paint over these branches. I think that that turned out pretty well. There was some trouble spots over here where I couldn't quite get it to look very smooth, but I think we'll go ahead and blur that in a later step. But for right now, we can see that before and after of our in painting. We're off to a great start in the next video. We're going to fix up the lighting and colors. Okay. 55. Retouching Project - Global Lighting & Coloring: Let's make some global edits to this image. For this video, I want to get the overall image looking better with a few adjustments, and we'll fine tune specific parts of the image later on. We won't worry about doing any painting on of adjustments. We're just going to apply all of these adjustments over the entire photo. To start, let's work on the lighting. I'm going to add a levels adjustment, and I'm going to make sure that this levels adjustment appears on top of that pixel layer that we did in painting on. Then I'll start to adjust the levels. You can see in our histogram that we have quite a nice bell curve here, but I do think we can bring in the black level and the white level, just to add a bit more contrast to this image. I'm going to drag the black level inward. I'm also going to zoom out so I can see the whole image as I do this. I think that looks pretty good. Then we'll do the white level. This image has some pretty bright areas like these flowers here. I think I'm only going to bring the white level over a little bit. Now that I've adjusted the black and white levels, I think this overall image looks very dark. I'm going to move the gamma slider over toward the left side to brighten things up. Okay, and I think that looks pretty good. We're going to continue to finesse the lighting later on by brightening up our subject and darkening the edges. But right now, I think this levels adjustment has made a really good difference for this photo. Next, let's work on the white balance. Right now, I think this image looks very yellow and green toned. Let's go to our adjustments and apply the white balance. Now, this can be a little bit tricky because there's no exact way to know if you have the perfect white balance. But because I do think this looks a bit yellow and green, I'm going to move my sliders the opposite of that. Instead of making it more warm, I'm going to bring the white balance over in this direction to cool it down. Okay. Since I am seeing quite a bit of green tones, especially because the green in this image is reflecting on her skin, I think I'll also bring this tint over just to add a bit more magenta to counteract that green. Now you can see that before and after. By cooling down this image. I think her skin tone looks a lot more natural and all of the white parts of this image aren't looking quite so yellow. Last, I think we should do an overall HSL adjustment to boost saturation of certain areas to start I'll add the HSL adjustment, and I'll make sure that I'm in the main color channel. I'll try raising the saturation. I'm not sure if this particular image needs extra saturation. Maybe I'll just bring it up a little bit, and then we'll move on to the red channel. If I raise this, you can see that the red channel is affecting her dress and her skin. I do think adding a bit of saturation looks good here. Next, let's go into the yellow channel and raise this up. This is affecting her skin a bit, but it seems the entire background is included in this one color channel. This means that we have quite a bit of power here. I think the first thing I want to try is adjusting the hue. If I move it to the left, we have a bit more of a green blue, and if I move it to the right, it starts to become more red. I think I'll just bring it over to the left a little bit. I don't want to lose too much of its natural color, but I do think taking out a bit of the yellow tones looks pretty good. I think I also want to desaturate this because this is the background. I want to bring more focus into the subject. Last, let's see how the luminosity makes this look. We can lighten it up or darken it. I think the darkness actually looks pretty good here because she has such a light colored dress. This just adds more contrast between the background and her dress. That was the yellow channel. Here's the before and after of that. Moving on to the green channel. Let's see what's being affected here as I raise the saturation. I can see fringing around some areas. These areas seem a bit distracting. I think I'm just going to desaturate those a little bit. Then going into the channel, let's raise that up. Again, we have some of these fringing areas that aren't really adding to the picture. I'll go ahead and desaturate those as well. In the blue channel, I'm only seeing some areas on the dress. I'll just desaturate that in the magenta channel. You can see that this affects her dress a bit. At this point, since we have a lot of the detail on her dress being affected, let's play with the hue. We can make the dress a bit more orange toned or more purple toned. I personally am a big fan of the color orange. I'm going to move it over more toward the orange tones. Then I think I want to desaturate it. Some of these areas just seem so saturated, they're almost glowing. I'm just going to bring down the saturation here. I think I also want to darken these areas. Okay. That was a lot. Let's see how this looks now. Here's the before and here's the after. I think mostly we've desaturated and deepened the color in the background. We also changed up the dress to make her stand out a bit more. Now I'm going to select all of the layers that we added in this video so that we can see the before and here's the after. Okay. I really like how the white balance has changed this photo, and I think the colors look really nice overall. So that's it for this video. In the next one, we'll work on darkening the edges of this photo. Okay. 56. Retouching Project - Darken the Edges: Let's draw attention to the subject of our photo by darkening the edges to darken the edges. I'm going to add a levels adjustment. Let's go ahead and make this levels adjustment darker. I'll bring the black level over. Then I'll slide the gamma slider over to the right side to darken even more. I'll also adjust the output white level to darken the whites. Now we can go ahead and paint in black to remove from this, or we could invert this adjustment and paint in white. Either way works just fine. For this one, I'm just going to grab my paintbrush tool. I'm going to make sure my paint is set to black and white. Then with 0% hardness and a lower flow. I'll make my brush nice and large. Then I can remove this effect from parts of our image. Since I want the edges to be dark, I'm just going to paint over our subject first to brighten her up. Then I'll go ahead and brighten a bit more of the center area. And now you can see the before and after of this. It's creating a bit of a spotlight effect. I think I'm actually going to click on the levels adjustment again and just to reduce the intensity of this effect. I'll do that by lowering the gamma and raising the output white level. This will just make it blend better. Now you can see that before and after. I think I want to draw even more attention to our subject. I'm going to show you one more technique to do this. What I think I want to do is desaturate the edges of this photo. I'm going to grab an HSL adjustment. Once that's supplied, I'll go into the main color channel, and I'm going to go ahead and fully desaturate just so that we can see where we're painting. Then I'll go ahead and paint in black paint to remove this effect. Now the main center area is not being affected as much and with a lower flow, I'll lightly paint over the edges. Just to bring back a bit of the color. Now I'm going to go back and adjust that HSL adjustment, just to bring some of the color back. But you can see that we still have it desaturated. Here's what that looks like. Here's the before and after. There are so many ways to draw attention to your subject. These are just a couple of ways that are very simple and make a big impact. Here's the before and after of everything that we did in this video. Now that we've darkened up the edges in the next video, we're going to lighten up our subject. 57. Retouching Project - Brighten the Subject: Let's brighten up our subject. In addition to darkening the edges to bring the focus into our subject. We can also brighten up our subject. Let's go ahead and add a levels adjustment. Then we can begin to brighten. I'm just going to bring the gamma slider over toward the left side. I'll just do that a little bit. Then I think I'm going to add a little bit more contrast to her, and maybe a little bit more white level. Now she's looking nice and bright, but I only want this to affect our model, not the whole image. I'm going to go ahead and press command or control. That way, this adjustment is no longer being applied, and if I paint in white paint, we'll be able to see the adjustment again. The areas that I want to brighten include her face, and I'll just increase the flow. I forgot I had it that low. I'll go ahead and paint this over her face, the rest of her body, her arm. I think I also want to paint it over the branch that she's holding. Since that's in focus as well as her, I think that whole area should be nice and bright. Now we can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after. As we saw in the last video, one way that we can also draw attention is affecting the saturation of the colors because she's our focus, I want to saturate her so that she stands out more. I'll go ahead and add another HSL adjustment, we're starting to get a lot of layers here. With this HSL adjustment. I'm going to go to the main color channel, and I'll just increase this saturation. I'm going to bring it nice and bright so that I can see where I'm painting. Then I'll invert it with command or control eye. Now that we have a black mask applied, I'm just going to paint in white paint over our subject's face. I think I'm just going to focus on her face and I'm going to switch my color to black using x, and I'm just going to remove it from her ear and hand. I do think I want to add a bit more color to her neck. I think that looks pretty good. The reason why I painted it off her ear and her hand is because those areas tend to be more red naturally and they already have more color to them. But the face, I think could use a bit more color. I'll go ahead and click here. I'm just going to lower the saturation to make this more natural. I think around 20% looks pretty good for this. Okay. Now I've added some brightness and I've also added some saturation, and we can see how both of these look. Here's the before and after. I feel like this has added a lot of warmth to our model, and I think this looks really nice just having more color in her face. Now we're just moving right along with our adjustments, and I think this looks really good. But I do want to organize our layers. Like I mentioned, there are quite a few layers now. I'll go ahead and select all of the layers that I used to brighten and darken the surrounding areas of our subject. Just these four layers here. Then I'll group them with command or control G. Then I'll go ahead and rename this group by double clicking on it. I'll go ahead and call this targeted lighting. This is just going to help us stay a bit more organized with our layers because we do have a few more layers to add before we're finished. Turning back on our plan layer. So far we've cropped, we've cleaned up, and we've done the lighting and the colors. But I still have one thing on my list here, which is to add a blur. Now that I'm looking at our image, I don't think the background needs much more blurring, but I do think I want to add some blurring here where we painted. We'll go ahead and do that in the next video. 58. Retouching Project - Add a Blur: This video, we'll add a blur. I want to add a blur to smooth out the area that we painted, while we're at it, we might add a little bit of extra blurring to other areas of the photo. Let's go ahead and start by going to our filters, and I'll go ahead and apply a Gaussian blur. This has been added as a child layer to the layer that we had selected. I'll just open up this group and drag this to the top of everything. That way, we're affecting every part of our picture. Then I'll go ahead and zoom in to this painted area that just looks a little bit splotchy. As I raise the radius, I'm going to watch this area to see when it starts to soften. And I think about there that looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and turn on preserve Alpha, just to make sure the edges don't become transparent and then I'll go ahead and press command or control to invert this layer so that it's no longer being applied to anything. Now with our white paint and a low flow, I'll go ahead and gradually add this painting to this area. Anywhere where you see that splotchiness, I'm just going to paint over that to remove it. If you weren't sure what I was talking about before, now you can see the before and after of that area. I'll go ahead and continue to paint this across because I think there's a few more splotchy areas that little wire was pretty hard to remove. I'll come down here and see if the area where we had branches looks okay. I'll go ahead and paint over any strange areas down here too. I think that looks a lot better. Now, if you'd like, you can make your flow even lower. Then with a larger brush, you can go ahead and lightly paint around the edges of your photo to add a little bit of extra blurring. This will create a subtle blur vignette effect. I'm not sure if we'll be able to see much of a difference, but here's the before and after. You can add as much blurring or as little blurring as you want. I don't think I want to do too much for this picture though. So that was a very quick video. In the next one, we're going to add our final touches onto this project. Okay. 59. Retouching Project - Finishing Touches: Let's do some finishing touches. I think our photo looks really good. But let's just take a minute to evaluate if anything seems off. Stepping back, I can see that this area looks way too bright. I think that it's just catching the light and any brightening that we did is making this stand out even more. I'm going to go back through our layers to see where we went wrong with that really bright area. Starting in the first levels adjustment we did, I'll just turn this off and back on. I can see that this did contribute to that brightening. With that levels adjustment selected, I'll make sure I have my paint brush out, and I'll paint in black paint to remove this brightness. I'll just go ahead and paint over the area. The sleeve still looks a little bit bright. I think next, I'll go into the targeted lighting group, and I'll click on this levels adjustment, which brightened our whole subject. This also brighten the sleeve a little bit too much. With black paint, I'll just paint over that area to remove that brightness. That sleeve looks a lot better. One other area that I'd like to change is the darkness of the shadows of her hair right here and right here, they've become so dark that they're starting to lose any detail that was there. To adjust that, I'm going to do the same thing that I just did. I'm going to go back through our adjustments to see where that went wrong. Starting with this levels adjustment again, I'll turn this off and back on. Whatever we did in that levels adjustment, it was probably changing the black level. It really did darken that area. With my low flow paint brush set to black, I'm just going to paint over those shadow areas to bring back a little bit of that detail. In addition to those little areas, now would be a great time to look at the overall image to see if we need to adjust any of the brightness or any of the colors. One thing that I'm noticing is since we added so much beautiful coloring to her face back when we added that HSL adjustment, her hand actually looks a little bit pale in comparison. I believe that was put in the targeted lighting area right here. If I turn this off, you can see her face used to be as pale as her hand. But now we've added that beautiful brightness. This looks like I painted white in that area to apply it. I'll just change my paint color to white, and I'm going to lightly paint this over the hand as well. It's important to pay attention to little things like this that will make it look like your image has been edited. Now that our whole skin tone looks better, I think that we're done with this picture. Feel free to change anything else that you'd like to change. But for me, I think this looks so good and I'm really excited to see the complete before and after. I'm just going to select all of these pictures and are you ready? Here is the before and here's the after. What a huge difference. We've layered on these adjustments so beautifully, and I think this image just looks so much better. Great work. I'm so proud of you. We are done with the retouching chapter. The next chapter is going to be a lot of fun as we learn about selections and masks. 