Create Amazing Macros in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Hey, they're affinity fans. Today, I'm excited to share my newest course with you, where we'll learn how to create amazing macros and affinity photo. Macros are one of my favorite features in affinity because with them, we can edit photos with the click of a button. All you need to do is open a photo and then pick the macro you'd like to use. Just like that, the photo is instantly edited. To make macros, we first record a series of steps that we want affinity to perform. Then after that, we can have Affinity repeat those steps on any of our photos. See macros can be very simple just with a few basic steps. But other macros can be long and complex, allowing us to perform amazing edits with the click of a button. In this course, I'll give you 30 macros that are already made. But in addition to giving you the macros, I'll also show you exactly how I made all of them. Let me show you some examples of what these macros can do. Macros come in all shapes and sizes, and in this course, we'll learn how to make a wide variety of them. That way, you'll have all the skills you need to make macros on your own. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with some important exercise files. We'll be using these exercise files all throughout the course. Be sure to download them before continuing with the rest of the tutorials. You can download these files in the next lesson, and then you're ready to begin your journey to creating amazing macros. 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. Introduction to Macros: This introductory chapter, I'll teach you the basics of using macros. You'll learn how to install macros, the basics of applying those macros, and how to keep everything nice and organized. All very useful stuff. Let's get started. 4. Installing Macros: The first step to using macros is installing the macros. Once your macros are installed, they'll always be ready to use anytime you open up affinity photo. In the exercise files for this course, if you go into the first folder, you'll see a folder called installing macros. If you click into this folder, you'll see all of these files. These are the macros that come with the course. That's where you'll locate the files. But now we need to go back into affinity photo so that we can bring those files into affinity photo. To do that, I first need to bring up a special panel that helps us with macros. Go ahead and go to the top to Window, and then go down to where it says library. I'll click on that. Now we have this library panel that I'm just going to talk right over here. The library panel is where all of the macros will be stored, and by default, we actually have a few macros right here. But I want to bring my own macros into this. The way to do that is going to the Top Hamburger menu right here, and then clicking Import Macros. You can go ahead and navigate to this folder, and then we can add these macros in. Now, unfortunately, if you try to select them all, it will say, nope, you can only select one at a time for this. We're going to have to do this one at a time. There's our first one. I'll repeat these steps, Import Macro. I'll click on the next one and open. I'll go ahead and repeat this for all of the files. I just finished importing them. I'm just going to close them up using this arrow next to their names just so that we can see all of them better. They've been numbered, so you should have one through seven right here. As simple as that, you now have all of the macros that we're going to use in the course installed into affinity photo. Because they now live inside of affinity photo. If you wanted to clear the space off your computer and delete these files, you could go ahead and do that now because anytime you open up affinity photo, all of these macros will be right here for you to use. Now that you know how to install the macros, I'm going to show you how to use them in the next video. 5. Applying Macros: Applying macros is actually really simple. First, go ahead and open up your photo. Then you can go over to the library panel, and we can open up any of these folders to find the macro that you want to apply. Now, these folders are organized by the chapters of the course. To start off, let's just stick to this very first chapter. Macros get a little bit more complicated to use in the later chapters. We'll get to those in a minute. First, let's go ahead and apply one of these macros. I'll just click on it, and now the macro is applied. Simple as that. You can see over in the layers panel, we now have this folder with all of these different layers in it, and we can turn them on and off to see the difference. If you wanted to, you could change the opacity to change the visibility of this macro. You could even duplicate this macro if you wanted to amplify it, just press command or Control J to do that. Now we have it doubly applied. I love how simple this first macro is. Just click on the macro and you have a beautiful customization effect here. I'm just going to delete these. Then I want to show you another type of macro. Some macros are only semi automatic when you click on them. Go ahead and close up this first folder and open up the lighting and color macros. I'm going to go down to the macro that says black and whitish. Go ahead and click on that one to apply it. This one is pretty interesting. When you click on it, you can see that the effect has been applied, but we're not quite done. Look down here. We have all of these sliders that we can customize for this particular photo. I'll go ahead and adjust the red slider. Maybe I'll bring up the yellow slider a little bit. You can make these changes to affect all of the colors in your photo. I'll click Apply. Now we can see over here, we have our layers applied. We can click on and off to see the difference. If we wanted to, we could go into this group and adjust anything here that we'd like. Sometimes when you make a macro, you'll want to add sliders like this because your macro might need customization to work properly. In this case, we can see that the macro looked pretty good from the start, but it could be improved with a couple of tweaks of those sliders. That's usually the case when you make a photo black and white like this. Sliders are perfect for a macro like this. I'll just delete this one. As one last example, I want to show you a macro that needs extra special customization by you. Let's go to the retouching macros, and I'm going to apply the detail extractor brush. When you apply this macro, at first, nothing happens. Let's go into our layers to see what's going on. In this layer group, we have three high pass filters and a black mask. High pass filters are used to sharpen images. But with this black mask laid over these, you actually can't see a thing. We need to paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal the sharpening. I'll go over here and get out the paint brush tool. Then I'll zoom in. I'll go ahead and change my color to white, and I think I'm going to lower the hardness all the way. I'll just click and drag on the word hardness to lower that down. Maybe I'll even lower the flow a little bit too. So this is nice and soft. Now I can go ahead and paint with this black mask selected here, you can see that I'm sharpening up the edges of the hair. Check out the difference. Here's the before and the after. Now, usually when you're sharpening a photo like this, you'll want to add sharpening wherever you want to draw attention. I'm going to lower the size of my brush using the bracket keys, and I'll just paint this over her eyes. Maybe I'll paint this over her eyebrows. I could paint it over the flower in her mouth. Anything that you want to bring forward and enhance. With all that painted, here's the before and after. Macros like this are special because you would not want this effect applied to a whole photo. You can choose exactly where you want this to be applied. Looking over in this macro folder in the library, you can see a lot of cases where you'd want to paint your macro on, teeth whitening, enhancing the eyes. These features are going to be in different places in every photo. Being able to paint them directly onto your unique photo is super nice. Now you know how to apply macros. There are a lot of other unique macros that we'll work on throughout this course. But these are the three most common types of macros and now you know how to use them. In the next video, I'll show you how you can keep your macros organized. 6. Organizing and Exporting Macros: This video, I want to really dive into how the library panel works so that we can keep things organized. As you can see, the more macros that you add to the library panel, the more wild things get over here. Let's take a look at how all of this works. I'll just close up these folders, and I'll go into the first one here. When you right click on a Macro, there are a lot of options you can do to change the individual macro. You can rename it, delete it, and you can even edit it, but we'll learn all about that later. For now, I'll go ahead and rename the macro. You can see it updates automatically. I think I'll just change that back so we don't get confused later on. But as you can see, it's super easy to rename things. It's also very easy to move macros around. Maybe you want to change the order of your macros. You can just click and drag to do that. You could even move macros into different folders. Moving macros around is a lot like moving layers. It's very user friendly. But what's slightly less user friendly are these categories here. Each of these folders is called a category, and they really don't like being moved around. To move them, you need to click on the Hamburger menu, and then you can move them up or move them down one spot. This can be very tedious if you have a lot of macros over here that you want to move around. That's just something to be aware of. There's a lot more you can do in the hamburger menu for the category. You can rename the whole category. You can delete it. You can even duplicate it. I think I actually want to delete this default category because we won't be using it. I'll just click that and make sure that I really want this. You can't undo it. I'm going to press. Now we just have the macros that we'll use in the course just to clean things up. The last option in this Hamburger menu is exporting the macros. If you remember, when we installed these macros, there were seven files to install. That's because each of these categories had its own individual file. If you ever want to export your macros to share them or sell them or move them to a different computer, then you can just click here. You can navigate to whichever folder you want to save them in, and then you can click Save. Like that, you'll have your macros in that category exported. You might be wondering though, this will export the entire folder here. What if you just want to export a single macro? Well, you actually can't do that. You could create a brand new category and put a single macro into that category and then export it to create a new category. Just go to the Top Hamburger menu and then click on Create new category. You can go ahead and give it a name. I'm just going to call it new category. I'll press. You can see our new category has been added right here. Now you can save new macros into this category. Notice I said new macros. There's actually a little bug right now where you can't drag existing macros into a blank empty category. You actually will need to record a brand new macro, and then you will be able to place it into this new category. Lucky for you. In our next chapter, I'm going to show you how to make macros from scratch that you can go ahead and save into your new category. I'll see you in the next chapter. Okay. 7. How to Make Basic Macros: Now that you know the basics of macros. It's time to make your own. I'm so excited for you because once you know how to make your own macros, you'll save so much time in editing. Let's go ahead and jump right into making macros. 8. Making Macros: Making macros is super fun. Let's go ahead and get started. First, we need to add a brand new panel called the Macro panel. I'll go up to Window, and then I'll go down to Macro. I'm just going to tuck this macro panel right next to the library panel like this. Using this macro panel. This is how we're going to record the steps of our macro. Once we click this red record button. Every action that we take on our photo will be recorded right here. Let's go ahead and start. I'll press the big red button, and we can begin to apply some adjustments to our photo. The goal for this macro is just to create some nice warm colors. Let's go ahead and start by boosting our colors. I'll go to the adjustments, and let's apply a vibrance adjustment. I'll go ahead and boost the vibrance and the saturation. All right. Next, I think I want to brighten the photo. I'll go to the brightness and contrast adjustment. Let's just make this a bit brighter and add some contrast. This looks good, but it might be a little bit too bright on the highlights. I'm going to go to blend ranges, which is this gear icon. I'm going to drag down the highlights node so that this isn't being blown out. Now you can see that calmed down the highlights a little bit. That's perfect. Let's go ahead and finish this off by adding a lens filter, just to add some warm colors. I think this is a little bit too intense, so I'll just lower that down. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we're done, we can go ahead and stop recording by clicking this button right here. Once you're done, you can go ahead and add this to your library by clicking this button right here. It'll ask you which category you'd like to saved into. I'm going to save it into our new category. I'll just rename this warm Color Practice. I'll press. Now you can see our new category has a single macro in it. Because this category is now in active category. You can go ahead and drag any other macro into it, just like you would with the other ones. I also just want to double check that this works. I'm going to delete all of these layers, and then I'll click on this macro. Yeah, you can see that worked perfectly. Great job creating your first macro. The next thing I want to do is actually rearrange the library a little bit. Throughout this course, we're going to recreate every single macro in these folders. The library panel is going to fill up fast. For me personally, as I film this course, I'm going to save all of these practice macros into this category right here. I think I'm just going to rename this category. Practice macros. And I'll probably clear out this folder every once in a while as it fills up. But I think that's just how I'm going to save these. Feel free to save all of your practice macros however you'd like. I also think I'm going to move this macro category up to the very top. There we go. The reason I'm doing this is because whenever you save a new macro, it'll ask you which category you wanted in, and it'll always default to the top category. If we just have that category at the top, all of our macros will go ahead and be saved in there automatically, which just saves us a little bit of time. Now you know how to make a super simple macro. But there's actually some extra steps that I like to take when making macros. Just so things stay a little bit more clear and organized. In the next video, we'll learn some tips to make macros work even better. O 9. Macro Tips: This video, I want to show you some tips for making better macros. In the last video, we made this super simple macro. But with a few more steps, this can be a lot more functional. What do I mean by this? Well, take a look at our layers right now. They aren't grouped together. They don't have names. It's just a little bit messy. Now I'm going to delete these steps, and I'm going to apply the warm color macro that came with this course. Now you can see the difference. They're in a group. They all have names for what they're doing. Just beautiful. But how can we do that in a macro? Well, I'll walk you through it and give you some extra tips along the way. First, tip number one, plan your macros before you begin recording them. Before I even press record, I make all of my adjustments and write down what I'm doing. I write down the adjustments name and the percentages or amounts that I've moved thing. I write down every detail. That way, I won't make mistakes while recording the macro. I've already done all of my experimenting and I'm ready to lock in my adjustments in a macro. I'll just delete this and I'll begin to make a macro and give you tips along the way. In the macro panel. First, I'm just going to clear off the steps that we took by hitting this reset button. Then before I start making my macro. Tip number two is to always have your layer selected first. Then press record. Then click off the layer. I like doing this by just clicking any blank spot in the layers panel. What this does is it selects your layer by selecting your layer, the next adjustment that you apply to your macro will always be placed at the top of your layers panel. To see this. Let's apply our first adjustment, which is the vibrant adjustment. Then I'll just change this the same amounts that I did before. We have 3010. There we go. You can see that was applied to the very top, which is perfect. Tip number three is to name your layers while recording your macro. Having named layers just prevents confusion later. If you decide to share or sell your macros, how would anyone know what each layer is doing? Naming your layers just prevents these confusions. I'm going to double click on the layer, and then I'll rename it boost colors. Tip number four, to keep the layers organized, group your first layer. I know that this is a little different