60. Selections & Masks for Beginners: This chapter, we're going to learn about selections and masks, which allow you to apply edits to specific parts of your photos. But wait a second. Isn't that what we've already been doing as we paint black and white on adjustment layers? Yes, it's exactly like that. In this chapter, we're going to take all of that knowledge that you have painting black and white on layers. We're going to do even more to give you more control over your edits. Let's get started. 61. What is a Mask?: This video, we'll learn about masks. Let's say that you want to remove the background of this photo. Well, you could get out the racer tool. And then you could begin erasing and you can see that I'm removing the background. But what if I paint too much. How do I bring that back? Well, that's easy. You just grab your paint brush tool and paint and white paint, right? But that just paints white paint onto our photo. I wish we could paint with black and white to erase and un erase, like we've been doing with adjustment layers. Well, good news, we can. All we need to do is add a mask to our layer. I'm going to press command or Control Z a few times to do what I painted. To add a mask to our layer. All we need to do is press on this little icon here that looks like a Japanese flag. Now you can see, we have a mask added to our layer. This mask is fully white, meaning that the layer is fully visible. Now if I paint in black paint, I can erase from the layer. But I can easily switch my paint to white by pressing x on my keyboard, and then I can bring the layer back. How is this different from painting in black or white on an adjustment layer. Well, actually, that's the trick. It's not different. In fact, it's exactly the same. The only difference is that adjustments and filters have masks pre built into them. But we need to manually add masks to photo layers. The only reason masks are pre built into adjustments is because erasing and un erasing parts of an adjustment is super common to do. But since it's not as common to remove the background on photo layers, affinity doesn't pre add the masks for us. That's the basics of how masks work. Just as we've done before, paint in white and black paint to remove or add back in your photo. But there's one last thing that I want to show you, which is a super common mistake that new users to affinity can make. Notice how our photo layer now has this little arrow here. If I click on that, you'll see that the mask layer is actually a child layer to this photo layer. We can see that these layers are two separate layers. There's a photo and a mask. This is different from adjustment layers which have the mask built right into them, so there's only one layer. Why does this matter for one simple reason? Before you begin painting, please make sure you have the mask layer selected, not the photo layer. If the group is closed and I click on the whole layer like this, and then I begin painting, we'll just begin to add paint onto the photo. Instead, we need to make sure that the mask layer is selected and then we can begin painting. At some point as you're working, you will probably accidentally have your photo layer selected instead of the mask and you'll be confused why your mask isn't working. Every new user runs into this problem at least once. I just wanted to show you the problem and the solution right from the beginning so that you don't get frustrated later on. If this does happen to you, remember command or Control Z is the way to do what you've painted. Okay, so now we know a bit more about masks. Let's do a few examples together. Go ahead and keep this image open. We'll use it in the next video. 62. Mask Example 1: Let's do an example together. Now that we know how masks work. Let's use a mask to remove the background from this photo. I've already applied a mask, but I'll go ahead and delete that and we'll start fresh. I'll click on the mask icon here, you can see that a mask has been added and it's automatically selected, which is great. Now we can go ahead and begin painting. I like to have my paint brush with 100% flow when I'm removing the background so that I don't need to paint over the area multiple times to build that up. Right now, I also have 0% hardness, but you might want to have 100% hardness to get a very clean edge. If you have a lower hardness, your edge will look a bit more feathered and will blend better into wherever you're going to put this. But a hard edge might look good in some cases. Just keep that in mind and play around with the hardness as you go. Remember, you can always press X on your keyboard to bring back some of that that we've lost there and x again to begin removing again. This is where the shortcut can really come in handy. I think for this one, I'm going to bring my hardness somewhere in the middle. This feathering is just a bit intense for me. I'm going to go ahead and add that back in and then remove again. I think that looks really nice for this. Every picture will be a little bit different because of how big the picture is or how much feathering you want. Just keep that in mind that your brush settings might be different from picture to picture. Just like when I'm applying an adjustment to something, I'm going to create an outline going around this pomegranate. Then I'm going to go ahead and paint through the rest of the background. Once I have this outline established. The smooth part of the pomegranate is pretty easy. But as we get into these spiky areas, go ahead and take your time with it and just keep your finger on your bracket keys and shift the size as you go. I also like to outline and then fill in any small areas like this because when I go through later with a larger brush, it'll be hard to fill in those areas. Okay. And it looks like we have some disappearing area here. So I'll switch my color to white and I'll add that back in. All right. That looks really good. So now I'm just going to take a black brush and I'll go ahead and remove the rest of this background. Once you have all this painted, I like to do a little trick with my layer to make sure that I've completely removed the background. This little trick involves holding down Alt or option on your keyboard, and then clicking on the mask layer icon. This will transform your layer into a black and white layer. You're seeing the white area where it's revealed and the black area where the background is removed. In this case, it looks like I did a pretty good job, but there are a few stray areas here and there. I'm just going to go in and make sure they're all taken care of. A lot of times I'll have one large area up here that I need to go back and fix. That's the reason why I do this. Sometimes it's hard to tell if you've completely filled in an area. And to get your normal view back, select any other layer. I think our layer looks really good. I'm happy with this. Now I'm going to give you an example of when you would use a layer, that doesn't have a background like this. First, we need to save this as a PNG. I'm going to go to the top of my screen and click on file. Then I'll go down to where it says port. If I save this as a JPEG, you can see that all of that background digest removed will be replaced with white. We don't want that. We want this to stay transparent, so I'll switch it to PNG. Now you can see that we have the pomegranate standing alone on this background. Then I'll go ahead and export this and I'll save it. Now, I have a blank new document here. I'm going to grab my rectangle tool, and I'm just going to click and drag to create a background. Now I'm going to change this to any color that I want. Let's go with a pretty pink color. Now I'm going to add that PNG image to this document. I'll go to the top of the screen to file, and then I'll go down to place. Then I'll select that P and G that I just saved, and I'll go ahead and open that up. Now I can add this to our document. I can resize and position it how I'd like. You can see that because the backgrounds been removed, we can place this anywhere in the document and it stands on its own. We can layer anything else we want with this. For example, I could layer another rectangle here. Now you can see that we can just place this wherever we want and because the backgrounds are moved, this creates a really cool cutout effect, similar to that scrapbook image that we've been using throughout the course. Now that we know how to remove a background, there are so many possibilities, and we're going to go ahead and explore another possibility in the next video. 63. Mask Example 2: Let's do another masking example together. Before we jump into our next example, I just want to quickly show you that you can add a mask to any layer. We saw in the last video that you can add a mask to a photo layer, but you can also add a mask to a shape layer. You can also add a mask to text. You can also add a mask to a group. Why would you want to add a mask to a whole group? That's what I'm going to show you in this video. Do you remember that sharpening that we did in the last chapter? I'm going to open that photo again, and we're going to apply sharpening to the eyes again. I go to my filters and apply a high pass filter. I'm going to go ahead and take this high pass filter and bring it to the top of our layers. Then I'll go ahead and raise up the radius and change the blend mode to soft light. We've already done this before. To apply this just to the eyes. I'm going to press command or control y to invert this layer. Then using my paintbrush tool. I'll go ahead and paint in white paint with a 0% hardness and full flow, and I'm just going to paint this over the iris and the eyelashes of the eye. Now we have this applied to the eyes. I'll go ahead and duplicate this three times like we did before. Then I'll go ahead and select all of these layers and group them with command or control G. Now we can see the before and the after. But now, let's say that we wanted to change which areas are being sharpened? Well, we would need to go back and add white paint to each one of these layers. That would take quite a bit of time. But instead, what if we added a mask to the group and then we could just paint that mask on and adjust the entire group at the same time. To do that, I'm going to first delete this group, and let's start fresh. I'll add another high pass filter. I'll bring it to the top of everything. I'll raise up the radius, and I'll change the blend mode to soft light. I'm going pretty fast because we've already done this. This time, instead of painting, I'm just going to go straight into duplicating this three times. Right now, the sharpness is being added to everything, but that's okay. We're about to change that. I'm going to select all of our layers by holding shift and clicking on our last one, and then I'll press command or control G to group these. Then here's the fun part. I'm going to add a mask with this group selected. This mask has been applied to our entire group. Now I can go ahead and invert this with command or control, and all of those layers are now not being applied to anything. If I paint in white paint, I can reveal that sharpness wherever I want. I can add it here and here. I can even add this sharpness to a few other areas. Maybe I want to define the eyebrows or show off the lips. Now we have the power to do that or undo that at any time because we have this whole mask here that's affecting every layer in this group. Group masks can be really helpful and save a lot of time when you want to apply multiple adjustments to a single area. There's another masking example. We're going to do one more masking example in the next video. 64. Mask Example 3: Let's use a mask to remove the background of this dog drawing. The first step to remove the background is to apply a mask. I'll come over here and press on the mask icon. Now we can see that this has been applied as a child layer and the mask layer is selected. Now all I need to do is come over here and get my brush tool. Then I can go ahead and switch my paint to black. For this drawing, since the edges are very harsh, I think I'll bring my hardness up all the way so that we can have a nice crisp edge. Now all I need to do is paint in black to remove the background, and if I paint too much, press x on my keyboard to switch my color, then I'll paint in white to add that back in. I'll go ahead and begin painting. This is going to take a long time and it's pretty imprecise. I keep having little squiggly areas, and it's just hard to get right. There must be a better way to do this. Actually, there's a much better way. Let's go ahead and delete this mask and go ahead and keep this image open. We're going to learn about making selections in the next video. 65. What are Selections?: Let's learn all about selections. Up until now, we've been painting with black and white paint to erase and un erase parts of a layer. But if there was a way that we could tell affinity, Hey, I want to keep this dog but remove the background, that would be a lot easier. Lucky for us, there is a way to do this. All we need to do is make a selection of the dog. A selection is how we tell affinity, which parts of the photo we want to keep, in which parts of the photo we want to remove. To make a selection, first, let's get out the selection brush tool. This tool works similarly to the paint brush, where you can adjust its size using the bracket keys. Then you can click and drag to paint over an area. This painting will start to create a selection. As I paint across this dog, you can see that the selection brush tool will snap to the edges of the dog. Once you've made your selection, just go back and make sure you've selected everything. I forgot his nose right here. I think that looks pretty good. Now, all we need to do is press on the mask icon. Just like that, the background is removed. That was way easier than needing to paint an outline around our dog. Right now, we still have the selection made. You can still see these little marching ants to remove those, press command or control D. Now, nothing is selected. When you make a selection and then apply a mask, your mask will make everything that you have selected stay white or visible and make everything outside of your selection black or invisible. You can see that in the layer thumbnail right here. Selections are just a different and quicker way of painting white or black onto a mask. I'm going to delete this mask though and show you a different way of removing the background. We selected the dog before. But what if we selected the background instead? You can use this special tool here called the flood select tool. The flood select tool selects areas that are all the same color like this pure white background. All you need to do is click once and the entire background will be selected. Then we can apply a mask. Now, this is the opposite of what happened last time because we had the white background selected, that stayed visible and the dog became invisible. This is the opposite of what we want. I'm going to deselect by pressing command or control D. Then with this mask layer selected, I'm going to invert the mask. This will make it opposite. I'll press command or control. Just like that, our mask has reversed. Now the dog is visible and the background is invisible. There are a lot of ways to make selections in affinity photo. But for this course, we're just going to focus on the two most common selection tools. In the next two lessons, we're going to learn more about how to use the flood select tool and the selection brush. 66. Flood Select Tool: Let's learn about the flood select tool. The flood select tool is used. When you want to select a large area, that's all the same color. For example, you'd use the flood select tool to select a nice blue sky. You could also use the flood select tool to select a green screen background. However, the color that you're selecting needs to be different from the color of the area that you're not selecting. For example, you couldn't use the flood select tool to remove the background from this notebooks photo because the notebook and the background are all the same color. The flood select tool wouldn't be able to tell the two areas apart. For our first flood select practice photo, let's select this desert sky. Selecting skies is a very common use for the flood select tool, so it's a good thing to practice. I'll go ahead and grab the flood select tool. Then I'm going to go ahead and click the top right of the sky. Unfortunately, this only selects half of the sky. If I click down here to select the other half, that just selects half the sky as well. In the real world like this, things are not just one pure color. You can see that this sky starts off darker and then becomes lighter and lighter. When colors have variations like this, sometimes you'll need to add up multiple selections to combine them together. To do that, we can come up to the context toolbar and change the mode from new to add. Once you've changed it to add mode, you can just click on the part of the sky that's still not selected, and now you have a full selection of the sky. Now that we have the sky selected, I'm going to apply an adjustment to the selected area. I'll come down here to our adjustments and apply an HSL adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and change the hue shift slider. Let's make this a nice orangey yellow color, and I'll decrease the saturation. Because this guy was the only thing that was selected. That's the only thing that was affected by this HSL adjustment. Selections are great for masking areas and removing backgrounds, but I tend to use them more for making adjustments like this. Once you have your adjustment in place, you can deselect the area by pressing command or control D, D as in deselect. Adding this adjustment layer while we had the selection on is the exact same thing as when we applied a mask after making a selection. Everything that was selected stayed white like it was on the mask, and everything else was black, meaning that the adjustment wasn't applied. Let's go ahead and take a look at another example of using the flood select tool. For this photo, I want to remove all of the white parts of the photo and only keep the black lines of this dog. I'm going to grab the flood select tool. If we click in the white background to select it, we only have this outside area selected. Then we could change the mode to add mode and click in all of these little white areas around the dog. Unfortunately, this is quite tedious because there are quite a few white areas around this dog. But luckily, there's a better way to make a selection of areas that aren't touching, but are still the same color. All you need to do is turn off contiguous. I'll change this back to new mode and D select by pressing command or control D. Now nothing is selected and I just unchecked contiguous. Now, if I click, Every area that's this white color is selected, even if it's separated by these black lines. Contiguous is a very useful setting because sometimes you only want to select an area that's all the same color in one part of your photo like the sky, and other times you have situations like this where you want every single white part of your image selected. Now that I have the white area selected, I'm going to apply a mask. Then I'll deselect by pressing command or control D. Right now, our mask is the opposite of what we want. With our mask layer selected, I'm going to press command or control to invert this mask and now we just have the black lines visible. Now that we have that, we could export this as a PNG file to keep that beautiful transparent background. Let's do one last example. Let's try to select the logo. We want to remove all of the dark green in this case. I'll grab the flood select tool, and then I'll click on the logo. Unfortunately, the flood select tool selected everything because the background color is very similar to the logo color. In this case, you'll want to turn down the tolerance in the context toolbar. The tolerance measures how different a color can be and affinity will still tolerate it, adding it to the selection. If you have a much lower tolerance, affinity will be very picky and will only add colors that are nearly identical. If you have a very high tolerance, this means that affinity will be very tolerant and understanding of different colors and add them all to your selection, even if they are pretty different from the color that you clicked on. In this case, I want to lower the tolerance because these colors are very similar to each other. I'll lower it to 5%, and then I'll click right here. Now, affinity has recognized that these are two different colors. I'll go ahead and apply a mask. Since that logo was what I had selected, the background has completely gotten removed. I'll deselect by pressing command or control D. As a final tip, once you have a background removed, you could add a new background if you wanted to. I'll go over here to our shape tools and select the rectangle tool. Then I'll click and drag a rectangle and I'll place this beneath our layer. Now instead of that dark green background, we could have a white background or any color in between. And that's the flood select tool. This is a very useful tool for situations with solid colors. There are a few different settings that you can change about it in the context toolbar to make it work better for whatever situation that you find yourself in. Now that we know how to use the flood select tool, let's learn about how to handle tricky situations with the selection brush tool. 67. Selection Brush Tool: In this video, we'll learn how to use the selection brush tool while making a color splash effect. The selection brush is used to select objects, not areas of color. In this photo, I want to make a selection of this giraffe. I'm going to grab the selection brush tool. By default, Snap to edges is turned on, and that's what makes this tool work so well. Affinity will automatically see where the edges of your object are and will snap your selection to that area. In addition to snap to edges, I also like having soft edges on. This gives your edges a feathered look and can really help you to blend out your selection. To select this draft, you have a few strategies that you could use. You could use a larger brush to try to select most of the draft all at one time. Or you could use a smaller brush to go a bit slower and more detailed with your selection. As you're clicking and dragging to make your selection. You might end up selecting a little bit too much. If this ever happens to you, there's a really great keyboard shortcut that you can use. All you need to do is hold down Alt or option, and then you can click and drag and remove from your selection. I find this super because a lot of times the selection brush does a pretty good job, but you will need to go back and refine. Again, that's holding down Alt or option as you're clicking and this will remove from your selection. To create this color splash effect, what I want to do is keep the draft in color and make all of the surrounding areas black and white. To start that, with the draft selected, I'm going to come to our adjustments and apply a black and white adjustment. Now, this has made the draft black and white, but we can reverse this. First, we'll need to deselect by pressing command or control D. Now that nothing selected, we just have a bit more free range as we move through our document. With the black and white adjustment selected, we can invert this with command or control. Now you can see that we have this beautiful color splash effect. We can also click back on our black and white adjustment and adjust these sliders. Now we have this beautiful black and white color splash effect, and that was super quick, thanks to the selection tools. Now, the selection tools and affinity are far from perfect. It's not uncommon that you'll need to go back and adjust some of your selection. In this case, I can see we've missed a few areas here and there. What I'm going to do is with the black and white adjustment selected, I'm going to grab my paint brush. Now, if you look at this mask, the black and white adjustment is being applied outside of this draft and the draft has no black and white applied, meaning that it's represented by black. With my paint brush, I'm going to paint in black paint to remove the black and white adjustment from areas that it seems to have stayed on. I'm just going to go through here with black paint, and I'm just going to go over these areas. And I have a pretty low flow right now. I think I'll just go ahead and bring that up. Okay. All right. With that, I think we are done. The selection brush really sped up this process of creating this effect, and after that, we could go back in and do fine detail work to clean it up. Here's the before, and here's the after. You can do this effect with just about any picture. Just select your object and follow the same steps. In the next video, we'll step it up a notch with multiple selections and masks. Okay. 68. Using Multiple Selections & Masks: In this video, we'll fix up a photo using multiple selections and masks. As we go through this video, I just want you to keep in mind that this process we're about to start is pretty similar to layering on multiple adjustments like we've done in the past. The only difference is that we'll be using selections to help us along this process. Before we were doing a lot of painting over areas to add adjustments to them. If that's not really your thing, then selections can really help you to speed up this process. My goal for this photo is to make it feel more colorful and warm. Let's start by making a selection of the sky to enhance this blue area. I'll grab the flood select tool. First, I'm going to check in with our settings. I'm going to check on contiguous. This will make it so only this blue area will be selected, and none of the blue areas that are down here in the sand will end up being selected. Then I'll go ahead and increase the tolerance. This blue area has quite a few different blues in it. I think a higher tolerance might be good. Let's go ahead and try that out. Oh. Unfortunately, these colors are pretty similar. I'm going to lower the tolerance down. Then I'll go ahead and click. That's pretty good. Let's raise it up a little bit more. We have quite a bit selected. I'm just going to change it to add mode. Then I'll click in a few more areas to add to the selection. Hmm. That didn't turn out very good. Let's lower the tolerance to 5% and try this again. I still have it set to add mode. Now I'm just adding in a few more areas. Okay. And now we have the selection. Sometimes the flood select tool can be a little finicky with the tolerance. But like I just did, all you need to do is try out a few different percentages to see what will end up working. I think this looks pretty good for our selection. Now I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. Since this area is selected, it will only affect that area. I'll just go ahead and stay in the main color channel. Then I'm going to shift the hue over to a more warm toed blue. I'll also increase the saturation. Okay, I really like this color. Now I'll go ahead and D select with command or Control D, and we can see the before and after. This is already starting to feel like a warmer, sunnier day. Next, let's select this shell and give it more color. Now, there are so many variations of colors here that I think the selection brush tool will be a better option for selecting this object. I'll just increase the brush size by using the bracket keys. And then I'll go ahead and start selecting This isn't snapping to