from normal. Usually we have a bunch of layers and we group them together at the end. But with macros, we actually can't select multiple layers like that. Instead, I'm just going to press command or Control G right now. Then I'm going to rename this warm colors. Then I'll open the group and I'll select this layer again. Now, look what happens when I select a different layer. A dialog box will pop up and we'll ask you, are you sure you want to select the first child layer? I'll say, yep, that is the exact layer I was trying to select. It's just trying to record the steps in the right way so that nothing gets messed up. I think that's perfect. Now as I add more adjustments, they'll all be placed together inside of this group. Let's just make a couple more adjustments to keep warming things up. The next adjustment is the brightness and contrast adjustment. I'm going to raise this to 30%, and I'll raise the contrast to 15%. If you remember in the last video, we're also going to go into the blend ranges and I'll drag down the highlights. For this layer, I'm just going to rename it right now. I'll double click, and I'm going to call this Ad Contrast. If you ever accidentally click off of a layer while recording, it will record that step, which isn't very good. If you ever mess up, you can just press command or Control Z to undo your last action. Now we have that layer selected again and that step has been removed. I'm just going to add our last adjustment, which was the lens filter, and I'll bring this down to 20%. I'm going to rename this layer warmth. Now that we've added a few layers. I just want to show you that you can't select multiple layers to group them. If I hold shift and try to select this layer. This pop up will appear that says it can't record that action. This will happen sometimes. This reminds me of our next tip, tip number five, which is to think creatively as you're recording your macros. Sometimes you'll want to record a step in your macro, but then affinity tells you it can't record that action. Think about, is there may be a different action you could take to achieve the same result? Maybe you need to do things a little bit backwards like grouping everything from the start. Macros can be a little tricky like that. But I'll show you every workaround that I can as we work together on this course. We're done making this macro. I'm going to select the group again. Select the parent layer. Yes, go ahead and select that by selecting this parent layer. This just makes it. Every time you apply the macro, the whole group will be selected. I'm going to go over to our library now and stop the recording. Then I'll save this. You can see it's being saved into the practice macros. I'm going to call this warm color Better practice, and then I'll press. Finally, tip number six is to test your macro on a few different photos, just to make sure it looks good in multiple situations. A macro isn't very useful if it only works on a single type of image. Let's delete our layers over here. Let's test it again on this photo. Yeah, that looks great. We have our group. We have all of our layers nicely named. That's perfect. Now I just want to test it on one more photo. I'll press Command or Control O to open a new photo. I'll just grab the next photo. I'll open that up and we can go ahead and test it on this one. Yeah, that looks great. We really warmed up this photo too. This is such a beautiful, simple macro. I love that all the layers have names now, and it's very clear what each layer does. All the layers are grouped together. We can easily turn them all on and off to see the difference, which is great. I know we covered a lot in this video. There were some funky steps, and honestly, that was a lot of information to take. But don't worry. We're going to keep practicing these steps over and over, and it'll become so much easier the more we do it. 10. Edit Existing Macros: In this video, I want to show you how to edit an existing macro. Let's go ahead and edit the macro that we just made. I'll click to apply it. That way, we can see all of the layers and what they do. Then I'm just going to right click and then press Edit Macro. We're automatically taken to the macro panel, and here is where we can start adjusting. First, we can adjust anything that has a gear icon next to it. Once you click on that, you can change the parameters of that adjustment. For example, here, we have the lens filter parameters. If we wanted to, we could make this very intense. We could even change the color if we wanted to, anything like that. Once we've changed something, we can go ahead and save this to our library. I'm just going to name this test one and I'll press. Then I'll delete these layers over here, and we can see what this looks like. You can see this is much warmer. If we go into our lens filter adjustment, you can see that that's been raised the exact amount that I changed it over in the macro panel. I'm just going to delete this group again and I'll apply our main macro one more time. I just want to show you another way that you can edit it. I'll right click and press Edit Macro. Another way you can edit a macro is you can add more steps to it. You can do that by looking at the very last step and making sure your macro is set up that way. The last step was to set the current selection, and we know we did this by selecting the main group layer. With that selected, we can go ahead and click on the red record button, and then we can continue to add any other steps that we want to this macro. I'm going to select one of the child layers again. Then I can apply anything else that I want to. Maybe I'll apply a color balance adjustment and just make a few adjustments here really quick. I'll just rename this color balance adjustment, more warmth. Then I'll select the main group again. Maybe I want to lower the opacity of the group just a little bit. Now we can stop recording. We can add this to the library. I'll call this Test two. I'll delete these layers, and we can see how this one works. Those are some beautiful warm colors. We can open this up and see we had a lowered opacity for the whole group, and we have this more warm layer here. Another way you can edit a macro is by removing steps. We just did all of those new steps. If we wanted to remove them, we could simply uncheck all of those layers back to about that point there. Then we could save this macro. I'll name this test three. I'll delete these layers, and then I'll apply test three. You can open this up and see that we're back to our original layers. But something interesting is, if you go back to edit this one, all of those steps are still there. They're just not checked on. At any time, you could check them back on, save this macro again and have these steps again. As you can see, you can always go back and edit a macro to make it work even better. I think I'm just going to delete these extra macros just to clean these up. In the next video, we'll do some more practice as we make a beautiful macro from start to finish. 11. Macro Practice - Autumn Day: This video, we'll make a macro from start to finish. This macro is really pretty. It turns your image into a beautiful golden autumn day. To see how this macro looks, let's go into the basic macros folder, and then click on Autumn Day to apply it. Look at that difference. I purposefully chose an image with a lot of green in it because this autumn day macro really changes up the greens. Let's just take a quick look at the layers that we'll use to create this macro. This is the main color shift layer. You can see this changes our colors from green to this golden color. If I click here, you'll see we'll use a channel mixer to do that. Next, we have a layer adding some more warmth, and we'll use the selective color adjustment to do that. Last, we add a little bit of contrast to the image before and after, and we'll just use a simple S curve to create that. Now that we know what we're aiming for, I'll just delete all of these layers and we can begin making this macro. I'll go over to the macro panel, and then I'll click record. I have the layer selected, so I'll click off of it for our first step to clear the selection. First, let's do the channel mixer adjustment. I'll go into our adjustments. I'll select the channel mixer. Then in the red channel, I'm just going to shift these around a little bit. For the red channel, go ahead and lower this to negative 50%. The green channel, bring that all the way up, and the blue channel, go ahead and bring that down to negative 50. Here's how our picture is looking right now. You can see that we have some strange skin tones going on. To change this to make that look more normal, you can go ahead and change the blend mode of this layer to lighten. I just want to be completely honest with you because I probably sounded pretty confident as I was moving those sliders around. I don't actually know exactly how this adjustment works. Someone else actually came up with this technique, but I think it looks really cool. I wanted to show you how to do it. But the channel mixer adjustment is a little bit confusing. Just follow those steps and you should have these beautiful golden colors. I'm just going to double click to rename this layer Main color shift. Then since this is our first layer, I'm just going to group it with command or Control G. Then I'll go ahead and rename the group. I'll call it Autumn Day. Then I'll open up the group and select the main color shift once again. Now we just need to add our last couple adjustments. First, we have the selective color adjustment. For this one, I want to add a little bit more warmth to the photo. I'm going to go to the yellows, and I'm just going to warm those up a little bit. I'll remove Cyan. Let's remove that all the way. Then I'll add a little bit of magenta. Then I'll rename this layer more warmth. Let's finish this off with a curve. I'll go to the curves adjustment. To add just a little bit of contrast, I'll just make a super small S curve here. Just make sure the midpoint of your curve where it bends in and changes direction, lines up with the center point like this. I'll just double click and rename this contrast. With that, we have our beautiful macro finished, so I'll just select the group one more time. Then we can stop the recording and add this to our library. It's going into the Practice macros, and I'm going to call this Autumn Day Practice. Now that we have that finished, we can quickly test this on another photo, just to make sure it still looks good. I'll press command or control O to open up another photo. Let's go with this one right here. Then I'll go into our practice macros and I'll apply the autumn day practice. That just looks so pretty. With the click of a button. Now any photo can look like autumn. Great work. In the next video, we'll make another macro from start to finish. 12. Macro Practice - Dark Moody: In this video we'll make a dark moody macro. This macro is perfect for making your picture look a little bit more muted and edgy. Let's go ahead and start by applying it to see how it looks. You can see this definitely makes the picture look a lot more moody. I'm just going to go through the layers to see what we're doing here. The very first thing we do is apply a vignette. You can see how this draws the focus into the subject. Then we shift the colors, so we have a bit more cyan. You can see the difference there. Then we desaturate that cyan just a little bit and add some orange to the photo, just to make sure the skin doesn't get too blue. As last, we add just a little bit of contrast. It's a lot of layers, but that's actually pretty simple. Let's go ahead and get started making this macro. I'll delete that. Then we can go ahead and begin, I'll press record. I'll click off the layer. Now we can add our first layer, which is a vignette filter. Go down to the filters and then apply the vignette. I'm just going to shift this around a little bit so that we can see this better. I want this to be darker, so maybe about like that. I don't want it to be quite so hard. Let's soften that by bringing this slider down. We can also scale this up, maybe not quite that much. Like that. I think that looks pretty good. Now, something I always like to do with vignettes is I like to change the blend ranges. Right now, the Vignette looks pretty obvious on the light parts of the photo. But by going to blend ranges and bringing down the highlight node, you can see the difference right here. Now it's not muddying up the highlights, but we still have a nice vignette everywhere else, which is really nice. Normally, I would now rename this layer, but it's just a vignette. I'll leave that as is. Now I'm just going to group this layer with command or Control G. I'll rename the group. Dark Moody. And then I'll select the vignette layer once again. Next, we want to shift all of the blue colors more towards Cyan. We're going to do that with the channel mixer adjustment. Go ahead and go into the blues. I want to bring the blue slider all the way down, and I'm going to raise the greens about to 100 I'm just going to rename this blue to cyan. Very nice. Next, we want to desaturate the cyans. I'll go in to our adjustments and apply an HSL adjustments. I'll go into the Cyan color channel. Let's go ahead and desaturate this not completely, but just to tone that down a little bit. And I'll rename this layer, desaturate Cyan. Next, I want to add more orange tones. Just to make sure the skin doesn't look too blue. Let's go in and apply a selective color adjustment. I'm going to go into the neutrals category for this. Then I'm just going to lower cyan and you can see that really warms up the photo, and I'll just warm it up even more by adding a little bit of yellow. Next, I'm going to go into the reds. I'm just going to bump up the yellows again and remove some of the cyan again. Looking pretty good. I'll just rename this orange skin tones. We just have one more layer to go. Let's go ahead and apply a curve. Once again, I'm just going to make this a super small S curve with that center point being right in the middle. Actually, I think I went a little too far with that. I'm actually going to press command or Control Z until that curves adjustment is removed, and let's try that one more time. I thought it looked nice, but I think that was just a little too intense. I'm just going to make this a very small S curve. I think that looks a lot better. I'll double click and rename this contrast. We're done. I'm going to select the group once again. Then we can finish making our macro. I'll save this, and we'll just call this dark Moody practice. I'll press. Now we can go ahead and test this on another photo. I'll press command or Control O to open up our photos. Let's go ahead and test it on this one. I'll click to apply it. You can see how dark and moody this makes this picture look. I actually really like this effect on this picture because it really draws the focus into our subject here. All right with that, we're finished with the basic macros chapter. Great job. Now that we know all of the basics for the rest of the course, we'll really dive into making all sorts of macros and learning techniques so that you can make any type of macro that you want. 13. Lighting and Color Macros: This chapter, we'll learn how to make some fun macros to change the colors and the lighting in your photos. These are some really fun effects and you're going to learn a ton of different skills. Let's get started. 14. Vignette: Let's make a simple vignette macro. This macro is the perfect finishing touch to bring more focus to the subject of your photo. Let's start by applying the macro. You can really see how this is drawing that attention inward. Here's the before and the after. Inside of this group, you can see I just have two subtle vignette filters here. This one's pretty simple. But the one important feature that I always use for my Vignettes is to lower the highlights for the blend ranges. You can see that's right there. Otherwise, it'll just start to look too dark on the highlights. I'll make sure to do that for each layer. Since this is pretty simple, we can go ahead and just jump right into it. I'll go to the macro panel and hit record. Then I'll click off of our background layer and we can begin adding our layers. I'm going to go down to our filters and I'll just apply a vignette. For this one, I think I do want to make it pretty dark. I'm going to lower the exposure down all the way. I'm going to lower the hardness to around 10%. But this makes the Vignette very small. We need to make sure to scale it up and I'll bring it up to around 200. That's a good start. I'm just going to go into blend ranges now and I'll lower that highlight node. Now, I think I will just go ahead and rename this. I'll double click and I'll type in subtle Vignette. Then I'll group this layer with command or Control G, and I'll rename the group vignette. This is pretty simple. I'm just going to select the subtle Vignette layer. Then I'm going to duplicate it with command or Control J. This just enhances the effect a little bit. I think that's perfect. And we are done. I'm going to select the group layer. With that selected, I can go ahead and stop the recording and save this to my library. I'll put this into the practice macros and I'll just call it vignette Practice. Then I'll click Okay. All right. There it is. I'm just going to test this on one other photo. I'll press command or Control O. We can go ahead and choose any of these pictures in this folder. I'll go with this one. Then I'll click on the Vignette to see how this looks. Now, this is pretty interesting to see the Vignette on this picture. Since most of these outer areas are highlights, the Vignette really isn't showing up too strongly. But when I turn it off, you can see that this is making a difference and drawing the attention inward, which is really interesting. I love this Vignette macro because it just saves a little bit of time, but it looks good on pretty much any photo. Now you know how to make a Vignette macro. 