the edges. That's not good. I have snapped to edges turned on. Well, I do have that, but I have the wrong layer selected, I'll D select with command or control D. I need to make sure I have my shell layer selected, so the affinity knows what to snap to. With this layer selected, the only reference it has is this mask and the shell isn't included in that. I'll have the background selected. Now as I begin to click and drag, we start to snap to the edges of the shell. That's much better. Okay Remember to hold down Alt or Option and click to remove from your selection. Remember that you can always adjust the brush size as you go. I now have the shell selected, and I think that looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and add an HSL adjustment. And I want this to be more bright. I'll start by just increasing the saturation. Let's see what happens when we adjust the hue. We can make it more yellow green toned or more red toned. I think I'll just bring it over to the right just a little bit to add some redness. I think that looks really good. Let's go ahead and turn that on and off. I do like that difference. Okay. Let's go ahead and press command or control D to D select, and now would be a great time to check in with our selection and see if we need to do any painting. I think we're looking pretty good. That was a pretty good selection. I don't think we need to do any cleanup. But if we did need to do cleanup by adding more, all you need to do is select your paint brush tool and then paint in white and black paint to add and remove from the selection. The next thing I want to do is enhance the foreground, which in this case, is everything except for the sky. To do this, we need to make a selection of everything other than the sky. Now, we already made a selection of the sky earlier. Is there some way that we can use that selection? Yes, we actually can. Here's the shortcut. All you need to do is hold command or control and then click on the mask. This will load that mask as a selection. Right now, this area is being selected, I'm going to go ahead and apply a white balance adjustment to it. Then I'll just warm up this slider. Now obviously, this isn't what we want to happen. We want this to be applied the opposite. I'm going to deselect by pressing command or control D. Then with that white balance adjustment, I'm going to reverse it with command or control. Wow, look at that. I think I added a bit too much warmth. But you can see that by using that sky layers selection, we were super easily able to flip it and select the foreground. I'll just click on the white balance adjustment and I'll bring down that warmth. That was a bit too much. Okay. The last thing I'm going to do is to lighten up the image overall by adding a levels adjustment on top of everything. Then I'm just going to add a bit of contrast. I'll bring the black level over and the white level over and I'll bring the gamma slider over to the left to brighten everything up even more. Okay, here we are. Let's lit all of these layers. Now we can see the complete before and after. Like I said before, this is pretty similar to what we've been doing all throughout this course. We just use selections to speed up the process of adjusting specific areas. Great work on this chapter. We've learned so many important masking and selection skills. These will be very important for us as we go into the next chapter and learn how to make beautiful composite images. 69. Compositing for Beginners: Let's do some compositing in this chapter. Compositing is taking multiple images and combining them into a single image. T hroughout this chapter, we'll work on two examples of this together, and we'll learn three simple steps for compositing along the way. These steps include applying a mask, adding the new photo, and matching the two photos. It's really fun to composite and has endless possibilities. Let's get started. 70. Apply a Mask: Let's apply a mask to our first photo. My goal for this composite is to replace the sky because this photo was accidentally taken on a day with a pretty gloomy looking sky. Let's start by grabbing the flood select tool. I'll make sure that I have contiguous checked on, and I'll go ahead and increase the tolerance back to its default 20%. Then I'll click in the sky to select it. Now you can see we have our sky selected. Let's go ahead and apply a mask. Then I'll deselect with command or control D. Because the sky was selected, that's the only thing that stayed on our mask. But we can invert this mask to remove the sky instead. I'll press command or control to invert that. Now you can see we have our sky removed. This is like we've cut a hole in our photo. We could place anything underneath this. As an example, I'll just go ahead and make a shape. Then I'll drag the star to the bottom of the layers panel, you can see that now our star is beneath this. It's poking through that little hole that we've cut out. I can make this really large, taking up the whole sky. As you can see, we still have this entire star shape here, but because we've expanded it in that way, it looks like it's taking up the whole sky. At this point, we can place anything inside of this hole, resizing it to position it the way we want. We'll go ahead and add our brand new sky in the next video. Okay. 71. Add the New Photo: In this video, we'll add a new sky. We'll go ahead and start by deleting this star layer. That was just for an example. Now we have this cutout here and we can place any image we want behind it. I'll go up to the top of the screen two file, and then I'll click on Place. Then I can go into our exercise files and click on this photo called add the New Photo. Then I'll press open. Now this photo has been loaded into my cursor and I can click and drag to stretch it across our canvas here. Next, I'm just going to drag this underneath our original photo. Now you can see that it fits perfectly in that little cutout. Now I can go ahead and adjust it. I don't think I want to include all of these trees here. I'm going to make this bigger. We can make this as large or as small as we want. I think that looks pretty nice. It's super easy to replace the sky in this image. But where did I find this better sky photo? Where am I finding all of these images in the first place? Well, I use free stock image websites for all of my videos. That way, I can share them all with you and save some money. There are three websites that I go to to find photos. They are Pb splash and Pexels. I'll leave all of these websites linked below this video. To use these websites, just type in a word that you're looking for. Then when you find an image that you like, you can go ahead and press on the download arrow right here. Each of these websites have it slightly different. You might need to click on the image. But on all of the websites, once you've downloaded the image, it will automatically download to your computer and you can use it for free. Stock image websites like this are so nice and can really help you to find great pictures to practice new techniques on. That's it for this video. We've now replaced the sky. In the next video, we're going to make this look more realistic by matching up the lighting and the colors of these two images. Okay. 72. Match the Two Photos: In this video, we'll match the two photos. I want to make this cloud image, match our original image. To do that, I'll apply adjustments so that both of their colors and lighting match up. To start, I'll go ahead and add a levels adjustment. Then let's just try adding a little bit of contrast here or a lot of contrast. I just want to show you that if we keep the levels adjustment on top of everything, then it will affect everything. But in this case, I only want to affect the sky. I'm going to click and drag on this levels adjustment until it's highlighted on top of the sky layer. Then I'll release it. Now you can see that the levels adjustment is a child layer to the sky. That means that any adjustments we do with this levels adjustment will only affect the sky part of our photo. Now, the original image is very gray and faded. I'm going to reset this here by moving the sliders back. Let's start by making the sky look a little bit more gray and faded. Instead of adding contrast, I'm going to come down here to our output black level and output white level. As a reminder, the output black level will make the black parts of your image more gray out and light in the output white level, we'll make the white parts of your image more gray out and black. This is a great way to decrease contrast, and I really only use these sliders in cases like this where I'm trying to match up two images. To start on this one, let's move the output black level down you can see that this has faded out the shadows of the clouds. Then I'm going to move the output white level as well because the whites in this image are very bright and we can't forget about the Gamma slider. We can use this to make the sky even darker or lighter. In this case, since the bottom of the photo looks quite gloomy and gray. I think I'm going to go ahead and lighten up the sky like this so that the shadows don't pop quite as much. With that, we've now added a levels adjustment to the sky to make it less contrasted, and I think this fits with the image much better. I just want to point out that right now my goal is just to get these two images to match. I'm not trying to make this look finished and beautiful quite yet. Let's go ahead and add a white balance adjustment next. Because my levels adjustment is selected, this adjustment will be applied on top of that, so it's automatically been applied as a child layer, which is perfect. If your adjustment was placed on top of everything, just drag it down so that it's a child layer. I think I want to add a little bit more blue to the sky. I think that looks pretty good. To me, this field has quite a bit of blue in it, especially in the shadows. Adding a bit more blue here will decrease the warmth of the sky. Last, I think I want to make this a little less saturated since the whole image doesn't have much color to it. To do that, I'll add an HSL adjustment. Again, this is placed as a child layer, which is perfect. I'll go ahead and make this a little less saturated. We can also play around with the hue to see if this helps. I think I'll just drag it down a little bit to the left to make it a little bit more purple toned. With that, we can see the before and the after of the HSL adjustment. Now I'll just go ahead and select all of these layers, and we can see what the sky looked like before, and here's the after. As I went through all of these adjustments, I tried really hard to just make the images match. I started with lighting because to me, that's the easiest place to start. I went ahead and reduced the contrast, which I think actually made probably the largest difference in this photo. Then I went through the colors just to make sure all of the colors looked natural for this setting. Now that we have the two images matching perfectly, we can go ahead and edit the whole image to make it look great in the next video. 73. Continue Editing: Let's finish up these edits. Now that these two images match beautifully. We can go ahead and apply adjustments to the entire image, and since the two photos match, these adjustments should look very natural. I'll go ahead and select our top layer. Let's go ahead and start with the lighting. I'll come to our adjustments and then apply a levels adjustment. Now, as I said before, this image is very faded. Let's start by adding contrast with the black level and white level. I'll go ahead and drag this over, and I'll drag the white level over two. I think that looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. Then I'll go ahead and add an HSL adjustment to adjust our colors. Let's start by increasing the saturation of this image. Okay, I like how that looks. Let's adjust the hue and see what difference it makes. Oh, I like how this looks pulling the hue slider over to the left. I'll just reduce that slightly. This looks really pretty. Okay. Now I think our lighting and colors looks really improved. Here's the before and after. As one final tip for this particular image. I think I want to blur the clouds a little bit. The clouds in the distance like this shouldn't be so sharp and in focus as they are now. You can really see all of the little edges and puffs of clouds here. But if we blur that, I think this will look more natural. I'm going to go ahead and select the sky layer. Then I'll apply a gaucian blur filter to it. I'll come to the filters and apply the Gaucian blur. I'll make sure to check on preserve Alpha. Then I'll go ahead and increase the radius. I think that looks pretty good. Now I'll go ahead and zoom out so that you can see the before and here's the after. I think this looks pretty good, but I do want to reduce the blur slightly. I'll click on its layer icon here and I'll just reduce the radius. We have a lot of layers going on here, and I really want to show you the final before and after, but it'd be hard to select all of the layers. I'm just going to do a little work around here. I'm going to select our original layer and I'll duplicate it with command or Control J. Then I'll drag it to the top of everything and I'll delete the mask layer. Now we have this original copy of our layer here so that you can see the before and here's the after Okay. This looks so good. We've really improved the sky and the colors in the photo overall. Now that we've completed one composting project, let's do another example in the next video. Okay. 74. Example 2 - Apply a Mask: Let's apply a mask. For this project, we're going to give our model a new background. Our first step is to apply a mask to separate our model from her background. That way, we can put a new background behind her. To make a selection. In this case, I'm going to use the selection brush tool. Make sure that you have snap to edges and soft edges turned on. Then you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to adjust the size of your brush, and you can begin to paint to make a selection of our model. Remember that if you ever paint too much, you can use the short cut Alt or option on your keyboard, and then you can paint away anything that you selected too much of. I think the selection looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and press on the mask icon. Then I'll press command or Control D to D select. Now you can see we have our mask applied here as a separate layer, and it's a child layer. With that selected. I want to clean up this mask. It did a pretty good job of selecting her, but there's always trouble areas with people, mainly with the hair. Hair is always a little bit of a booker to work with. It's hard to select it. A lot of the time, you'll need to go in with your paint brush tool. I'll go ahead and select that. Then you'll need to paint in white and black paint to add and remove hair from the area. I'm going to go ahead and switch my paint color to white. Then I'll zoom in here and I can begin to make little paint strokes to reconnect that hair. I'm working with a very small brush that's about the same size as our hair. This just makes it easier to make this look more natural. Okay. At this point, I've filled in most of the hair. There are some patchy areas like this for areas like that that I don't really want to fill in completely, I'm just going to switch my paint color to black and I'll just remove that. It's okay to remove hairs, if that will make your selection look better. I'll just go ahead and move over to the other side and I'll switch my color to white. Then I'll continue to add to our mask with a very small brush. Make sure you're always painting in the direction that the hair is going in. If you paint across like that, it will obviously stand out. Right now, I'm just trying to paint up and downward strokes. All right. I think our mask is looking pretty good. I'm just going to go around the edges to double check here. I see a little bit of bumpiness on this hat. I'll make my brush a little bit larger and I'll just fill in a few areas here. Now, I have 0% hardness, and I think that's giving this a nice feathered edge. I'm going to keep it set to that. But if you happen to have your hardness up, I would suggest lowering it to keep this nice soft edge that we've created. Okay. And this leather jacket was pretty easy to select because it was so smooth. Okay. All right. With that, we've created a very beautiful selection of our subject. So now that we've applied that mask and she separated from her background, we're going to add a new photo in the next video. 75. Example 2 - Add the New Photo: Let's add in a new photo. We could at this point, add any background that we wanted, but not every background will look good. To show you this, I'm going to place in a new picture. I'll go up to file, and then I'll go down to place. Then I'll select this beach photo. With that loaded into my cursor. I'll go ahead and click and drag to place this on our document. There we go. Then I'll go ahead and drag this underneath all of the layers. Why did I use this one as a bad example? Well, this background doesn't exactly make sense for a few reasons. First of all, the background is very sunny and bright with harsh lighting. You would expect that our subject would be very bright with some harsh shadows on her face. In addition to that, she's definitely not dressed for the occasion of being at the beach with her jacket on and her cup of coffee. It definitely seems more like she should be in a city scene than on the beach. Because of all of these factors, this will very much look fake. Even though we can match her lighting and colors to make her look a bit better. The context just doesn't make sense. I'll go ahead and delete this layer. Instead, let's go ahead and place the other exercise violin. I'll go ahead and click on this one and open it up, and then I'll drag it across the background. As I mentioned, with her leather jacket and her cup of coffee in hand, it makes a lot more sense for her to be in a city scene. I really like this city scene because it puts the city at a distance like she's overlooking it. It also has soft lighting, which will match up to our subject better than the bright harsh lighting of a beach. I'm going to drag this underneath all of the layers. Conveniently, our subject is large enough that she'll cover up the girl behind her. I'm just going to make a couple adjustments here to make her fit with the background better. First, I'm going to resize the background and just shrink it down a bit. There we go. Then I'm going to go ahead and select our model layer. Now, because this was the original photo in our document, her layer is locked right now. I'll go ahead and click on the lock icon. Now I can move our model. I'll just shrink her down like that, making sure that she's fully covering that girl in the background. I think that looks pretty nice. Before we finish this video, I want to point out an annoying quirk of affinity that you might run into. I really wish this wasn't an issue that affinity had, but I'm just going to show you what it is and how to fix it. First, I'm just going to select this layer, and this is just for demonstration purposes, but I'm going to drag a rectangle out over our background. Then I'm going to make this rectangle black. Okay. So you might see it right there. We have a white line above our subject. For some reason, it goes in and out, but here we have this white line and a white line going down here as well. This happens sometimes when you apply a mask to a photo and then you re size that photo. In this case, we applied our mask and then we shrunk down her image. This is because the mask only removes about 99.9% of the background, and for some reason, it keeps this very thin annoying border here. If this happens to you and it probably will, the way to fix this is to select the mask. Then grab your paint brush tool, and with 100% flow and opacity, you really want to make sure you're covering it here. Go ahead and paint in black paint over the line. This will just tell the mask, Hey, I don't want this part to be white, I don't want it to be visible, please remove it. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and delete the black rectangle. That was just to help us see the line. I'm not sure why they haven't fixed this yet. It's been a problem for a while. If this happens to you as you're making masks, that's how to fix it. Now we have our background and it's placed nicely. In the next video, we're going to match up these two photos. 76. Example 2 - Match the Two Photos: This video, we'll match these two photos. These two photos don't match right now. The model is a lot more warm and saturated and she has a lot more contrast between the shadows and highlights. While the background is a bit more dull and blue toned. Let's change the background and try to get it to match the coloring and lighting of our model better. I'm going to go ahead and add a levels adjustment. Because I only want this to affect our background, I'm going to make it a child layer to the background by clicking on this layer and dragging it on top of our background. Now you can see that's a child layer, and whatever I do, will only affect the background. Like I said before, it looks like our model has quite a bit more contrast between her shadowy and highlighting parts. I'm going to go ahead and increase the contrast. I'll start by dragging the black level over and I'll also drag the white level over. Now, you might be tempted here to really crank the black and white level to get the city background to match her contrast. But in this case, I'm only trying to get this wall to match her contrast. This looks like it's naturally a more foggy day back here. I mostly just want the area where she's standing to match her contrast better, and it's okay if this area is a little less contrasted because of fog and distance. Now that I'm looking at it though, I do think I want to make this even darker. I'm going to move the gamma slider over. Maybe I'll back the black level off a little bit. Okay, now you can see that the highlights and shadows here look a lot more similar to her jacket. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we've done the lighting, let's move on and fix the white balance. I want to make this more warm tone similar to our model. I'll go ahead and drag this slider up to introduce a bit more of this orange tone. I think that looks pretty good. Next, I think I want to add an HSL adjustment to adjust the saturation. I'll go ahead and add that in. Let's go ahead and adjust the saturation. As I increase the saturation, things start to look a little strange. Especially in the sky here, you can see that it starts to get a little bit green. If I reduce the saturation, that looks a little off because she's quite saturated. I think what I'm going to do is use this to mask the saturation. I'm going to go ahead and desaturate, Then I'll invert this so it's applied to nothing. I'll press command or control. Then I'm going to paint this desaturation over the sky since that was our problem area, that this HSL adjustment becomes applied to the sky. I need to paint in white paint over the sky. I'll make my brush nice and large, and then I'll just paint over the sky. Blend this out more. I'm going to lower my flow, and then paint here. Okay. Here's the before and after. Okay, I think that looks better. That green color just looked a little strange to me. This is already looking pretty good. Here's the before and after of what we've done so far. That looks pretty nice. You could stop here, but when matching photos, there's always more and more you can do to make it look better. Let's keep going a little bit more. To fine tune a few of these areas. I'm going to mask on some adjustments. The first area that I want to mask is this area of the wall. Right now, it's a lot brighter than the other side of the wall, and I find that a bit distracting. I'm going to add a levels adjustment to try to get those sides of the walls to match. Right now, it's quite bright and it has a lot of contrast. I think what I'm going to do is reduce the output white level. This will take away some of the white highlight. I'll also darken it with the gamma slider by bringing this over to the right Now the blacks are looking very dark. I think I'll also bring the output black level over just to gray that out. Then I'll go ahead and invert this with command or control eye. Now I can paint in white to reveal that darkness over this wall. I don't know if you notice this, but you might see some white popping in here and there on the edges. I think again, that's coming from our mask, which is super annoying. I'm going to go back to our mask layer. I'll switch my paint color to black. I'm just going to paint in over the edges with full flow. Our model isn't over here, so it's fine to paint a little more roughly on this side. Then I'm just going to paint as close as I can to her without removing her. Now those white lines should go away. It might just be glitching a little bit, but I think we've removed any white lines that were there and back to what we were doing. Here's what we just darkened, here's before and after. After adding that darkness, I think the color of this wall looks a little bit too red toned. I think I also want to adjust the colors. With that same levels adjustment selected, I'm going to add an HSL adjustment so that I can reduce that redness. I'll start by just desaturating. I like how that desaturation is looking. I'm also going to shift the hue slider over to the left. This is adding a little bit of yellow tone to the highlights, which will match the yellow toed highlights in her jacket. I think that looks pretty nice. I'm going to invert this layer with command or control. Then I'm going to paint in white paint to reveal this coloring just over the wall. Since this is a child layer, I can paint this on top of our model and nothing will happen. This will only affect the background layer. Now you can see all the work I just did on the wall, here's the before, and here's the after. I think that looks pretty nice. The next thing I want to change is the city background. Right now, I think it just looks a little too bright and I want to darken it up a little bit so that we can see some of the detail of the buildings. To do that, let's add another levels adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and darken the city by moving the Gamma slider over and you can already start to see some more detail there. We can add even more detail by bringing the black level over. I'm not trying to bring the contrast all the way up, but I do think adding a bit more contrast looks pretty nice. Now, I really like how this background looks, but I don't like what this is doing to the wall. Instead of inverting, I'm just going to paint in black to remove this adjustment from the wall. Now you can see the before and the after. I think I've done just about everything I can for the background at this point, but I think our model still looks a little too warm. One thing you can do with compositing is you can match the background to the subject, but you can also reverse your edits and edit your subject to match the background a little bit. That way, they meet in the middle and their colors and lighting will just match a lot better. To do this, I'm going to select our subject. Then I'm going to apply a levels adjustment. I'm going to make this a child layer to our subject. I'll drag this on top of her layer. Now this should only affect her. I'm going to brighten up our subject by moving the gamma slider over to the left. I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Just to brighten her up to match the surroundings better. Next, I think I want to desaturate her a little bit. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment to desaturate her colors. I'll go ahead and bring this down. Remember, since we had the levels adjustment selected, this was automatically applied as a child layer. Now that I've lowered the saturation, I think her colors in lighting look a lot better for matching the background. Here's the before and here's the after. And to see the difference of the background. Here's all of those layers turned off and back on. This was a lot of layers. I hope that wasn't too confusing. But to break it down for you, first, I always do the lighting, then I just the colors. If I see any areas that still look strange, I'll just add more lighting and color adjustments until all of the areas look good. I think these pictures match so much better in the next video. We're going to finish off this project by doing some finishing touches. 77. Example 2 - Continue Editing: Now that our photos match, let's make the overall image look even better to adjust the entire image as a whole. I'm just going to close up this group here and close up this one. Then I'll select our top layer. Then I'll go ahead and apply a levels adjustment on top of everything because the images match so beautifully. Any edit that we now apply to both of them at the same time should look very natural. I'm going to go ahead and start by adding just a bit of contrast. I'm going to move the black level over, and I'll move the white level over. That looks pretty nice. Here's the before and after. Next, I'm going to add a white balance adjustment. Now, at this point, we can really adjust this either direction we want, making the picture more warm toned or more cool toned. For this city scene, since it looks like a bit of a gloomy day, I'm going to opt for making this more cool toned. I think that's about all I want to do here. Here's the before and after of those simple edits. Now we can see a complete before and after. I'm just going to duplicate this layer with command or control J, and I'll bring it to the top. Then I'll go ahead and delete the mask and I'll delete these two adjustments. Now we have the original picture sitting on top of everything, and now we can see the complete before, and here's the after. Creating composites like this is one of the best parts of affinity photo. I really hope that you've enjoyed this chapter. For the final chapter of the course, we're going to do the impossible. We'll take everything that we've learned, and we're going to put it all together to complete two beautiful start to finish projects. 