15. Black Tones: This video, we'll make a macro that really enhances the black tones in your image. I'll go ahead and apply the black tones macro so that you can see what this looks like. This macro really adds contrast to make your image pop. You can see this gets a lot darker here to contrast with the white waterfall, which looks really pretty. In addition to that, we can see that we have some color differences here. We have some more red tones going on up here than we did in the original photo. Looking at our layers, this is actually pretty simple. We start off by desaturating most of the colors, but boosting the red tones. Here's what that looks like. Then we use a curves adjustment to darken the shadows of the image. Last, we add a little vignette around the edges to darken everything. Now that we know what we're going for, let's make this macro. I'll delete the group, and then we can begin recording. I'll click off the layer and we can start by making that HSL adjustment. Using this adjustment, I'm going to go color channel by color channel to adjust these different values. Starting here in the main color channel, I'm going to reduce the saturation to negative 30%, and then I'll press enter and move on to the next color channel. For this one, I'm actually going to change the hue to negative 15, and I'll bring up the saturation to 15. In the yellow channel. I'll also adjust the hue to 20, and I'll change the saturation to 25. In the green channel, I'm going to change the saturation to negative 30. Then I'm going to change the luminosity to negative ten in the cyan color channel. I'll change this to negative 50, and I'll change the luminosity to negative ten. In the blue channel, I'm going to do the same thing, negative 50 and negative ten. And last in the magenta channel. I'm just going to lower the saturation to negative 50. That was a lot of different numbers. Hopefully, you could follow that. Now we're done with the HSL adjustment. I'll just double click to rename this. I'm going to call it D saturate, but boost reds. With that finish, I'll just group this layer with command or Control G. Then I'll rename the group black Tones. I'll just select this layer again and then we can continue. For this next part, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I mainly want to darken the shadows here. I'll darken this side of the curve. Then I'm going to level out the highlights so that the white line matches up to this middle area again. I think that looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and rename this dark shadows. Last, I'm just going to add a filter. Let's do the vignette filter. I'm just going to change this to negative three. I'll change the hardness to 15, and I'll boost the scale up to 200. As always, I'm just going to change the blend ranges to bring down that highlights node. I don't need to rename the vignette layer. We're done. I'll just select the group. Then I'll finish my recording. I'll call this Black Tones Practice. All right. And now we can go ahead and test this on another picture. I'll press Command or Control O to open up our pictures. And I'm going to go ahead and test it on this picture right here. I'll go into our practice macros and I'll apply the Black Tones practice and here's what we're working with. This doesn't actually look very good, especially on the skin. She looks very washed out and strange. Did we mess something up when making this macro? Well, maybe. But something to keep in mind with macros is that they might not look good on every single image. Sometimes you might need a particular look to make it work. Let me show you. I'm just going to open up another photo. I'll choose this Sepia one. Then I'll apply the Black Tones practice to it. This picture actually looks really nice with the Black Tones macro. But what's the difference here? Well, in this picture, there's not so much skin showing as the focus of the picture, and it also has beautiful contrast. You can see that the Black Tones macro really helps the white horse to stand out from its background. I think that just makes this look a lot more striking to have that contrast, where in this other picture, she's really the focus of the picture. There's not a lot of contrast going on. Adding this really creates too much contrast and makes the skin look strange. In conclusion, for the black Tones macro, I suggest using a high contrast photo with not too much skin showing. It's a very intense macro, but it can look beautiful on the right picture. Now that we're done with that. In the next video, we'll create a macro that has beautiful coloring. 16. Polaroid Picture: Let's make a polaroid picture macro. This macro will make your picture look faded and have different colors to make it look like a polaroid picture. I really like the color grading that we add here. Here's the before and the after. Let's go ahead and see how this works. The first layer is actually a pink layer, which adds this pink color to the shadows. Then we have a yellow layer that adds the yellow color to the highlights. Last, we have a curves adjustment to lower the contrast of the image overall. This is pretty simple, but we will learn a new technique for how to add colors to your macro. I'll just delete this and we can go ahead and get started making this. I'll press record. I'll click off the background layer. Now I want to add that pink layer for our shadows. Now, affinity photo will not let you record a new fill layer and change its color, which is usually what I would do for this. A work around is actually to create a new pixel layer by clicking right down here. Then you can use the flood fill tool, which looks like a paint bucket. Go ahead and click on that. Then you can choose the color that you want. I'm going to choose a nice bright pink color. Then I'll click in our document to fill this pixel layer with color. That's the work around for that. I'm just going to adjust this layer, so it blends with the photo beneath it. First, I'm going to change the blend mode to Lighten. You can see how this is mainly affecting the shadows in the picture like his black shoes or the instrument case here. I'm just going to lower the opacity. I'll bring it down to around 30%. I think that looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and rename this layer pink shadows. With our first layer done, I'll just group it with command or Control G. Then I'll rename the group Polaroid picture. I'll just select the inner layer again and we can repeat this process to create our yellow highlights layer. I'll add a new pixel layer, and we still have the fill bucket tool out. I'll just change the color to a yellow color. I'll click in our document to apply that. Then I can begin making adjustments so that this blends. First, I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply. Then I'm going to lower the opacity quite a bit to around 15%. With that done, I'm just going to rename this layer Yellow Highlights. This last step is pretty easy. We're just going to decrease the contrast by adding A curves adjustment. Instead of the traditional S curve, I'm going to reduce the contrast by bringing this highlight node down, the shadow node up. Then I'm going to level out the middle like this. I'll just rename this layer less contrast. I'm just going to select the group and we are done with the Polaroid picture macro. I'll save this and I'll rename it Polaroid picture. Now we can test it on another picture. I'll press Command or Control O. I'll just select the next picture. And then I'll apply it. This one is so beautiful. It really enhances the pastel soft look of this picture. I think this looks really nice on this picture. Here's the before and the after. Great work on creating the polaroid picture macro. 17. Black & White-ish: Let's make the black and whitish macro. This is a very exciting macro because not only does this black and white effect look beautiful, but I'm also going to show you how to add sliders to your macros. I'll just apply the macro, so we can see these sliders in action. You can really play up this macro to change what's emphasized in the picture. In this case, I think I want to make everything dark except for our subject like that so that she really stands out. I'll apply this. We can take a look at our layers. As you can see, super simple macro. We just have a black and white adjustment, and then we have a curves adjustment where we add some colors and contrast. I'll just delete this and we can jump into making this one. I'll hit record. I'll click off this layer. Then we can start by adding the Black and white adjustment layer. For this one, we actually don't want to adjust any of these. We actually just want to click once on one of them, make sure it stays at 100%, so that this step appears right over here. Set adjustment parameters. Once you have that, you can click on this gear icon, and you can see all of the sliders are visible here. Now, to make all of these sliders when the macro first opens, we need to make them visible by clicking on the next to each one of these. I'll click on that. If you'd like, you can rename it to anything you want. I'll just leave this alone. And then press. Because I've just made the red slider visible, if I were to stop here, when you apply this macro, only the red slider would pop up for you to adjust. I need to make sure to do each one of these. I'll just quickly go through and make them all visible. You can turn anything with a gear icon into a visible slider like this. We'll do this more in later videos. But for this first one, we'll just do it with a black and white adjustment. I'll close out of this. Then we can go ahead and group our first layer with command or Control G. I'll just rename the group black and whitish. I'll select the layer again, and then we can apply our last adjustment, which is a curves adjustment. The goal with this curves adjustment is to create more contrast and add a little bit of color to this. To start, I'm just going to create a small S curve to add contrast. Then I'm going to go into the red color channel, and I'm going to create a larger S curve for this one. This adds red to the highlights and can to the shadows. Next, we'll go into the green channel. For this one, I'll do a medium S curve sitting right in between the white line and the red line. This adds a little bit of green to the highlights and a little bit of magenta to the shadows. Last, we'll do the blue color channel. For this one, I'm actually going to do a reverse S curve. By lowering the blues. I'm basically adding yellow. In this case, I'm adding yellow to the highlights, and then adding blue to the shadows. You can see we have our black and whitish effects looking beautiful. It's practically black and white, but with this little bit of color, it just makes it a little more interesting. I'm just going to rename this layer. I'll call it color and contrast. And I'll just select the group, and we are done. I'll save this, black and white ish practice. Now we can test it on another photo. I'll quickly test it on this vignette photo. We can just see if the sliders appear. They did. Because we made each one of those sliders visible, now we can go ahead and adjust how these look. That looks beautiful. I'll just apply that and we can see all of our layers here. Here's the before and after. This works perfectly, and now you know how to add sliders to your macros. We'll do another macro with sliders in the next video. 18. Sepia: Let's create a beautiful sepia tooned macro. So this macro is like the brown toned version of the last macro that we made. Once you apply it. The same thing happens where all these sliders appear. You can go ahead and adjust these however you'd like, and then press apply. Once we apply it, you can go ahead and see all of the beautiful layers that we have here. There's a few extra layers that I added in here to create a vintage look. The very first layer is just the black and white adjustment layer. That's where the sliders come from. Then we add a curves adjustment to lessen the contrast. Then we add a brown color using the lens filter adjustment. Here's where some of that old tiny look come from. We're going to add a vignette to darken the edges. Then we're going to add some noise just to add some graininess to the photo. Now that we know our plan, I'll just delete this layer and we can begin recording the macro. I'll go to the macro panel and start recording. I'll click off this layer, and then we can begin with the black and white adjustment layer. With that applied, I'll just click on any of the sliders to activate that step. Then I'm going to turn all of these on one by one to make the sliders visible. With that finished, we can go ahead and close that. I don't think I need to rename this one. I'm just going to jump right into grouping it with command or Control G. Then we can rename the group, Sepia. I'll just open up the group and select the child layer, and then we can do the next step, which is lowering the contrast. To do this, go ahead and apply a curves adjustment. And to lower the contrast. This is the same thing that we did for the polaroid picture macro. We're going to lower the highlight node, raise the shadow node, and then level it out in the middle. There we go. I'm just going to rename this layer less contrast. Next, we're going to create the brown color. I'll go into our adjustments and apply the lens filter. For this one, I'm going to change the color to a saturated brown color. I'm just going to move the color down like this we have that nice rich brown color. So that we could see that color better. I'm going to up the optical density to 90%. Then we can go ahead and rename this brown color. This looks really good so far and you could stop here. But I just want to add those vintage touches to make this look a little bit more antique. The next thing we're going to do is go into our filters and apply the vignette filter. The values I chose for this one are negative 3.5 for the exposure, ten for the hardness, and 245 for the scale. As with every vignette. I'm just going to go into our blend ranges and lower the highlight node. The last step is going back into our filters, and I'm going to apply the add noise filter. I'm going to bring this up quite a bit. I think to around 20%. There we go. I don't think I'm going to rename either of those layers. We're done. I'm just going to select the group. Then we can stop recording and add this to our library. With that finished, we can go ahead and open up another picture to test this on. I'm going to test it on the polaroid picture here. I'll a fly it. We can go ahead and adjust these sliders however we'd like. I think that looks really nice. Here's the before and the after. Great job. Now that we've done a few macros with sliders. In the next video, I want to teach you a new technique. We're going to learn how to incorporate image overlays into your macros. 19. Orange Bokeh: In this video, we'll learn how to make a macro that can make any photo have a magical Boca light effect. This is a pretty exciting one. I'll just click on the orange Boca macro so that we can see what this looks like. This is such a pretty effect. I'm just going to turn this on and off so you can see what we have going on here. Layers. We only have a few layers here. The first layer is the Boca image that we're going to overlay onto our document. Then we have a layer to lessen the contrast. Last, we have a gradient map adjustment that we're going to use to add some warmth to the photo. So pretty. Now, before we recreate this, I just want to take a quick peek into how I found this boca image in the first place. I found this image on pexels com. I just typed in Boca. These are the images that came up. Now, I wanted to find an image that was on a dark background with just the Boca balls because I'm going to use blend modes to overlay these lights onto my design. But you can see there are so many beautiful ones that you have to choose from here. You can choose ones that are more glittery. You can choose ones with smaller brighter little balls or ones that are a little bit more colorful. You have a lot of options to choose from here, but I would stay away from anything that has too much detail going on. You just want a picture like this that has just the balls of light and a dark background. That's how I found our exercise file for this macro. But you can feel free to use any voc of all image to create your own. I'm just going to delete this. Then we can begin making the macro. I'll hit record. I'm going to click off of the background layer. The first step is adding that Boca image. I'll go to the top of the screen to file, and then down to place. I'm going to select this next image right here. I'll open that up. Then I'll click once in the document to apply this image. To center this image, you can go to the top right here. Then you can align it horizontally and vertically. Go ahead and hit Apply. Then I'm just going to change the blend mode so that it blends with the layers beneath it. I'll go ahead and change this to screen. Next, I'm just going to rename this layer. I'm going to call it Boca image. Then I'm just going to group this layer, and I'll rename the whole group orange Boca. I'm just going to select the layer again. Then we can add a few more layers to enhance the effect. For the next layer, I want to decrease the contrast, but I want to show you a new way you can do that without using curves. Another layer you can use to lessen contrast is the levels adjustment. I really like this adjustment, but there are a lot of sliders here that can make things confusing. The first sliders enhance contrast if you move them inward. These lower sliders will decrease the contrast as you move them inward. I'm going to go ahead and move the output black slider to 10%, which will just lower the contrast of the shadows, and I think that looks really nice. I'm also going to brighten the entire photo using this gamma slider. This one can brighten or darken the entire photo. I'm just going to move it over to the left to brighten things up. I'm just going to rename this layer. I'll call it less contrast. To finish things off, I'm going to add some nice colors to this. I'm going to go into our adjustments and apply a gradient map adjustment. This is way too many colors, so I'm just going to select the green node and then hit delete down here. Then I'm going to keep the shadow set to red, but I'm going to change the highlights to yellow. Once that's done, I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode to soft light. Just so this blends a little bit better. I'm also going to lower the opacity down to around 30%. I'm going to rename this layer warm colors. We're done. I'll select the group. I'll stop the recording, and I'll save this to my library. I'll call this orange Boca practice. This is our very first macro that we've ever made with an image inside of it. This image now lives inside of this macro. You can go ahead and delete the image off of your computer at any time. It'll always be right here in the library panel. Let's test this on another photo. I'm just going to choose this photo. Then I'll go ahead and apply it. I would suggest using this macro on a darker image. But this is the only image I had for this chapter that I thought would work since it's indoors and has the right look for this. Now, one thing that you might need to adjust with this macro is the image size. In this case, I do think I'm going to select the Boca image layer, and then select the move tool just so that I can adjust the size of this because it's quite large compared to the photo. You could go ahead and shift that downward like that. You could also rearrange how this is positioned if you wanted it to frame her a little bit better. That's just a very quick and easy way to customize this macro. Great job on finishing this lighting and color chapter. You have a lot of great macro making tools under your belt. We're going to keep on learning even more techniques in the next chapter as we make some beautiful retouching macros. 20. Retouching Macros: This chapter, we're going to learn to make macros that are perfect for portrait retouching. We'll learn how to edit the eyes, teeth, the skin, stuff like that. These macros are going to save you so much time, so let's get started. 21. Grouped Masks: In this video, I want to teach you about grouped masks. We're not actually going to make a new macro yet. Once you understand grouped masks, you'll be able to make even better macros. We're just going to start with this. My goal for this video is to change the color of the hat and enhance it a little bit. I need to use a few different adjustment layers for this, I only want these adjustments to be applied to the hat. Here's the technique for that. First, go ahead and apply an adjustment. I'm going to apply the HSL adjustment, and then I'll change the color. Once you have your adjustment, we can go ahead and put this layer in a group with command or Control G. Now that we have a group, we need to add a mask to it to create our grouped mask. I'm going to go down here and click on the Mask icon. By default, this will apply a white mask, which means that everything in this group is visible. But I actually want the opposite of that. I'm going to invert this by pressing command or control I. Now that this mask is inverted and black, I can grab my brush tool and paint in white paint with full flow to reveal the adjustments that are inside of my group. I'm going to go ahead and paint over the edges of this hat here. Then I'll just fill it in. I'll use the bracket keys to make my brush a little bit smaller for the edges. If you ever paint too much, you can hit x on your keyboard to switch your color from white to black. I'll just erase a little bit. That was the basic setup for creating a grouped mask. Just apply an adjustment, group it, apply a mask to it, invert it into black, and then you can paint over the area. With that setup, we can actually apply as many adjustments as we want to this group. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select this layer, and I'm just going to adjust the hue and the saturation. Then I'll apply a curves adjustment, and I'll darken the color of the hat. Notice only the hat is changing as I do this. That's the magic of grouped masks. Last, I'm going to apply a filter. I'll apply the high pass filter. I'll really boost the radius, and then I'll change the blend mode of this to soft light. This will just add some nice sharpness so that we can see the detail of the knitting. It's so nice that we don't need to select the hat over and over as we do this. Grouped masks are so nice like that. In the next few videos, we're going to put grouped masks into action with some beautiful retouching macros. 22. Teeth Whitening: Let's make a teeth whitening macro. Whitening teeth can take a lot of different adjustment layers. Making a macro for it will save a lot of time. Let's start by just seeing what this macro looks like. I'll click on the teeth whitening macro and you can see that at first it looks like nothing happens. That's because we have a black mask applied to this entire group. The way to use this macro is to grab the brush tool and paint in white paint over the area that you want to apply the macro to. I'll just paint in white over the teeth to reveal what we have going on here. You can see we have some beautiful white teeth. I'm just going to turn the layers off so that we can see what each one of these does. The first layer is a desaturate yellows layer. Here's what that looks like. You can see it makes the teeth look a little bit more gray. We'll need to brighten them up a little bit more with the next two layers where we'll brighten up the shadows. Then we'll brighten up the highlights. Now, this brightened highlights layer is a little bit different. We'll not only be brightening the teeth, but we'll also add a little bit of blue. That way, it just counteracts any leftover yellow that's still on the teeth. This is a pretty fun one. You can see that it brightens the teeth quite a bit. If you ever feel like it's too much for your picture, you can always just lower the opacity down. I'll just delete this so that we can begin recording. I'll hit record. I'll click off the layer and we can begin. First, I'm going to apply the HSL adjustment to desaturate the yellows. I'll go into the yellow channel, and then I'll lower the saturation to negative 75%. I'll close out of this. Then I'll just rename this layer desaturate yellows. Then I'll go ahead and group this layer with command or Control G. I'll just rename this layer, teeth whitening. Up until this point, everything has been pretty normal for making our macro. We applied an adjustment, we grouped it. But here's where things get interesting because we want to apply a mask to the entire group with the group still selected. Go ahead and hit the mask icon. This will apply a white mask, but we'll want to invert this with command or Control I. What we've done is we've applied a black mask to the group, which means that we won't be able to see any of the rest of the adjustments that we apply to this macro. That makes it a little bit tricky to film. But as long as you plan ahead and you know the amounts that you want to adjust everything, you should be just fine to record this macro. Don't worry, I'll walk you through all of the adjustment layers so that this isn't quite so tricky. Go ahead and select the desaturate yellows layer. Then we can go ahead and apply the rest of the adjustments. First, I'm going to apply a curves adjustment. I'll brighten the curve. This one is going to be used for brightening the shadows. I'll go into blend ranges, and I'm just going to lower the highlight node and bring it over so that this bright curve is only affecting the darkest shadows. I'll just rename this layer. Brighten shadows. Let's do that one more time. I'll add a curve, and I'll brighten it. But this time, I'm going to add a little bit of blue. I'll go to the blue channel and raise that. I only want this applied to the highlights. I'll go into blend ranges. I'll leave the highlight node raised, and I'll lower the shadow node, so it's no longer applied to the shadows. I'll also bring it over halfway. I'll rename this layer. Brighten highlights. Normally, at the end of recording a macro, I would select the group. But this time, I want the macro to start on the black mask whenever it's applied. That way, people can jump right into painting on it. Unfortunately, you can't just select the mask layer. If you try. It just won't work. I'll jump to a different layer. I'm going to hit command or Control Z. Instead, what you need to do to select the mask is actually selecting the group. And then go ahead and select the mask layer, and now it should work just fine. I'll just stop the recording now, and I'll save it into our library. I'm going to call it teeth whitening practice. Now we can go ahead and test this. I'm going to open up this subject enhance photo for this. She has such a beautiful smile that we can apply this to. I'll just click. And you can see that because we ended on the mask layer, it's already selected when we apply this macro, which is perfect. I can just grab the paint brush, switch my color to white, and then I can paint over the teeth to apply the macro. Now, she already has pretty white teeth, I might need to lower the opacity quite a bit. But before I do that, here is the before and after of that. Very nice. I think for this picture, I would just lower this down a little bit. But you can still see that we have whitened up the teeth to brighten up the smile. Very nice. I'm so glad this macro worked out. It's a little scary recording with a black mask. But because we planned ahead and knew what we were doing, it wasn't too bad. Now that we've recorded our very first macro using a black grouped mask. This will make the rest of the chapter so much easier because we're actually going to do this a few more times. In the next video, we're going to use a grouped mask to make a macro that enhances the eyes. 23. Enhance Eyes: In this video, we'll make a macro to enhance the eyes. Eyes need multiple adjustments to look good. We'll break this macro down into three different parts to apply all of the different lighting and color adjustments that will really make the eyes look good. First, let's take a look at our macro. You can see this macro also has a black mask. But it actually has a few more black masks because there's just so much to add to the eyes. To start, I'm going to grab the paint brush and I'm going to paint in white paint over the eyes. For the first black mask, I'm going to paint this over the iris of the eye and over the pupil, just paint it over this whole area, and I'll do that for every eye in this picture. Painting over all of the eyes is step one. What this is doing is it's revealing this base edit group down here. To see this, I'll just zoom out, so we can see all of our eyes. Then I'll turn these layers off so that you can see what each one is doing. First, we have a sharpening layer that adds sharpness to the eyes. Maybe I'll just in like this. We can see this better. Here's the before and the after before after. Then we add a little bit of saturation to the eyes. Here's the before and after. I think you might be able to tell a little bit better with the cat's eye. Here's the before and after. Then we add a brightness and contrast layer, and that's our base edit for the entire eye. Next, we have a layer that will enhance a dark rim around the eye. To do this one, you just need to select the layer and then paint in white paint around the rim of the eye. Now, because we've already painted very carefully over the eye, we actually don't need to be as careful with this part because our painting will be contained to the area that we originally painted in, if that makes sense. We just need to paint around the rim like that. As you can see, this just darkens the rim to enhance the outer edge. Last, we have one more layer called kicker light. This layer is for enhancing any of the bright spots in the eyes. I'm just going to paint it over all of the bright highlights that are reflecting off of the eyes. Wow, you can really see a difference now. Here is the complete before and after of our eye enhancements. This is such a beautiful way to enhance the eyes. I'm just going to delete this group so that we can try making this macro for ourselves. I'll go to the macro panel and hit record. I'll click off the layer, and then we can begin. First, I'm going to apply a sharpening layer. I'll go to my filters and I'll apply the high pass filter. I'm going to bring the radius up to five pixels. Then I'll change the blend mode to overlay. I'll rename this layer sharpening. Then I'll just press command or Control G to group this. This is going to be the entire group. I'll rename this enhance Is. With this group still selected, I'm going to apply a mask to it, and then I'll invert the mask with command or Control I. I'm just going to open up this group and I'll select the sharpening layer. Then I'm going to group this layer one last time with Command or Control G. I'll rename this group base it. That was a lot of different groupings, but now that we have this setup, we should be able to easily create the rest of this macro. I'm just going to select the sharpening layer. Then we can apply the next layer, which is an HSL adjustment. I'm going to go into our main color channel, and I'll increase the saturation to 10%. Then I'll rename this layer saturation. Keep in mind that we won't be able to see any of the rest of our adjustments because we have this black mask of flide. I'm just following my notes for how much to adjust everything here since we can't actually see it. For the next layer, I'm going to add a brightness and contrast layer and I'm going to brighten this to 15%. I'm going to raise the contrast to 5%. I don't want to over brighten things. I'm actually going to go into blend ranges and I'll lower the highlight node. Just to make sure that we don't over brighten this highlight spot here, since we're going to paint over it later to really brighten it up. Now that we're done with that, we're actually done with this base edit group. I'll select it. Now our next layers will go on top of the group. They won't be inside of it like the rest of these. The next layer I want to add is a curve. I'm going to darken the curve. Then I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I. You can see that this applies a black mask to this curves adjustment, which means that we won't be able to see it and we'll need to paint over it to reveal this darkness. I'm going to call this dark rim because that's what I want people to paint around to reveal the darkness. I'm going to add another curve. This time I'm going to brighten it. And I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. I find that this looks a little bit better for brightening those light spots. I'll also lower the opacity of this layer to 50%. Just to keep it a little bit subtle and last, I'll invert this layer so that we won't be able to see it and we'll need to paint over it to reveal it. I'll rename this kicker light. There's actually one more layer. I really don't want this lighting to become too sharp and harsh on the eye. I'm actually going to go into our filters and apply a gaussian blur to blur the kicker light layer. I'm going to raise the radius quite a bit. I think I'll bring it up to around seven. Then so that this only applies to the kicker light layer. I'm actually going to go up into our menus. I'll go to a range. Then I'll click on move inside. This makes the Gaussian blur a child layer to the kicker light, which is why it was hidden when we first applied this adjustment and I forgot to show it to you. But there's that. This will make that lighting a lot more soft. Now to finish off, I just want to make sure we have our first black mask selected. Right now I have the Gaussian blur selected, so I need to first select this layer, it's parent. Then I'll select the overall parent layer. Now we can finally select the mask layer. With that all done, we are finished recording our macro and would you look at all of those steps? Wow. That was a lot. I'm just going to save this and we'll call this I enhanced Practice. With that done, we can test it. I'm going to test it on the teeth whitening photo. I'll just zoom in here so we can see this better. Then I'll click on the eye enhanced Practice. Automatically, we have the black mask selected, which is perfect. All I need to do is paint in white paint over the eye. Then I can go down here and paint on the dark rim. I might have painted too much there. Last, we can paint in white paint once again to reveal the lighting. Now we can see the before and here's the after of that e enhancement. I might have painted a little bit too for the dark. I'm just going to go in here and soften that by painting in black. There we go. Here's though before and after and feel free as always to lower the opacity if it's too much. But I think this is such an interesting and fun macro, and it really saves so much time. You saw how many steps we had to add to that macro. But we painted this over his eyes in just a few seconds. I think this is just a great macro to have over in your library. In the next video, we'll take a step back and make a simpler macro that adds beautiful detail to your photos. 