78. Final Projects: We've learned a lot throughout this course. In this chapter, we're going to bring everything that we've learned together into two final projects. These projects will show you how everything you learned fits together, and it will also prepare you to edit your own photos once this course is over. Let's get started. 79. Winter Portrait - Make a Plan: In this video, we're going to make a plan for one of our final projects. To start off, I'm going to add a new pixel layer to paint on top of. Then I'll grab the paint brush tool. I'm going to make sure that all of these are set to 100%, and I'll make my brush a bit smaller. The first thing that I want to do is do some cleanup. There are a few odd branches sticking out here and there. But mainly, we have quite a bit of debris on the ground here. I think this image would look a lot better. If we just soften this up, I don't know if we'll spend the time to completely remove everything, but I do think taking care of some of the larger chunks of twigs and leaves that are here would really help to draw the eye in more toward our subject. I think I'll also reduce some of these leaves here, and whatever this is. Once we've cleaned up, we're ready to start adding adjustments. To start, we'll work on the lighting. Now, this photo is very bright with all of the snow, but our subject actually looks a little bit dark. I think I want to make our subject brighter and maybe darken up the background a bit. That was a fancy. Once the lighting is done, I think I'll go ahead and work on the color. For the colors. I think I want to desaturate some of the greens that we see here. Since this is supposed to be a snowy scene, I think that green is just a little bit out of place. We'll also probably work on some of the colors on our subject. But after we've brightened up our subject, I'm not sure which colors will need to be changed. I'll just write a general colors across her. Last, I think I want to add a bit of blurring in this image, that's not a good color. Darken that. I want to add some blurring in this image. We're going to do a lot of painting. I think that some of these areas might end up needing to be blurred. In addition, this will just create more of a focus on our subject if we blur some of the background a little bit more. That's my basic plan, and we'll see where this image takes us. I think this will be a lot of fun, especially practicing all the cleanup. This image has so much to clean up that you can really take your time with and practice using the painting brush, which I think is a super important tool for any photo editor to master. With our plan all set up, we're ready to begin our cleanup in the next video. 80. Winter Portrait - Clean Up: Let's clean up this portrait. In this video, I'm going to focus on doing some cleanup with the painting brush. I'll start by turning off our plan layer. Then I'll select the background layer and put a new pixel layer on top of that. We'll use this new pixel layer to do all of our in painting on. Then I'll come over here and select the painting brush. Then I'm going to change the setting up here to say current layer and below. With that, I'll set up. Now I can begin painting. For this image, as I said before, there's a lot to clean up. Feel free to take a lot of time with this and practice using the brush. I personally like to take my time and just put on some music and paint paint paint until everything looks good. Or if you'd prefer, you can just take care of a few of the biggest problem areas and then be done. Either way, doing this step will really help to clean up the image and bring the focus back to your subject. If you're ever painting and it's not turning out quite how you'd like. You can always press command or control Z, and this will undo what you've painted. As a reminder, if you're ever painting in an area that has quite a bit of debris, I would recommend always starting from the outside edges and working your way toward the middle from there. That way, affinity will have something nice to sample from on the outside of the debris and you can bring that nice sampled area in toward the center. Oh. Okay, I sped that up quite a bit, but I've been doing that for about 20 minutes. If it takes you a while, that's about how long it took me. Now I can show you what it looked like before. Here's the after. It's pretty amazing how much the painting brush can do. I mean, this area was completely full of twigs before and now totally clear. I think the only way this was possible was by starting from the outside edges and working my way inward. Go ahead and give this a shot for yourself. I think this step just makes a really big difference and can really help you before and after to look a lot more dramatic and beautiful. Now that we're done with the cleanup. The next thing we're going to work on is working on the overall lighting and colors in our photo. 81. Winter Portrait - Global Light & Color: Let's do some global lighting and color edits to our image. In this video, I really want to focus on the overall image. Then in the next videos, we'll work on painting on adjustments to specific areas. Let's start off with the lighting. I'll go down to our adjustments and apply a levels adjustment. Now, I think this photo is a little bit dark for such a bright, snowy day. I'm going to go ahead and brighten this up using the Gamma slider. I'll pull this over to the left to brighten things up. You can see that this is mainly affecting the mid tones or our subject in this case. I don't want to blow out the whites, so I'm going to keep the white level pumped over there, but I will bring the black level over just to deepen the blacks. I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before, and here's the after. Next, I think this photo could use some white balance adjusting, especially because I'm getting quite a bit of warm tones from our subject here. Generally, on a cool day, we should have cool tones. I'll go ahead and add a white balance adjustment. Then I'm going to pull the white balance over to the left. You can see how this just adds some more blue tones. I don't want to do too much here, but just a little bit. Now you can see that before and after Last, let's do some work with the colors. I'll add an HSL adjustment. For this image, I think I'd like to go into each individual color channel to adjust how the colors look. Let's start in the red channel and I'll pull up the saturation so that we can see what this affects. This is mainly affecting the skin of our model, but also her hair, clothing, and her boots. I'm going to increase the saturation a little bit, and I think that looks pretty nice. Next, let's go into the yellow channel and increase the saturation here. Now, this affects the trees and also her clothing. I like how that looks, bringing that up. I'll increase the saturation there. Then let's go into the green channel. This is really affecting only the trees. I don't really see anything changing on our model. Now, I don't want the trees to stand out quite so much. I think I'm actually going to pull the saturation down. Then we'll go into the channel. Oh, wow. This is affecting a lot of the surrounding areas of the trees. I think I'll go ahead and pull that down a little bit. And then we'll go into the blues. Okay. And I'll pull that down a little bit and the magentas. Magenta doesn't really do anything, so I'll just leave that at zero. As I was adjusting each of these color channels, I pulled the sliders in whatever direction I thought looked good, but I just wanted to mention that there's no right way to edit a photo. This is just what I thought looked good and if you pull your sliders in different directions or want to adjust the hue slider, that's totally okay. Now that I'm done with that, I want to see if I lower the opacity, how that looks. I do think this looks pretty good. I'll just leave the opacity all the way up, and now you can see the before and after before, after. I like how this has boosted the saturation of our subject, but decreased the saturation of the trees. Even though these were subtle adjustments, I do think this looks pretty nice. Now I'll just select all of the adjustments we made in this video so that you can see the complete before. Here's the after. Okay. All right. Great work so far. In our next video, we're going to do some painting with light. Okay. 82. Winter Portrait - Painting with Light: This video, we're going to paint with light. Painting with light is just a fancy way of saying, I want to darken the edges and brighten up our subject in this video. Let's start by adding a levels adjustment. I'm just going to drag this underneath the pixel layer. I think I actually can just delete this pixel layer. I think we know what we're doing here. I removed everything from the red circles and that looks pretty good. From here, I think we got this. I'm just going to delete this layer, so it's out of our way. Then I'll open up this levels adjustment. Let's start by darkening the edges. I want to darken the edges, but if we raise the black level, this just adds more contrast. Instead, let's use the Gamma slider. I'm going to pull this over to the right, and you can see how this begins to gradually darken. Again, this isn't doing very much. Because our background is white. We need to pull out a special slider, the output white level to darken the whites. Now as I pull this down, you can start to see how dark it becomes. Let's start by just pulling this down. That way, I can see where I'm painting. I'm going to go ahead and invert this with command or control, and now it's applied to nothing. Then I can grab the paint brush tool and I'll just make a few adjustments here. I'll lower the hardness and I'll lower the flow. Then I'll switch my colors to black and white. We have a mask here. I need to paint in white paint to reveal this darkness on the edges. I'll go ahead and make my brush a bit larger, and then I can begin painting. To me, this looks a bit harsh right now. I think I'll lower the flow even more to blend this in toward our subject. Now we can see the before and after there. I think this is very dramatic, but I do like the placement. Now that we've painted it nicely, I'm just going to open up the levels again and we can make some adjustments. I do like pulling down the output white slider, but I'm just going to bring it up so it's not quite so dramatic. Then I think I'll pull the gamma slider over to darken. To me, this looks quite subtle, but if I turn this off, you can see what it looks like before, and here's the after That did make quite a difference. I think I like how that looks. Now that we're done darkening the edges, let's do some more painting with light by brightening up our subject. I'll add another levels adjustment. This time, I'm going to just pull the gamma slider over to brighten up our subject, and this is very bright to help us as we paint. I'll invert this layer with command or control. Now I can paint in white paint over our subject. I'll just raise the flow, and then I can begin painting. I just painted over our subject and here's how that looks. Pretty nice. I'll go ahead and click on the levels adjustment, and now we can officially adjust these things. I'll bring the game a slider over to make it less dramatic but still bright. Then I think I want to increase the contrast. Especially down here on her pants, where we've brightened. Things are looking a little bit bright. I'm going to move the black level slider over to introduce a bit more darkness again. And I think I can move the white level just a little bit to brighten up the highlights. Here's how that looks. Here's the before and after, and that's quite subtle. But I think when you put these two subtle adjustments together, we'll have quite a difference. Here's the before and after. This is looking so good so far. We have a few videos left and in the next one, we're going to zoom in and focus on editing her face. Okay. Okay. 83. Winter Portrait - Focus on the Face: This video, we'll focus on the face. The edits that we've done so far have made her lips look neon and very bright. I think I want to tone down the color there. While we're working on her face, we may as well add some sharpness to the eyes. Let's go ahead and start working on the face. To start, I think we should use our selection knowledge to select her lips. I'm going to grab the selection brush tool. Then I'm going to make sure that we have the right layer selected. I'll come over here and select her layer. Then with a smaller brush. I'll go ahead and click to select the lips. That was nice and easy. Now I'm going to add an HSL adjustment so that we can tone down the color. I'm going to go ahead and drag this above the pixel layer before I make any changes. With all of that set up. Now I'm going to go into the main color channel, and I'll go ahead and desaturate. Now I do want to keep some of the color. But I think this more muted tone matches the rest of the picture better. I'll go ahead and D select by pressing command or control D. I think this looks pretty good, but let's go back in here and adjust the hue. I can make it more purple toed or more orange toneed I think you already know what I'm going to choose. Let's make it a little more orange toned. I like how this matches her hair and her coat a bit better. Now, you can see that before and here's the after Now, I might have gone too far here. If that's the case, you can always lower the opacity to bring some of the original color back before and after. I think I like how that looks. I just lowered the opacity to around 60%. Now we're ready to do a few more edits. I think I'd like to add some sharpness to her eyes. Right now, they don't look like they're very in focus. By adding some sharpness, we can make them pop a little bit more. I'm going to come over here to our filters, and I'm going to apply a high pass filter. Now, this filter automatically becomes applied as a child layer. I'll just open up that group and I'll drag this to the top of everything. That looks perfect. Now I can raise the radius. I'm just going to raise the radius. To about there. Then I'm going to change the blend mode. Remember, sharpness starts with S, and so does a soft light. I'll change it to soft light. Then I'll close out of this. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this. I'll press command or Control J three times. Now I can go ahead and group these layers by clicking on the first one and then holding shift and clicking on the last one. Then I'll press command or Control G to group them. With the group selected, I'm going to apply a mask to this group. Then I'm going to invert this mask with command or control. That way, none of these adjustments are applied to any part of this photo, and I can paint with my paint brush tool in white paint to reveal that sharpness to certain areas. In this case, I'll just decrease the size of my brush. I'm going to paint this over her eyelashes, over the iris of the eye on both eyes. I think I'll also paint with a larger brush, but a lower flow over her eyebrows. I'll undo that. I think I want this flow to be quite a bit lower. There we go. There are a few areas that look a little strange here. With a very low flow, I'm going to switch my color to black and I'm going to softly remove those grainy areas. Now I can turn the group off and we can see what this looked like before, and here's the after. Now, to me, this still looks too intense. I think I'll select one of the high pass filters, and I'll just delete that. Just to soften the effect. Remember that it's important to apply your filters like these high pass filters toward the end of your edits because they take up so much computer power. Speaking of filters, we're going to apply another filter in the next video as we create a stylized blur effect. 84. Winter Portrait - Stylized Blur: Let's make a stylized blur. I think this photo is a great candidate for making a stylized blur to draw attention more toward our subject. The reason why I think this is a great candidate is because we did so much in painting, and I'm sure there's areas throughout our image that could use a little bit of blurring to soften up some of the harsh edges that we might have created through in painting. To start, I'm going to go to our filters, and I'll add a Gaussian blur. This blur is automatically applied as a child layer. I'll go ahead and come in here and find it. There it is. I'll just drag this to the top of everything. Now I can go ahead and raise up the radius. I'll make sure to check on preserve Alpha to preserve our edges. With our blur added. I'll go ahead and invert this with command or control. Then I can grab our paint brush tool in white paint, I can go ahead and paint on this black mask to reveal the blur. Now, right now, I have very low flow. I'll go ahead and increase that I'll make my brush a bit larger. Now I can go ahead and paint over the edges. Now that this blur is applied everywhere, I think this looks extra unrealistic to make this look more realistic. We need to remove this blur from the same plane as where she's standing. This area right here, I'll switch my paint to black and with a very low flow. I'll go ahead and softly remove from this area. And I'll fade a little bit toward the background. You can see how much more realistic it looks when you've created more of a focus where she's standing and it gradually gets blurry as we move farther and farther from our subject. Now I'll turn this off and you can see the before and here's the after. Even though I removed some of the blur from these areas, there still is a bit of blurring, which I think helps with all of that in p. Here's the before and after. To keep this even more subtle, I'll go ahead and click on the Gaucianlur layer icon, and I'll go ahead and lower the radius. I don't want this to overpower our image. I just want to give this a nice effect. Now that we're done creating this beautiful stylized blur, in the next video, we're going to go through our image and put on any finishing touches that it needs. 85. Winter Portrait - Finishing Touches: This video, we'll do a few finishing touches. I think our photo looks great, but let's take a minute to evaluate if anything can be improved. As I'm looking at our image, I'm noticing that her lips are still very bright. I'd like to go back to that HSL adjustment wherever it was, and adjust that a little bit. I'm just going to go through here and check on and off layers. I found it. It's right here. I think what I want to do since I lowered the opacity is just raise this to reduce that color a bit more. I think that looks pretty good. The next thing that I want to adjust is I want to add a little bit more contrast to our subject. Mainly, I want to add more contrast to her face. To do that, I'll go ahead and add a levels adjustment. Then to add contrast, I'll move the black level slider inward, and I'll move the white level slider over as well. Then I think I'll move the gamma slider over to brighten up the face. So I like how this contrast looks on her face. I don't really like how this looks on her pants or other areas that already look too dark. So I'm going to invert this with command or control eye. Then I'm going to get my paintbrush and with white paint and a low flow. I'm going to gradually add this effect to her face. I think I also want to add this to her hair. Now you can see the before and here's the after before after adding just a little bit more contrast and brightness to the face can really help to draw the eye in to that area. At this point, I think our photo looks really good. I think I'm done adding adjustments. I'll go ahead and select the top adjustment and then scroll all the way down and while holding shift, I'll select the bottom one. Then we can see the complete before and here's the after This difference is so huge. We've done so much work to improve this photo, and I think everything looks a lot more bright and vibrant and really focused in on our subject. Great work on this project. We have one more project for this course. I think you're really going to like it. We'll go ahead and start with that in the next video. 86. Summer Portrait - Make a Plan: In this video, we'll make a plan for our final project of the course. To begin making our plan, I'll go ahead and add a new pixel layer. Then I'll grab the paint brush tool and I'll bring up the flow and hardness all the way. Then I'll go ahead and change my color. This is a beautiful photo that we're just going to make look even better. To start, I really want to replace the sky. I think it'd look beautiful if it was a nice, cloudy day with some blue skies. Just to add a little bit more visual interest up here. After that, I want to do some cleanup work. Now, this image definitely doesn't have quite as much debris as the last one, but there are still a few things here and there that if removed could really help to improve this picture. After that, we'll go ahead and work on light. I think we could definitely add some contrast to this image. Especially with our subject. I'd also like to work on the colors. I think we could definitely add more saturation. Okay. Here's a really fun part. We're also going to change the color of the dress. I think this dress is a very pretty color, but I think we could add a different color to add more contrast between the dress and the grass. I want this to maybe be a red color or a purple, something like that to just help her to stand apart from the grass. I'd also like to do a little bit of targeted light. To do that, I think I want to brighten up our subject. And darken the edges. Of course, we'll also have a video where we do any finishing touches to really pull this image together. This is going to be a really fun project. We're going to pull together so many skills that we've learned. In the next video, we'll start by replacing the sky 87. Summer Portrait - Replace the Sky: This video, we'll replace the sky. Before we do anything else in this photo, I really want to replace the sky. Let's turn off this pixel layer and select the background. Then I'm going to make a selection of the sky so that we can cut it out. Now, this is a perfect one color sky. I think we can use the flood select tool to select this. I'll go ahead and click once in the sky. Now you can see it's selected with that selected. We can go ahead and add a mask and then D select with command or Control D. Then with the mask selected, I'm going to invert this mask by pressing command or control. Just like that, we've cut out our sky. Now we can place any sky image behind here. I'm going to go to the top of the screen to file. Then I'll go down to place. Then I'm going to select this image. This is the same sky image that we used in a previous video, but I think it'll work very nicely here as well. I'll go ahead and open that up and with that loaded into my cursor, I'll click and drag to add this to our image. Before I start resizing it, I should probably put this at the bottom of our layer stack, and now I can stretch it out and make it larger. Okay, I like how that looks. Feel free to use whichever part of the sky you'd like. There's quite a few really pretty parts of the sky here. Maybe I'll use this part. The main thing is just don't include those trees. It'll look a little strange if you do. But I think that looks really nice. I think we can already see that this sky is just a little bit too intense for this overall image. The old sky was pure white. This really intense sky looks out of place. I wish that we could take this sky layer and lower its opacity, but then we just start to see this transparency. One way to combat this is to select the rectangle tool and click and drag out a rectangle. With this rectangle color set to white, I'm going to go ahead and drag this beneath everything, and now we can lower the opacity of the sky layer to make it gradually appear more white. This is just creating a much softer sky. I think that's a pretty cool trick. Before I finish this video, I think I want to make a few more adjustments to our sky. With the sky layer selected, I'm going to add a white balance adjustment so that I can add a little bit more blue to the sky. Now, I only want this to affect our sky layer. I'm going to drag this on top of the sky layer to make it a child layer to the sky. Then I'll go ahead and move the white balance slider over toward blue. You can see we're adding a lot more blue to the sky. I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before and here's the after. Next, I think I want to add a levels adjustment. I just want to increase the contrast a little bit. I don't want to fully bring back all of the contrast that was there, but I do think that adding a bit more shadows and a little bit more highlight. I think that looks pretty good. I'll also brighten the sky a little bit using the Gamma slider. Now we can see the difference here. Here's the before and after. We've brought back a bit of the contrast of the clouds, but the sky still looks very soft and light. I'll go ahead and select both of these adjustments to see the complete before and after of those adjustments. Now that the sky looks so much better for this image. Here's a quick before and after. I think this image looks really nice and the sky and the original image match very nicely. In the next videos, we can edit the image as a whole, and it will all look really nice and stay matching. But we're not quite there yet. Okay. According to our plan layer, the next thing that we need to do is clean up our image. So we'll go ahead and do that in the next video. Okay. 88. Summer Portrait - Clean Up: This video, let's do a little bit of cleanup. I'm going to start by adding a new pixel layer. I'm going to drag this pixel layer on top of everything except for the plan layer. That way, I can sample from everything beneath it. Then I'll go ahead and grab the painting brush, and I'll change it to current layer and below. Now I can go ahead and paint over any imperfections that I see in this image. As I zoom in here, you might notice that this horizon line looks a little bit strange, but I don't want you to worry about that. We're going to fix that later on in a different video. For now, we're just going to paint over any little problem areas that we see. Okay. Like I said, there aren't quite as many problem areas in this photo like there were in the last one. But I do think that doing this cleanup can make a great difference. With that said, here's the before and here's the after. We're moving right along. In the next video, we're going to do a few global edits to fix up the lighting and the colors. Okay. No. 89. Summer Portrait - Global Lighting & Coloring: Let's make our global edits to this image, and then later on, we can finesse specific parts of the image. Let's start by adjusting the lighting, I'll go over to our adjustments and I'll apply a levels adjustment. Remember that it's important to keep all of your adjustments above your cleanup layer. Now, earlier on, we adjusted this sky and had some adjustments and these are beneath this pixel layer. That's not a problem as long as we don't edit those adjustments. If we were to edit these adjustments now, Okay. Then you'll be able to see those areas that we painted. So I'll just drag that back up to where it was. So that we can have more flexibility with our edits. I'm going to keep our adjustments above this pixel layer from here on out. I'll just click on this to open it up. Now we can add a bit more contrast to this photo. I'll start by dragging over the black level, and that already looks so much better. Then I think I'll bring the white level over just a le bit. To brighten up this photo even more, let's pull the gamma slider over to the left side. After brightening. I don't think the black level looks quite as good anymore. I'm going to pull that over a bit more just to keep those shadows nice and dark. Here's the before and after of that beautiful levels adjustment. This already looks so good. Let's move on to adjusting the colors next. Let's add an HSL adjustment. I'm going to go into each individual color channel to adjust the colors. Let's go ahead and start in the red channel. I'll pull the saturation slider up, and we can see that this is affecting her skin and it's affecting the blanket a little bit. Hoops. I do think I want to increase that saturation to bring a little bit more color into her skin. Then let's go into the yellow channel. Now, this yellow channel is affecting a lot of this image. You can see it's affecting the grass and it's affecting her dress a little bit too. We're going to adjust her dress separately later on. Right now, let's just focus on the grass. I think I want to decrease the saturation here just to tone this down a little bit. I think I'll also pull the hue shift slider over to add a bit more blue green to the grass. After we change the dress color, this will help it to contrast even more with the dress. Next, let's do the green. Surprisingly, the green really isn't affecting anything. That's because in this photo, the grass was very yellow and not green. I'll go ahead and leave that one alone. Go into the sky and slider. This is affecting our sky. I think I do want to add a bit more saturation to the sky. Then moving into the blue channel. This is also affecting the sky just a bit. I'll go ahead and increase that for the magenta. I don't see this affecting anything. I'll double click on that node to reset it. Now we can take a look at the before and here's the after of that HSL adjustment. I'm already liking the added contrast between the color of the grass and our model here. To finish off this video, let's just add a white balance adjustment and see if this can help our image. As I warm this up, the clouds start to look a little bit strange. But as I cool it down, I think that actually does look pretty nice. I'm just going to cool down the image a little bit. Now I can select all of the layers we did in this video, and we can see before. Here's the after. That looks so good. Now that we've done that, let's focus on changing the color of the dress in the next video. 