24. Detail Extractor Brush: Let's make a macro to enhance the details in a photo. I'm calling this one, the detail extractor brush because you simply paint on a mask and all of your details come to life. Let's take a look at the macro. Once again, we'll be painting in white to reveal what's inside of our group. I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll paint in white paint to reveal this. I'll just paint over her eyes and the flowers on her face just to enhance them. Anything where you want the detail pulled in, maybe even the lips or things like that. Then we can go ahead and turn this off to see the before and here's the after before, after. This one's actually pretty simple. As you can see, the layers are just three high pass filters to enhance the effect. Since this is so simple, I think we can go ahead and just get started with this. I'll begin recording. I'll click off the layer, and then I'll go to our filters and apply a high pass filter. For the high pass filter, I prefer using a smaller radius and then duplicating that high pass filter to really enhance the fine details over and over again. You could boost the radius quite a bit to sharpen more. But what this is doing is it's sharpening more areas in the photo that you probably wouldn't want sharpened. By just using a very small two pixel radius, I can really help to just enhance just the areas that you want to enhance, like the eyelashes and the iris of the eye, not all of the little red veins in her eye or other areas like that. Set that to two pixels, and then let's change the blend mode to soft light. With that first layer done, I'm just going to group this with command or Control G. Then I'll rename this detail extractor. At this point, I'm just going to select our hi pass layer, and I'm going to duplicate it twice with command or Control J. With that done, I'll just select the group again. I'll apply a mask. Then I'll invert this mask with command or Control I. We're done. With that mask still selected, I'll go ahead and finish off recording the macro and I'll save it. I'll call this detail extructor practice. There we have it. Now we can go ahead and test this on another photo. I'll test it on the eye photo. I'll apply this and we can just paint in white over the eyes to enhance them. Oops. Make sure you're painting in white. There we go. Here's the before and after sharpening up the cat's eyes. I think that looks really nice. It's very subtle. If you want to really enhance this, you can always duplicate the group, but I think that might be a little bit too much now. Here's the before and after of that. Very nice work. Now that we know how to enhance the small details in our photo. Let's learn how to make the skin look better in the next video. 25. Skin Smoothing: This video will enhance the skin. This skin smoothing macro is perfect for quick and easy skin smoothing. Let's take a look at what this looks like. Just like all of the other macros that we've done so far, we'll need to paint in white paint on a black mask to reveal this effect. I'll grab my paintbrush and I'll paint in white paint with a low flow. Then I can begin to paint over the skin. Now, you can see the skin has a few little bumps on it, and as I paint over those bumps, they're reduced. This is even more apparent on the chin, where we have some larger bumps. I'll just paint over those to minimize them. Here is the before and after and for the cheek up here before and after. We're making this happen through frequency separation. Frequency separation will separate your photo into two layers. One that has all of the colors on it, and the other that has all of the texture. What we're doing is we're blurring the colors layer and leaving a nice layer of texture on top of that. That's why you can still see skin texturing and it doesn't just look like a blurry mess. Making this macro is actually pretty easy. I'm going to start my recording, and I'll click off the layer. The first step for this macro is to go up to our menus to layer, and then down to where it says Merge visible. I'll use this layer for the frequency separation step. It'll be cut into two separate layers. That way, the original photo layer won't be destroyed in this process. I also chose not to duplicate this background layer. I merged it. That's because you might apply this macro and have other layers that you've been working on like a layer to brighten the photo or do other edits. By merging, all of those edits that you might have been working on will all become one layer that will apply the effect to. Before I apply frequency separation though, I'm just going to group this layer, and then I'll rename it, skin smoothing. Now I'll just select this layer again and we can apply the frequency separation by going to the top of the screen to filters, and then down to frequency separation. I'm just going to leave this at the default settings. But I just wanted to quickly show you the high frequency side has all of the skin texture on it, and the low frequency side has all of the fuzzy colors here. You can really visually see the difference right here. I'll hit apply. You can see that that merged layer has now become these two layers. I'll select the low frequency layer. And then I'll duplicate it with command or Control J. Using this duplicate copy, I'm going to blur this duplicate, which will create that skin smoothing effect. I'll go to our filters and I'll apply a gaussian blur. Then I'll just increase the radius of this to around 12 pixels. I'll also turn on preserve Alpha. With that done, I'm just going to make sure I select its parent layer. Then I'm going to apply a mask to this layer and I'll invert it with command or control I. Now we'll need to paint on this black mask to reveal this nice blurring effect over the skin. I actually want to stop it here with this mask selected so that whenever you apply the macro, that mask will be selected and ready to paint on. I'll stop the recording and I'll save it to the library. I'll just call this skin smoothing practice. Okay. Now we can test it to see how it works. I'll apply this. Then I'll grab my paintbrush and I'll paint in white paint to reveal this. I'm keeping my flow nice and low so that I can gradually build up my paint to reveal the effect. By painting over this area, I'm just reducing the look of all of those pores on the skin. Here's the before and that might be a little bit too intense. You can always paint in black paint to reveal some of that back again. Here's the before and after. I also want you to keep in mind that as you're using frequency separation, it's important to stay on flat areas of the skin like this, rather than painting on the very edges. If you paint on the very edges, they can look pretty strange. I'll just paint on the edge of this nose to show you that. Look how soft and strange this looks. You're taking away detail from areas where it really matters or the edges of the lips. This can look pretty strange too as you blur these colors out. Here's the before and after. As you're using this, just be sure to avoid any areas like that. Even on this picture, blurring the edges of the flowers would look really strange. That's just a little advice for you. Just be careful as you're painting. In the next video, we're going to make a macro for dodging and burning. 26. Dodge & Burn: Let's make a macro for dodging and burning. Dodging and burning is the technique of darkening and brightening different parts of your photo to add or remove contrast. Let's take a look at how the macro works. This macro is a little bit unique because we have four different black masks that we'll paint on top of in white paint to reveal their different effects. The first two are for darkening different parts of the photo. You can darken the highlights or darken the shadows. Then down here, we can brighten the shadows and highlights. Let's do some painting to see how you would practically use this. I'll paint in white paint with a low flow. First, we'll darken the highlights. This is for any areas that you don't want the attention drawn to. You might paint dark paint over the hairline and over the neck, to frame the face and bring the attention inward. Another area you might want to darken are the eyebrows and eyelashes, to draw the attention there. You might also want to darken the lips to add more emphasis to them as well. For darkening the shadows, I would honestly darken some of those same areas again. The hair line, just darkening those areas. You can also come in here and darken some of the shadows of the hair to add contrast. Again, you could darken the eyebrows and the eyes to enhance them. Next, we can brighten areas. Some areas you might want to brighten for shadows are under the eyes. You also might want to brighten areas like the center of the forehead to bring attention, maybe the center of the chin. I think that looks pretty good. Last, we can brighten any highlight areas that we want to enhance. In this case, I think I want to brighten the highlights that are on the lips to make them look nice and shiny. Maybe I'll just enhance the highlight that's on her cheek right here, and the highlights of her hair. With that, I'll just turn this off so that we can see the before and the after. It's a pretty dramatic difference. She's the same person, but we've just changed up the lighting. As we're making this macro, basically it's a simple curves adjustment for each of these layers with different blend ranges depending on what we're doing. Here we're darkening the highlights, which means we need to keep the highlights node raised and lower the shadows. We'll make those adjustments depending on the layers. In addition, each of these layers has a gaussian blur applied to them. That way, all of our painting just stays very soft. Now that we know how all this works, we can begin creating this macro. I'll begin recording. I'll click off the layer, and we can start by adding our first curves adjustment. To start, I'm going to Brighton, so I'll make this a brighter curve. Then I'll go into our blend ranges and I'll lower the shadows node. Now this brightness is only affecting the highlights. I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I. Then I'm just going to rename this so that we don't forget what it is. This one is for brightening the highlights. As a last step, I'm going to go to our filters and add a gaussian blur to this. I'm just going to raise this five pixels. To make this a child layer to our curve. I'm going to go to the top to arrange, and then I'll go to where it says, move inside. Now that's a child layer. That's perfect. I'll just select the main layer again. Then I'm going to group this layer with command or Control G. I'll just re this dodge and burn. With that setup, we can select the child layer again and I'm going to duplicate this with command or Control J. We already have a bright curve that has a gaussian blur applied. I just want to change this so that it's brightening the shadows instead of the highlights. I'm going to go into blend ranges, and I'm just going to reverse this bringing down the highlights and raising the shadows. Then I'm just going to rename this bright end shadows. Now we can go ahead and darken parts of the photo. I'll add a brand new curves adjustment for this and I'll darken it. I'll go into our blend ranges, and I'm going to lower the highlight node so that this is only affecting our shadows. I'll invert this with command or control I. Then I'll rename this darken shadows. As a final step, I'm going to add that gaussian blur to this one and I'll raise it to five pixels. I'll go up to a range and I'll move this one inside, so it becomes a child layer. Then I'll select the main layer again. We just have one more layer to create, and I'll do that with command or control J. I'll go into our blend ranges and reverse this. Then all I need to do is rename this layer, Darken Highlights. With that top mask layer selected, I can end my recording and save this. All right, Let's see how this works. I'll open up a new photo. And then I'll apply that practice macro. I'll get my paint brush out with white paint, and then we can begin adjusting how things are brightened and darkened. With that, you can see that before and after. I just wanted to quickly show you that this does work. But in addition to brightening and darkening parts of the face, you can always brighten and darken different parts of a photo. It doesn't just have to be the face of your subject. If you have a really bright background that you want to darken, you can totally do that. In fact, I might do that with this photo really quick. This area is a little bit brighter. If I want to darken a bright area, I can go to the darken highlights and paint and white paint just to darken this area. Now you can see the before and after of that. I think this is such a useful macro. All right, to finish off this chapter in the next video, we're going to make a macro that really helps your subject to stand out. 27. Subject Enhance: In this video, we're going to create a very unique macro that will enhance our subject. This macro is super unique because we'll be using it to brighten our subject and darken the background. This will make the subject really pop from the background and stand out. To see how this macro works, the first step to using this macro is to make a selection. I'm just going to make a rough selection of my subject here. You select too much, you can always hold down Alt or Option and then just click and drag to remove. Just a rough selection like that so that I can show you what this looks like. Once you have your selection of your subject loaded, you can click on the subject enhanced macro. Now you can see, we've brightened the subject and darkened the background. Here's the before and after. This is a very unique macro. We don't need to do any painting on it. We just need to have that selection loaded. Click on the macro and boom, you're done. Let's take a look at the layers that we use to get there. First, we have a layer that brightens our subject. Then we invert our selection so that the background is selected and we'll darken the background and we'll blur the background. While these steps are all pretty simple, it can be a little complicated to understand the selection process through this. Recording the macro makes this a little bit more complicated still. I'm just going to delete this and show you my process of recording the macro. But there is a little bit of a problem, so maybe don't follow along quite yet. First, you have your selection made. Then you start recording your macro. Here's where you start to run into some problems. I'm just going to apply a quick brightening adjustment. Then I'm going to go into our blend ranges to adjust these. Here's where things start to go wrong. As I lower this. Look over in the macro panel. All I'm doing is lowering this down and it gave us 30 different steps here to record. I think this just has something to do with having the selection up as you're making a macro. Affinity doesn't like that. I've created a workaround to avoid this issue. I'll stop the recording and reset. Then I'll deselect this and I'll delete this layer. Because having a selection loaded is such an issue for affinity. Instead, I'm going to begin recording without having a selection made. I'm going to assume that people who use this macro do have a selection made. But just during the recording process, I won't have a selection. I'll begin recording and I'll leave this layer selected since our user of this macro should have something selected. I'll just leave that as is. Then I'll begin to apply our adjustments. First, I'll apply a curve. I'm going to brighten this but level out the shadows like that. Then I'm going to bring the highlight node down just so some of these highlight areas don't get too blown out. In blend ranges, I'll lower this down. You can see we didn't have that weird issue where all those steps appeared. That was a good work around. Now, I'll just rename this layer, Brighton subject. I'm going to group this layer with command or Control G. Then I'm going to rename this group subject enhance. I'll select the Brighton subject layer once again. Here's where things get a little weird. I'm going to invert our selection with command or control, shift, I. I know this looks weird since we had no selection made, and now there is a selection going on. But when we use this macro later, this will work perfectly. I'm going to move on to adjusting our background with a dark curve. I'll darken this. I'm also going to adjust these points to reduce the contrast. I raised the shadow side and lowered the highlight side, and overall just darkened everything down. I'm going to rename this layer, darken background. As a last step, I'm going to apply a gaussian blur to blur the background. You can blur this as much as you want. But I found two pixels is a subtle blurring, and I'll also make sure to check on preserve Alpha. I'll just rename this layer, Blur background. To finish off this macro, I'll deselect by pressing command or Control D. That way, your selection that you had made will just become unselected at the very end and I'll select the group, and we're done. I'll stop this and save this. I'll call this subject enhanced. Now we can test this out just to double check that it worked since that was a weird process. I'm going to open up another photo. I'll make our selection to start it off. I'll refine the selection. I'll paint this over the edges of her hair. Just to tell affinity to take a second look at those areas. I'll hit apply. Now I'm going to click on our subject Enhanced Practice Macro. And you can see that that did work. We've frightened the subject and darkened the background and dulled it down. I think that looks great. I know that was a little bit of a funky macro to record, but I really like using the subject enhanced macro on my photos. To end off this video, I just wanted to mention that the same technique could be used on just about any macro. If you want your subject to look warmer, for example, you could select the subject and then apply the warm colors macro. The macro will only be applied to what you have selected, which is pretty cool. All right, and with that, we've finished the chapter. Now that we learned about how to create so many beautiful and practical macros. Let's have some fun in the next chapter as we make some special effect macros. 28. Special Effect Macros: All of this realistic editing has been fun, but it's time to shake things up. In this chapter, we're going to make some really fun special effect macros. I think you're really going to like these, so let's get started. 29. Gradient Effects: In this video, we'll make a gradient macro that will have multiple layers with different color combinations. As we know, macros are super useful because with just the click of a button, a really cool effect is applied. But what if you could apply a bunch of really cool effects all at once? Let's go ahead and apply the gradient effect macro Once this is applied, you can turn these layers on and off to apply different color combinations to find just the right one for your photo. You wouldn't want to turn all of these layers on all at once, but it's pretty nice that all of these combinations are quick to click through. For each of these layers, it's just a simple gradient map adjustment with two colors. Really simple. Nothing too fancy here. To make this macro, I'm just going to delete this and then we can begin. I'll hit record and click off the layer, and then we can go ahead and add our first gradient map adjustment. For this first one, I want to make these colors look like pretty pink cotton candy. I'm going to delete this center node. Then I'm going to make the shadows a nice pink color. And I'll make the highlight a nice yellow color. I just roughly added those colors, but if you'd like to make the exact same macro that I made, you can type in this color code. I'll just put those up on the screens that you can see them. The highlight color is the yellow one and the shadow color is the pink one. Just type in those codes and press enter, and you should be good to go. With that finished, I'm just going to rename this layer cotton candy. Then I'll group this with command or Control G, and I'll rename the group gradient effect. Go back in here, I'll select the child layer, and then I'll turn it off. As we go, we'll turn off each of these layers except for the very last one. Now I'll just add another gradient map adjustment. I'll delete the center node. For this one, I want to make the colors look like hot cocoa. These are the color codes that I used for this. For the shadows, it's a purple brown color. For the highlights, it's a nice soft yellow. I like that these colors look like sepia, very pretty. I'm just going to rename this hot cocoa. Then I'll turn off the layer and we can make another one. I'll add another gradient map. For this one, I want to do some blue colors just to mix it up a little. For the shadows, I'll make it this nice blue color, and for the highlights, I'll make a nice light pink color. For this one, I'm just going to call this blueberry muffin. Remember to turn off this layer, and then we can go ahead and add another gradient map. I'll delete the middle node. I'll go ahead and make the shadows a nice, yellow green color. I'll make the highlights of peach color. I'll rename this one Carmel apple, and I'll turn off the layer. Just for good measure, I want to do one last one that has very bright warm colors. I'll add a gradient map. I'm going to make the shadows a n d, bright red, and I'll make the highlights a buttery yellow color. I'll just call this one buttery waffles. I just thought these food names were cute. With that, we can go ahead and leave the buttery waffles layer on and we can stop the recording. I'm just going to call this gradient effect practice. Let's test this macro on another photo. When we apply this macro, as we know, we have all of these fun flavors to choose from. I think I'll just use the buttery waffles one. With this gradient effect, you could leave the colors as is, or you could click into the adjustment and click to add a center point. Once you've done that, you can move the center point from side to side to affect how much of the colors show up as this yellow highlight color or the dark shadow color. For this one, I think I'll just move it over to the left to brighten things up a little bit. In addition to changing that midpoint, you can also adjust the blend mode or the opacity. To make the effects look a little more subtle. In this case, I think I'm going to change the blend mode to screen. Just you can still see the beautiful colors of the bird here, and I'll also lower the opacity down halfway. Now it's more of a subtle look. Here's the before and after of that. With that done, I think now would be a good time to point out that you can always add more and more macros on top of this. For this one, for example, maybe you'd like to apply the dark moody effect. There it is. Just to add to the moodiness. Maybe you even want to add a vignette. You can do that now too. You can layer as many macros as you want on top of each other with just the click of a button. You have this really cool effect instantly. Let me just show you how this looks now. Here's the before and after of this picture. Still dark and moody, but a different effect. I really like macros that you can just click once like this dark moody one, and it'll apply a really cool effect instantly. But I also like this technique of having lots of different adjustments all in one place. I think that's really fun and useful too. In the next video, we're going to do another fun special effect to create a dreamy haze. 30. Dreamy Haze: Let's make a macro that has a dreamy hazy effect. First, let's take a look at the effect. We can see here that the effect looks like you're in a dream or that the person in the photo is an angel or something. It's pretty fun. I'll just turn off the layers so that we can see what we're working with here. To create this effect, we need to create a duplicate copy of our photo with a motion blur on it. Here's what that looks like. Then we'll add a curve to create some contrast. Then we'll actually use a gradient map to add some peachy tones to this photo. Then we'll add a layer that adds some more sparkles. You can see this especially in the background here. Here's the before and after. Last, we'll add just a little bit of noise to really seal in this effect. With that, we have a very unique look. It took me a while to figure out how to do this. I hope you like it. Let's get started making this one. I deselected the layer. Now I'm going to start this off by merging all of our visible layers. I'll go to the top to layer, and then down to where it says merge visible. To this layer, I'm going to add a filter, and I'm going to add the motion blur. I'm going to increase the radius up to 100. Then I'll select the parent layer. I'm going to change this layer to the screen blend mode, and all over the opacity to around 65%, just to make this a little more subtle. But I think this looks really nice. I'm just going to go ahead and rename this main layer, blur image. Then we can go ahead and group this first layer. I'll just rename this dreamy haze. Okay Let's select the child layer again and we can continue adding layers. Next, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I'm just going to create a tiny little S curve here to add contrast. Raise the highlights, lower the shadows. I'll just rename this contrast. Next, let's do a gradient map to add those PG tones. I'll delete this center point here. For the shadows, I'm going to type in F AD 00. Then for this other side, I'm just going to make this fully white. It should just be all the way across. There we go. Now I'm going to change this adjustment to soft light. I'll lower the opacity down to around 25%. Then we can rename this peach tones. Next, we're going to add some sparkles and I figured out, you can do this with a filter. Go ahead and go up to maximum blur. You can raise the radius 210. Then you're going to want to turn on circular. Right now, this is creating all of these sparkles, but they're all squares. If you turn on circular, this will just smooth those out. I think that looks nicer. I'm going to lower the opacity to 50% for this one. Then I'm going to rename this layer Sparkles. One last layer, let's go into our filters and apply an add noise filter. I'm just going to bring this up to 8%. With that, we can select the main group layer and we're done. I'll end the recording and save this one. Let's go ahead and test this. I'll test it on this one here. You can see how this one looks. I like using this macro on pictures that are taken outside like this or pictures that have a lot of sunlight. The haziness and the light that this macro adds will play into that sunshine. Great work on this macro. In the next one. We're going to turn a photo into a pencil sketch. 31. Pencil Sketch: For this video, we'll make a macro to turn our photo into a pencil sketch. Let's apply this to see how it works. When you apply it, a slider comes up that allows you to change the pencil strength. However, this slider is actually super sensitive. I'd rather just type in a number. For this one, I'm just going to type in eight. I think that looks pretty nice for this one. I'll hit apply, and then we can go over to our layers. What's going on over here? There's a lot happening. Well, first, We have this layer here. This is a merge visible layer with a Gaussian blur added to it. A lot has happened to this layer. Some of it's hard to explain, but we started with a layer that was inverted, and then we changed it to the color dodge blend mode and then a blur was added to help us see the details again. It's a lot of weird technical stuff that magically all works itself out in the end. I don't really want to explain the science behind it because I don't fully understand it, but this technique makes a really beautiful pencil sketch effect, just follow these steps and you'll be good to go. Once we've done that confusing step, we're going to desaturate it with an HSL adjustment to really make it look like pencil and then we're going to darken the pencil lines by using a levels adjustment. Finally, we top it all off with this layer that isn't technically doing anything. This is a clean up layer that allows you to paint in white paint over your document to remove anything that you don't want a part of your pencil sketch. In this case, I would probably paint. Let me just raise the hardness and flow there. I would probably paint over anything that's not the woman and her bird. Anything in the background like that, you can just paint that away to remove those details and that cleanup layer is useful for doing that. So I won't do all of that, but that's what that layer is for before and after. One last thing before we start making it, you remember that slider for pencil strength? Well, that was actually this gaussian blur down here. The more you raise the gaussian blur, the more of the image that you can see again. That's what that one's doing. As we make this, we'll make sure to turn on the gaussian blur to make it visible so that we can have that pencil strength slider. Now that you know how the macro works, I'll delete this and we can begin to make it for ourselves. I'll begin recording and I'll click off the background layer. Then I'm going to go up to layer and merge visible. For this merge visible layer, I'm going to invert the colors with command or control I. Then we're going to change the blend mode to color dodge. You can see a lot of the details have disappeared now. We're going to add that gaussian blur layer next. This will reveal the details again. I'm going to type in two. That's our Gaussian blur there. I'm just going to make this visible over here in the macro panel. I'll turn that on, and I'm going to name this pencil strength. Now that'll be visible and pop up whenever you click on this macro. Coming over here, I'm just going to select the parent layer. I'm going to name this merge visible just so we can remember how we made this. Then I'll group this. We can name this whole group pencil sketch. A. Let's go back into our group. Next, I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. Then in the master color channel, I'm going to fully desaturate this. I'll just rename this desaturate. To darken the pencil lines. Next, I'm going to add a levels adjustment. A great way to do this is to just bring the black level up. The more you bring this up, the darker the lines get. I'm going to bring this one up to 40%. Then I'll rename this Darken pencil lines. L ast, I'm just going to add that clean up layer. I'll add a new pixel layer and I'll rename that cleanup. I'm just going to keep the cleanup layer selected for this one so that when you apply the macro, you'll know just which layer you're supposed to start on. With that, we're done. I'll end the recording. Now we can go ahead and test this on another photo. There's our pencil sketch. We can raise this a little bit. Let's see how five looks. I'll hit a fly. Now we can spend some time painting away the background for this to look even better. But I'll just speed this up so that you can see what this would look like. Here's what that would look like. Great work on creating this fancy pencil sketch effect. In the next video, we'll actually do a similar effect, but this time with watercolor. O 32. Watercolor Painting: Make a watercolor painting macro. This watercolor macro is beautiful, especially on colorful landscapes like this one. This macro has quite a few layers over here. I'll just turn these off so we can see what each one does. To start off, we have a merged visible layer, and then we detect the edges of that layer. Let me just quickly change this to the normal blend mode. This is what detect edges looks like. But then we'll change it to the subtract blend mode, which really starts to make it look like a watercolor. But we're going to add even more effects to really boost this effect. Next, we're going to add a brightness and contrast layer. Then we'll do a split toning adjustment layer, which really boosts the red tones in the picture. Then we'll boost all of these colors once again with an HSL adjustment. Usually at this point, the shadows in this effect look really dark. We're going to brighten the shadows just to bring that detail back. Then this next layer is interesting. The main effect is done at this point. But to soften the details and make it look more like a painting. We'll merge visible again and then add a blur to soften the layer. Here's what that looks like, and last just to ensure the shadows are bright enough. We'll brighten them one last time with this top layer. That's lots of layers, but I think the final effect is worth it. It's just a gorgeous effect. Let's make this thing. To start off. I'll begin recording. I'll click off our layer, and then we'll start with a merged visible layer. I'll go to layer, merge visible. Now to detect the edges, we're going to go to the top two filters, and then down to detect and detect edges. Now we just need to change the blend mode to subtract, and we can go ahead and rename this detect edges. I'm going to group this layer. Then we can rename the group watercolor painting. I'm just going to select this layer again and we can continue adding more adjustments. The next one I want to add is the brightness and contrast adjustment. I'm just going to bring up the brightness to 25%. Then I'll bring up the contrast to 15%. Next, we'll do a split to adjust. There it is. For this one, don't change the first hue, but go ahead and change the highlight saturation to 75. Then down here for the shadows hue, go ahead and change that to 275. Then I'll change that saturation to 40. Once you have that all set up, we can go ahead and rename this layer red tones. Let's boost these colors even more. I'll add an HSL adjustment. I'm just going to shift the saturation of the main color channel up to 10%. And I'll rename this layer color boost. Next, I'm going to add a curve just so our shadows don't look quite so dark. I'll bring this up. Then I'll level out the top area, so we're mostly just brightening the shadows. I'll rename this layer, brighten shadows. Here's where we're going to merge the layers again to soften the effect. I'll go up to layer, then down to merge visible. I'm going to change this layer to the soft light blend mode so that it blends with the layers beneath it. Then I'll go into our filters and apply a gaussian blur, and I'll set this to 20 pixels. This has been placed as a child layer to this top layer. If your layer was placed on top, you can always go to a range and then move inside to make sure that this is placed as a child layer. With that done, I'll just select its parent and I'll rename this one soften image. Then we'll go ahead and finish this off by adding one last curve to brighten the shadows again. I'll brighten the shadow side and lower the mid areas right there. I'll just rename this brighten shadows again. I'll just select the group and we're done. I'll end the recording, and I'll save this Watercolor Practice. Now I can go ahead and test this on any other photo. This generally looks best with landscape photos, but we can go ahead and try it on this one. This effect can look a little strange on skin, which is why I usually use it on landscapes. But I think this one looks nice, especially with the pretty bird over here and all of its colors. Here's the before and after. Great work on this video. In the next one, we'll do another unique and colorful effect. 