90. Summer Portrait - Change the Dress Color: Let's change the dress color in this video. Before I begin with changing the dress color, I want to organize my layers better. With all of those layers selected that we had in the last video, I'm going to press command or control G to group them together. With that a little bit better organized. We're going to change the dress color. But to do that, I want to make a selection of the dress first. I'm going to make sure that I have her layer selected so that the selection brush can snap to the edges of her dress. This is really important to remember. Then I'll grab the selection brush, and I'll go ahead and zoom in here. With a small brush, I'll begin to click and drag to create a selection. Now, it's okay if your selection isn't perfect. We're going to go back and refine this later on by painting on this mask. But for now, just get a pretty good selection going. If you select way too much like I just did, remember, you can hold Alt or Option and click to remove from your selection. This looks pretty good, but again, this doesn't have to be perfect. With the selection now made. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment, and this is what we'll use to change the color of the dress. But I need to make sure to drag this above our pixel layer. I'm going to drag this on top of everything. Then I can go ahead and shift the hue. I'm going to pull this over quite a bit so that we can see where we're painting as we fix up this mask. Then I'll press command or control D to D select. Okay, I pulled this on top of everything to avoid pixel layer issues. I'm also going to delete this plan pixel layer because I think we're done with it now and our layers are getting a little bit wild over here. Okay. Now, let's go ahead and fix up this mask. I'm going to grab the paint brush. Then I'm going to switch my colors to black and white. That way, I can paint in black to remove this color and white to add the color. But before I begin painting, let's go ahead and adjust the brush settings. I'll bring the hardness all the way down, and I'll paint with a bit of a lower flow. Now we can zoom in here and I can begin to paint. Now you might have this yellow haloing going around this dress, and that's because the dress originally was this yellow color. I'm going to use a very soft brush and I'm just going to paint over all of that haloing. It's okay if your magenta bleeds a little bit onto the edges. As long as the haloing is covered up, I think this is going to look a lot better. Okay. I'm just going to paint around all of the edges. And remember that if you ever want to switch your color to black, you can press x on your keyboard to quickly switch between black and white. Now I've painted and all of our haline is gone, and I think that looks a lot better. Even though that took some time, getting rid of that yellow haline, we'll just remove all evidence that this dress was ever yellow. Now we can click on this HSL adjustment icon, and we can choose the official color of this dress. I'm just going to pull this HSL slider over to choose a red orange color. I think I'll also desaturate this a little bit. I love how this contrasts with the background better before she blended in. Now she stands out from the grass and you can see the pattern on her dress even better. I think this looks really good, but I do want to alter this a little bit using a levels adjustment. That way we can emphasize the shadows a little bit better and just enhance the contrast. I want to use a shortcut though. I want to use this selection for the levels adjustment. To do that, I'll hold down command or control, and then I'll click on this mask and this will load it as a selection. Now as I add a levels adjustment, with that selection loaded, you can see that we're only affecting that area. Now that I've made a change, I can go ahead and deselect with command or Control D. Then I can go back in here and adjust just the dress. I like to deselect so that those marching ants disappear, and I can better see what I'm doing. Like I said, I want to enhance the contrast here. I'm going to pull the black level slider over so that we can see a bit more of the shadows in this dress. I think that looks pretty nice. I do think I want to lighten the dress just a little bit. I think that looks really nice. Now I'll select both of these layers, and we can see the before and the after. This is such a good change. I think this looks a lot better. I'm going to group these layers with command or Control G. Then I'll double click on this layer group so that I can rename it, and I'll just call it dress and I'll rename the other group. We'll call this global adjustments. This image is really coming along. I love all the adjustments we've done so far. Now that we have our image in a pretty good place, we can start to get fancy with it and paint with light in the next video. Okay. 91. Summer Portrait - Painting with Light: In this video, let's do some painting with light to paint with light in this video. I think I want to darken the edges and add some contrast to our subject to help her stand out more. To start, I'm going to select our top layer here. Then I'm going to add a levels adjustment. Now for this levels adjustment, I just want to darken up the edges. I'll pull the gamma slider over. Then I'll close out of this and let's go ahead and invert this adjustment with command or control. Now that it's not being applied to anything. I'm going to paint in white paint over the edges. There we go. With a nice large brush, I'm just going to paint. You can see how this has beautifully revealed this darker adjustment. Here's the before and after. The next thing I want to do is I want to add a little bit more contrast to our subject. I think it would look nice if her skin just had a bit more contrast between the shadow and highlight areas. Let's go ahead and add another levels adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and pull the black level slider over and I'll pull the white level slider over. I think I'll brighten up the skin a little bit using the Gamma slider. I think this looks really pretty. Now, I only want this applied to the skin. I'll press command or control eye to invert this. Then using white paint, I'll just paint this over the skin. Now that I think about it, adding a bit more contrast to the hair always looks nice. I'll go ahead and paint this over the hair as well. Let's take a look at that. Here's the before and after. Her skin looks a lot more glowy, and I think that looks really pretty. Adding that contrast and darkening the background has really helped to highlight our subject even more. Here's the before and after of this video. Now, I think I could do a little bit better of a job with this first levels adjustment. I can see some bright spots here and there that probably should be dark with the rest of the background. I'll just select that layer and with white paint. I'm just going to paint a little bit closer to our subject to fill in those areas. Okay. I think that looks a lot better. We are almost done with this project. In the next video, we're going to sprinkle on a few finishing touches to finish off this image. Okay. 92. Summer Portrait - Finishing Touches: Let's do some finishing touches. This photo looks great. Are there any finishing touches we should do? Well, I think we could go back through some of our global adjustments and change a few of the sliders. Let's go ahead and start in the white balance adjustment. Right now, I have it set a little toward blue. But I could set it more toward blue to cool down the image even more. I think that actually looks pretty nice. I'll just pull that over a little bit. Going into the HSL adjustment. I think we could increase the saturation overall just to make the image pop even more. I won't go too far with this though. Go into the levels adjustment last, I think I'd like this to be a little bit brighter. I'll pull that gamma slider over a bit more. Another thing I want to adjust is I want to add a bit of a blur to the clouds like we did last time. I'm going to select the top layer, and then I'm going to add a gaussian blur to it. Then I'll open up the layers and pull that Guscian blur to the top. Now let's go ahead and blur up these clouds. I'll just raise the radius here and I'll make sure to turn on preserve Alpha. Now, I don't want to take this too far. I just want to add a little bit of blurring so that the edges of the clouds don't look quite so sharp. I'll go ahead and close out of this. I'll invert this gucian blur with command or control. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't need to do that. I'll just undo that with command or control Z. Since the clouds are their own separate layer, I could just make this a child layer to the sky. I'll pull this on top of the sky layer and then I'll release. Now you can see that only the sky is being affected. Here's the before and after. Before and after. Well, that was easy. I thought I'd have to paint that on, but I didn't. Now that we've blurred up the sky, we should do the opposite and sharpen the model. I want to sharpen a few facial features. I'll go ahead and select the top layer again. Then to sharpen, I'm going to add a high pass filter. I'll pull this to the top of everything. Then I'll zoom in and raise the radius. I only want to raise this until we start to see the facial features appear. I'll just raise it to about there. Then I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light. Now I'm going to do our trick where we do a grouped mask. First, I'm just going to duplicate this, I'll press command or control J, and I'll just do that twice. Then I'll hold down shift to select all of these layers and I'll group them together with command or control G with that group made, I'm going to apply a mask. Then I'm going to invert this mask with command or control With that sharpening being applied to nothing. I can now paint in white paint over the model's facial features to add this sharpness. In this case, her eyes are closed, but I do think I want to add sharpness to her eyelash area. I'll add it to her eyebrows. We can also add it to other areas like her hair, her lips, her dress, whatever you think looks good. I really love the texture of her hair. I'm just going to paint it over her hair to enhance that. I'll also add this to her lips. Okay. Be careful when adding sharpness to the lips, though. If your subject has chapped lips, this can really enhance that. But in this case, I think this looks okay. I'll just remove any graininess that appears. I think that looks pretty nice. With that done, here's the before and here's the after of that added sharpness. Now, as I was painting this, I noticed that we have a bit of her face missing. I think this might have been a highlight area on her face, and when we removed the sky, this came along with it. I think that is a good see into cleaning up our selection. To clean this up, I'm going to come back down here to our main image layer, and then I'll select the mask. This is the mask we used to remove the sky. If I paint in black on this, this will continue to remove our subject. But if I paint in white, this will add areas back in. I'm going to go ahead and paint to reintroduce that area of her face that was removed. I don't want to bring it back too much, so I'll just remove this white part that appeared. But I think I should probably paint this along the rest of her face. This is really softening those pixelated edges, and I think this looks pretty nice. Okay. And with that fixed, now is a great time to address this horizon line and her hair. Let's start with the horizon line. Originally, the sky was white, and now we've changed it to blue with clouds. If I paint over this horizon line, and add back in those areas. This will soften up the horizon line and add a bit of whiteness to the sky. But I personally think that's okay because we already have white areas on the sky. Now you're starting to see that we're just adding that grass back in because there's clouds in these areas, this is really masking this in nicely. I'm going to do the same thing with her hair and just subtly add back in a few of the edges. Now, this isn't perfect. We're having a bit of white haline going on. To combat that, I'm going to make my brush nice and large. And then with a very low flow, I'm just going to lightly remove This is brightening up that area of the sky, so this blends better. Now, unfortunately, we had some in painting done here. I think we can go ahead and go back to that pixel layer. I'm just going to erase on that pixel layer actually. I can see that little blemish that we tried to remove earlier. I think now on this pixel layer, I'm just going to grab the painting brush set to current layer and below, and I'll just repaint over that. Now you can see that we've faded the mask into the new sky. I might have gone a little bit too far with this, but this is a great way to add back in that horizon line and just clean up any strange edges. Selections can be tricky. Any shortcuts you can take like this, I would just go ahead and take. I think this looks a little unnatural just because the sky is fading so quickly. I'm going to go back to the mask. Using my paintbrush, I'm just going to paint softly in white paint to blend this even more. I think this looks pretty good. With that finished, I'm going to select all of these layers that are above our subject, and we can see that before. Here's the after Now, that's just the before and after of all of those adjustments. I'm going to select our subject and duplicate her layer with command or Control J, and then I'll pull her to the top. Then I'll delete this mask and we can actually see the official before and after. This is such an amazing transformation. The picture was already really beautiful. But now we've just added even more contrast and color and detail in the sky. Great work on this final project. 93. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You've made it to the end of this course. I'm so proud of you. You've learned so much. Now you can go and have fun editing your own photos. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.