33. Pop Dots: Let's make a fun pop dots macro. Let's take a look at this. This macro comes with a lot of different sliders over here. Let's take a look at what each of these does. First, we have a slider to change the dot size. As you raise this, the dots get bigger and bigger, which can really affect how much detail is showing. You can also make it smaller to show more detail. Whatever look you're going for for your picture. We also have this contrast slighter. As you lower this down, you'll actually get more contrast in your image and as you raise it up, you'll get less contrast. I think I'll lower it for this picture just to see how this looks. Then down here, we have colors for the shadows, mid tones, and highlights that you can adjust. This can create a really interesting effect. But just for this demonstration, I'm going to make each of these colors a little bit funky just so that we can see all of the colors easier. Now that I'm done with that, I'll hit Apply. Let's get into our layers so that we can see what's going on here. The first layer we have is actually this half tone filter that turns our image into a bunch of. You'll notice this is outside of our group, and that's just so that it can affect our background layer directly. Once you've done that, we'll merge everything together into a single layer. This actually makes this half tone layer redundant. You could delete it. But I actually like to leave it so that I can just see the steps of creating this macro a little more clearly. But feel free to delete that. After you merge everything together, we'll use this single layer to select the highlights, mid tones, and shadows so that we can recolor them. You might notice that each of these colors has a little f X next to it. That's because we're going to add a color overlay effect to this, and that's how we'll be able to change our colors later on in those sliders that pop up when you first apply the macro. This dot effect is so fun, but there are a lot of little steps to make sure we get right so that this functions properly. While we make this macro, we'll make sure to make the mini sliders that we're going to use visible as we go just so that we don't forget any of them. Okay. I'm going to start recording I'll click off of this layer. Then I'll go into our filters to apply the half tone filter. Here's where you can change the dot size. Here it's called cell size. I'm going to turn this down to 25. It looks like it's using a lot of decimals though, I think I'll just type in 25 for this. Then we have the contrast slider here as well. I'll just leave that one alone and I'll make both of these sliders visible. I'll click on the next two size. I'm going to name this dot size. Then I'll go back in here and I'm going to make the contrast slider visible. I'll just leave it named contrast. That's fine. Now we have the first two sliders visible, which is perfect. I'll close out of this. I'm going to leave this half tome filter outside of the group. I won't group anything quite yet. Next, we're going to merge visible. I'll go up into layer and then merge visible. I'll just quickly rename this merge visible. Then I can group this. I'll rename this group Pop Dots. I'm going to select this merge visible layer again. Here we're going to start to select the different shadows, mid tones, and highlights for this effect. To do that, have the merged visible layer selected and then go up to select total range. Let's start with selecting the shadows. Right now, all of our shadows are selected. I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to fill this with black. I'll grab the bucket tool. I'll change my color to black, and then I'll click once to apply this black paint to our selection. I'll D select with command or Control D. Now I can rename this layer shadows. I'm going to go into f x right here and I'm going to check on color overlay. Then just so this shows up over in the macropanel. I'm going to change the color by just moving it around. I'm going to keep it set to black though. Then we can go to where it says, set effect color and we can make this visible. This is our shadows. Now we have the shadow color visible. I'm going to repeat the same process for the mid tones and highlights. To repeat the process, I'll select the merge visible layer first. Then I'll go up to the top to select total range. This time, I'll select the mid tones. With those mid tones selected, I'm going to add a new pixel layer that we can paint on top of. Then with the fill bucket tool, I'm just going to fill this with a gray color. I'll D select with command or control D. Then I can rename this layer midtones. Next, I'm going to go into the f X. I'll turn on color overlay. Then I'll change the color to a gray color. I'm just going to make this set effect color visible. I'll just name that mid tones. We're almost done. We just need to do this one more time for the highlights. I'll select the merge visible layer. I'll go up to select tonal range and highlights. I'll add a new pixel layer to painth on. I'll change my color to white and I'll click to reveal the highlights, I'll press command or Control D to D select. Then I can rename this layer highlights. I'll go into the layer effects. I'll turn on color overlay, and I'll change this to white. Then I just need to come over here, make this visible, and I'll rename this highlights. Okay. That was a lot of work, but we're done. I'll select the group, and we can finish making this macro. Let's test this on another photo. I'll just click to apply it. Then we can change any of the settings that we want. I think I'll lower the dot size just so we can see more detail here. Then I'm going to change all of these colors for the shadows. I think I'm going to make it a nice navy blue. For the min toes. I think I'd like to use a red color. Then for the highlights, I think I'm going to just do a super light orange color. I'll hit Apply. Now you can see our beautiful effect. Here's the before and the after. Great job following along with this tricky macro. I know that was a lot of sliders to keep track of, but you did it. Good job. In the next video, we're going to do another fun colorful effect as we turn our photo into a mosaic. 34. Mosaic: This video, I'll show you a really cool technique to create a colorful mosaic. Let's take a look. As you can see, when you apply this macro, your image is divided into four parts all with different colors, and the layers. You can see that each of these are labeled and each of them has an HSL adjustment as a child layer to change up their colors. Now, this looks pretty simple, but what's tricky is that we need to shrink down the picture and move it around, and we'll do that with a special filter called a fine. I'll show you how that works as we go, but let's go ahead and get started with this one. I'll begin recording. I'll click off of the layer. To start, I'm going to create a duplicate copy of our picture by going to layer, and then down to merge visible. I'll use this layer to shrink and move around. I'm going to go up to filters and then distort and then a fine. We'll use the special filter over and over as we make this macro. That's where you find this one. Once you apply this filter, the style log box will appear, that allows you to scale and move things around by percentages, which is pretty handy. To start, I'm going to go to scale x, and I'm just going to type in 50%, and I'll do the same for scale y. Then where it says, extend mode. I'm just going to change this to zero. Then I'll hit apply. I'm just going to rename this layer top left. Then I'm going to group this layer with command or control G, and I'll rename the group mosaic. I'll just elect the top left layer again. Next, I want to apply an H of cell adjustment to shift its colors. I'll go ahead and do that. I'm going to use the Hu shift slider for this. I'm just going to type in 30 With that done, I want to move this inside so that it's a child layer. I'll go up to arrange, move inside. Awesome. I'm just going to select the parent layer, and we're done with the first section of our mosaic. Now we just need to repeat this process three more times to finish this off. I'll start by duplicating this with command or Control J. Then I'm going to move this by going up to filters, distort, a fine I want to move this over here. I need to move it on the x axis. I'll go to offset x, and I'll move this 50%, and then I'll hit Apply. Top left has now become top right, I'll just change the name of this one. Then I want to change the colors. I'll select the HSL adjustment. Then to open up its colors. I'm going to click right here. This will pop up. Go ahead and click Cancel, and now we can change the colors. I'll change this to 120. I'm just going to select the parent layer again. Then I'll duplicate it with command or control J. To move this layer, I'm going to go back up to filters, distort, a py. Then I want to move this down. I'll need to use offset y, and I'll just type in 50%, and then I'll hit apply. Top right has now become bottom right. I'm just going to select the HSL adjustment and then change the colors. For this one, I'm just going to type in negative 150. Then we can select the parent layer. Then I'll just duplicate this one. With this last duplicate copy, I'm going to move it. I'll go to filters, distort a fine. I just want to move it back on the x axis. I'm actually going to type in negative 50% to move that one. Then I'll press apply. This has become the bottom left. Now I just need to change this HSL adjustment. For this last one, I'm just going to type in negative 60. As you can see, they all have very different colors. I think this looks great. I'm just going to select the parent layer, and then the full group parent layer, and we're done. I'll stop the recording. I'll just save this as mosaic practice. I'll open up another picture to test this on. As you can see, this picture is a totally different orientation. It's in landscape mode as opposed to the portrait mode that we were working with. Let's see how the mosaic effect looks on this one, and it worked perfectly. The reason why this worked perfectly is because the a fine filter uses percentages to move things around. No matter what size or shape your picture is. Because we moved things 50% downward or 50% over, it's all going to scale just fine, no matter what your picture looks like, which I think is perfect. Another thing I want to point out with this picture is that you can always go into the layers and change the different HSL adjustments into different colors, if you'd like For example, in this picture, maybe you want all the colors to resemble autumn leaves. You could go ahead and change all of those colors if you want. I'll just quickly show you what this could look like. Okay. Here it is with more fall colors. You can customize this however you want, and that's the beauty of this effect. I just want to show you one last thing with this mosaic macro because I think it's funny. I'm going to click on it one more time to apply it just from scratch. I want to show you if you click on it more than once, you'll just get more and more mosaic divisions, which I think is fun. Look at it. With that, we're finished with a mosaic macro and we're finished with a special effects chapter. Great work. You've learned so many new unique strategies for making macros. In the next chapter, we're going to make some macros that are specifically designed for text and shapes. 35. Text and Shape Macros: At this point, you've probably realized that you can do a lot more than just a simple edit using macros. In fact, you can also use macros to edit text and shapes. In this chapter, we'll do just that, so let's get started. 36. 3D Text: In this first video of the chapter, we're going to make a three D macro for text. First of all, I'm going to make this macro on a brand new document. I'm going to make my document, 1920 by 1080 pixels. You can go ahead and feel free to use any other size that you want. If you know you generally like to use bigger documents than this. Then I suggest you make your macro on that size document. But for this case, I'm just going to use this size. I'll go ahead and press Create, and we can go ahead and jump in to show you how this macro works. First, I'm going to grab the artistic text tool, and then I'll just type out some text. Then I can click on the three D text to apply this. You can see we have this beautiful three D effect. Let's take a look at the layers. Now, there are a lot of layers here. But as you can see, most of them are just duplicate coffees. Let's take a closer look at how this is working. First, we have main text. This is just the white text that's over the top of all of these other black text layers. Then each of these black text layers are just duplicated copies that have been moved over. As I turn these off, you can see that's shrinking down. As I turn them back on, you can see that that drop shadow effect is growing. We can go ahead and apply as many drop shadows as we want to this effect. We just move the layer down and over to create this look. This is all actually pretty simple. I think I'll just delete this and we can go ahead and get started with making the macro. Now, before we make the macro, we do need to have some text out, so I'll just type that again. Just to make this easier to see what's happening. I'm also just going to change the font really quick. We have a neutral other font. We have our text typed out, and we're ready to begin recording. I'll go into the macro and hit record. I'm not going to deselect this layer. Instead, I'm just going to rename it main text. Then I can group this layer, and I'll rename this three D text. I'm just going to select the main layer again and we can begin to make some changes to it. Now, the first thing I'm going to change is I'm going to change the font back to what we had originally, which is this aerial black font. I love how bold it is for this effect. I'll just select that one to change it. Then I want to change the color of this text to white. But unfortunately, affinity actually can't change the color of text. It won't record that. What's a work around we can do? Well, I figured out that a great workaround for coloring text is to use the f X down here. I'll click on this and I'll apply a color overlay, and I'll change this to white. You can see that that was recorded just fine over here. Now that we have the main text layer finished. We can go ahead and duplicate this with command or Control J. Then I'll just select this lower layer here. Over here, it says, select the layer named main text. That isn't very helpful because we have two that have the same name. Instead, I'm going to change it to select layer, one below current, just to make sure that definity registers which layer I'm actually trying to select. With that selected. Now, I'm just going to click in here and I'm going to call this layer drop shadow. I want to change the color of this drop shadow layer to be black. I'm going to click on the Fx next to its name. Then I'll just change the color from right in here. I'll close out of this. Now you can start to see the black peaking out there. But the way we're going to show this text is we're actually going to move it down and over using the arrow keys. I'll hit my down arrow and then my right arrow. It was just a tiny micro movement that we're going to repeat over and over for this. I'll press command or control J. Then I'll move this layer down and over. We can repeat this as many times as we'd like to get the look we want. I'm just going to repeat this over and over until I have the thickness of the drop shadow that I want. Command or Control J, down and over and repeat. I think I've reached my desired thickness for this effect. To finish off this macro, I'm going to select the group layer. Then I'm going to apply an outline to the entire group. I'll go into our layer effects. Then I'll click on Outline and I'll turn that on. Then we can raise the radius to whatever looks good for your size document. For my document, I think around 15 pixels looks pretty good. Just to add that little detail to make the white text stand out. I'll close this, and we're done. I'll stop the recording. I'll save this as three D text. There it is. I want to test this on some other text. I'm just going to move this group to the side over here. Then I'll grab the artistic text tool. I'm going to type some super small text right here. Now, this is in white right now, so I'll change the color to black, and I'll change the font to just any other font. Now we can see what the three D effect looks like on this tiny text here. I'll click to apply it. You can see that this did work, but because I'm working on a much smaller scale, all of those duplicated copies look a lot more dramatic, and the outline looks a lot more dramatic too. If you're trying to apply this effect to something that's quite a bit smaller or even quite a bit larger, all you need to do is go in here and make a few adjustments. First, I would probably adjust what our outline looks like. I'll go to the f X next to the entire group. Then I'll just shrink this down. That looks better. Then all you need to do is hold down shift to select multiple of these drop shadows, you can turn them off or delete them to get the effect that you're going for. I think that looks a lot better. Just to show you that this doesn't just have to be used for text. I'm going to go into our shapes. Let's select the doughnut tool. I'll click and drag to apply this. This has been added to the group, so I'll drag it outside of the group. Then we can go ahead and apply the three D text effect to this doughnut. You can see that that worked. If you want, you can always adjust the colors too. I'll go in here to show you this to adjust the colors. Go where it says color overlay. Then you can change this to any color that you want. This is a side tangent. But if you ever have 50 layers that you want to change all at the same time for layer effects. Here's how to do that. Select the top layer, then hold shift and select the bottom layer. Then you'll want to go up to the top of your screen to window, and then down to quick effects. Using this special panel, you can go into the color overlay and change the color from here. You can see all of those are changing at the same time. If you go back to the layers panel, you can see all of those have updated with their new color. You can only affect multiple layers and layer effects with the Quick effects panel. Now you know how to do that. The three D effect was super fun. Great job. In the next video, we'll make a macro to turn your text into neon. 37. Neon Text: Let's make a neon text macro. This macro is really fun. I'll just click to apply it and you can see what I mean. A lot changed with that. Over in the layers, you can see once again, we have quite a few layers to make this beautiful macro. Right at the top, we actually have an HSL adjustment that you can use to adjust the colors of the neon. Then we have the top layer of text, which is just this white text right here. We have a drop shadow. Then we have all of these different layers that just add more complexity to the light shine that's going on. Last, we have this black background which helps all of these different colors to look more like neon. This is all pretty simple. Let's recreate this one. I'm just going to change the font to a neutral font once again. Then we can begin recording. Right off the bat, I'm just going to group this layer and I'll rename the group neon text. Then I'll select the text layer again and we can begin to make some edits to it. I'll grab the move tool, and then I'll change the font. The font that I think looks pretty good for this is this aerial rounded font. I like that it's surrounded on the ends. That makes it look more like neon. That's the font that I decided to go with for this one. Now that that's done, I'm going to go into the layer effects, and I'm going to change the color overlay to a n dark pink color. While I'm in here, I'll also go into the Gaussian blur, and I'll check that on. I'm actually going to make this 500 pixels. I'll just type that in and press enter. This is a very subtle layer that you won't really be able to see until we have a black background, but we'll get to that later. For now, I'm just going to double click to rename this layer dark pink. Then I'm going to duplicate this layer with command or Control J. I'll click in the layer effects. For this one, I'm going to change the color to a nice bright pink. Then I'll go into the Gaussian blur and this time, I'm just going to make it 100. With that layer done. I'm just going to rename this bright pink. Once again, I'll duplicate this layer. Then I'll go into the layer effects and I'll change the color overlay to a lighter pink. Then I'm going to make the Gaussian blur 40 pixels. Then I'll rename this one light pink. Let's duplicate this again. I'll click on the layer effects. This time, I'm going to make it almost white. So a super light pink color like that. Then I'll go into the Gaussian blur, and I'm going to change this to 15 pixels. Duplicate this one last time. This is going to be our top text. I'm going to make the color overlay change to fully white. For the gaussian blur, I think I'll keep a slight blur on it, but I think I'll just make it 0.5. I'm going to rename this layer top text. We have the main text done, but now I just want to add a layer to enhance the effect by making a drop shadow. To do this, I'm actually going to duplicate this layer. Then I'm going to change the color overlay to black I want this to move back one layer, and that's actually pretty easy to do with the menus. Just go to range and then move back one. Now you can just use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move it down and over until you think it looks good. I'm just going to rename this drop shadow. To make this look more like a shadow though, I think I'm going to lower the opacity to around 15%. Next, I'm going to create a black background. To do this, I'm actually going to go to our shapes and I'll select the rectangle tool. Then I'll click and drag to drag a rectangle over the top of everything. I'm going to go into our layer effects and turn on color overlay to turn this black. Then I want this under everything. I'll go back up to our menus to arrange, and this time, I'm going to click on Move to B. That looks great. I'm just going to rename this black background. Last, I want to add that HSL adjustment to the top of everything just so we can adjust our colors. I'll click on the top layer. Then I'm going to add the HSL adjustment on top of that. I won't adjust any of the colors here. Instead, I'm just going to rename this adjust colors here. I just want to quickly point out that if you wanted to, you could totally make this HSL adjustment a color change slider that pops up when you apply the macro. But honestly, I think sometimes those sliders don't update as instantly for changing colors as just updating an adjustment layer would. Sometimes I just prefer to have the color changes right here in the layers rather than as a slider. With that, we're done. I'll leave that layer selected and we can finish this. There we go. Now we can go ahead and test this on some other text. I'll just delete that whole group. Then I can just type out any word I want. We can go ahead and apply the effect. I made it much smaller and you can see this actually looks pretty good. But if you wanted to, you could always adjust the drop shadow if you think the placement isn't quite right. You could adjust any of the colors and we can see what that looks like. Very nice. I want to just test it on a shape to finish off this video. I think this time we'll go with the triangle. I'll drag this out of the group like that. Then we can go ahead and apply the effect. You can see this works pretty well here too. However, it comes with its own black background. If you still want to see the neon text, you'll just need to delete that layer. Now you can see both of them. That's how you make the neon text macro. In the next video, we're going to get fancy as we make some beautiful metallic text. 38. Chrome Text: Let's make a chrome text macro. This macro is super pretty. I'm really excited to show you how to make this one. When you open up the group, you can see that this group actually only has two layers in it. That's because most of this macro is actually using the three D layer effect. If you open this up, you can see there are a lot of different sliders that you can change up right here, and this is the bulk of how we create this macro. There are a lot of sliders and things happening here and I just think it'd be easier if I just walk you through it rather than try to explain what's going on. We have that layer and then we just have one extra layer that just adds a little bit more contrast. I'll delete this group. Then we can go ahead and get started with making this chrome text. I'm just going to change the font. Then we can go ahead and get started with recording. The first thing I'm going to do is group this text with command or Control G. Then I'll just rename this text. I'll select the text layer again, and then we can begin to change this. With the move tool selected, I'm first going to change the font to something that looks like cursive. Feel free to use any font for this. I actually found this font online. I'll link it below if you want to download it. But this is the lobster font, and I like how it's connected in some areas. I think that just makes it look more like this metal has been actually molded this way. With that done, I'm also going to change the color. I'll go into the layer effects, and I'll go to color overlay. I'm just going to change the color to gray, and I'm going to change it so that the L right here, changes to 50. It should be zero, zero, and then 50. With that done, I'm going to begin to change up the three D effect. I'll just check that on. You can see right away, we have a little bit of a three D effect going on. But the more I change this, the better it's going to look. Starting at the top, I'm going to change the radius to 50. I'll just type that in. Then where it says soften, I'm going to change this 24. Next, I'm going to change the profile. The profile is basically what the edges look like. I'm going to change it to this last one right here. You can see this just gives us a lot more shape to this. That looks pretty nice. Moving on down here. I'm going to change the d 250. I'll change the specular to 100, and I'll change the shininess to 60. If you want, you can feel free to play around with any of these when you're not recording a macro to see what they all do. But these are the numbers that I came up with that I think really creates this chrome look. Feel free to type those in. As a last step, I'm going to add some light sources to this to make this look extra shiny. First, we have one light source here. I think that looks good. I'll click add. Now you can see we're on L light source two. I'm just going to change this to bring it down here. I'll add another one, and I'll move this one down here. I'll add another and move it over here. We're just trying to create a bunch of different light sources. The more light source points we have, the shinier and more metallic this will look. I think this is looking really good. I think I'll leave it at that. We have five different light sources here. If you don't like any of them, you can always go back to them and adjust them. But with that done, I think I'm going to go ahead and close this. Then I'm going to add our curve. This curve is going to add extra contrast, but I'm actually going to do it in a funky way to squiggle around this spline. First, I'm going to drag it all the way down right about at this one quarter line right here. Then I'm going to drag it like this. Then I'll drag it back around the halfway point right there. Then I'm just going to drag this back up a little bit like that. This has given a lot of dimension to this. You can really see the difference now. Your curve should look something like this, just to give a lot of variety to the lighting. I'm just going to rename this extra contrast. As one last step, I'm just going to select the whole group, and I'm going to apply a shadow to it. We'll go in here and I'm going to go to outer shadow. I'll check that on. Then I'm going to set the opacity to 15, the radius to ten and the offset to 15. With that, we're done creating our chrome text effect. I'll stop the recording and I'll just save this. There it is. I'll just move this text over. We can test this on other text just to make sure that this worked fine. With that, I'll select the chrome text. You can see what that looks like. I'll also test it on a shape. I think the Cog tool makes sense for this one. You can see that that looks like some nice shiny metal too. I think in this one, it looks maybe a little bit too shiny though. I'm going to go into this three D effects here. I just want to show you that at any time, you can remove any of these extra light sources to change up how this looks. You can see that's a little less shiny, maybe that's more of the look you're going for. Feel free to play around with the light sources and play around with this effect because I think this one is really cool. With that, we're done with our chrome effect. In the next video, we'll finish off this chapter by making some fancy golden text. 39. Gold Text: In this video, we'll make a macro to turn your text to golden. To start, let's take a look at this effect. Over here in the layers, you can see we actually just have two image layers here and there are child layers to the text. This top layer actually has the opacity lowered so that you can see both layers blend together. Here's what those layers look like. Then up here, we have a layer effect. Let's take a look at that. Similar to the chrome text. We're going to play up the three D effect to make it nice and shiny and to add that three D element. We'll also add a little bit of a outer shadow here. This is actually pretty simple. Let's get started. To start, have your text typed out first. Then we can go ahead and get recording. First, with the move tool selected, I'm just going to change the font. I found this font that I really like. I like that it has nice thick letters, and you can really see the golden effect when it's thicker like this. I'm going to use this one. Then I'm going to click off of this layer. Then I'm going to place an image. I'll go to file, and then down to place. And I'll just start with this first one here. I'll open this up. Then I'm just going to click and drag to make this cover the text. I'm going to go up here and I'm just going to align this to the center, and then I'll hit Apply. I want this to be a child layer to our text, so I'll go up to the top to arrange and then move inside. There we go, just like that. We have a beautiful texture added to our text. Let's do this one more time. I'll click off of the layer. Then I'll go up to file place, and I'll add in this second image here. I'll make it nice and big to cover the text. I'll just center it to make it nice, I'll apply that. Then I can go ahead and move this one inside, so I'll go to arrange. Move inside. For this top one, I'm going to lower the opacity to 65%. And now we're done with those image layers. I'll select the parent layer. I'm just going to rename this layer gold text. Then we can begin adding our layer effects to the whole group. First, I'm going to apply the three D effect. I don't think I'll change too many things about all these sliders this time. But I will go to the profile and I'm just going to change it to this fancy one right here, like how that one looks. Then I'm going to go to and change this two 50%. Then I'm going to change the ambient light color to a nice orange color. For this one, I'm going to do four light sources. The first one will be in this top corner. Then I'll add another one and I'll move this one to the lower corner. I'll add another one and I'll move it over here and another one that I'll move over here. All four corners should have a light source now. I think I'll move one of them in just a little bit. It's not directly on the edge, but you can really see how nice this looks. Maybe I'll move another one in. It's not directly on the edge. I just don't want it to get too shiny, but I think this looks pretty good. To finish this off, I'm just going to add an outer shadow effect. I want this to be nice and subtle. I'll keep the opacity set to 50, and then I'll just move the radius up to 3.5, and I'll change the offset to five. With that, we're done with the golden text effect. I'll stop the recording and save this. Now we can go ahead and test this on a few other things if we want. I think I'll first start by just testing it on some other texts. Beautiful. Very fancy. Then maybe I'll test it on another shape. I'll go with a double star tool. Let's see what this looks like. So fancy, so beautiful. This one's my favorite text macro. I hope you liked making this one. In the next chapter, we're going to make macros to add beautiful borders and frames to photos. 40. Border and Frame Macros: In addition to working with text and shapes, we can also use macros to add beautiful borders and frames to our photos. With the click of a button, your photo can be ready for a Christmas card or a scrapbook, or whatever else you'd want to use a border for. Let's get started. 41. Simple Border: In this first video, I'll show you how to make a macro to add a simple border to your photos. I have this photo up, I'm just going to go in here and click on the square border macro to see what happens. As soon as I click, we have this pop up that lets us change the color. I think I'm just going to sample the color using the color picker, and I'll sample the color of this yellow pole, and then I'll click on it to apply it. Then I'll just press a fly. Then we can see over in the layers that we have a layer that adds this border. We'll just use a rectangle to do that. The rectangle has a layer effect on it that adds a color to this outline, we've also lowered the fill opacity, which makes this inside part see through. You may have also noticed that this effect has cropped our image into a square. We can move the background layer around using the move tool so that it's positioned just how we'd like. We could also shrink it down if we want more of our image exposed inside of the frame. I'll just move that downward, and there we go. I think to center him better, I'll just make it a little bigger. Cropping the photo into a square is a technique that will work with any photo orientation. That's why I chose to do it that way. Feel free to use any size though. Let's go ahead and undo this with command or Control Z. There we go until we just have our photo again. Now we can go ahead and create this macro. I'll begin recording. The first thing I want to do for this macro is actually resize the Canvas. I'm going to go up to document resize Canvas. When this box appears, we can go ahead and change the dimensions. I'm going to make sure that this is resizing from the center point. Then I can go ahead and unlock the width and the height so that I can type in any number that I want. Again, like I said before, these can be any numbers, but I'm just going to try 2,500 by 2,500. Then I'll go ahead and click resize. With that done, I'm going to add a rectangle that spans the width of the entire document. I'll go into our shapes. I'll get the rectangle tool. Then I'll turn on snapping just so that I can click and drag right from the edge to edge. I'll just rename this rectangle border. Then we can go ahead and go into layer effects to change how this looks. First, I'm going to lower the fill opacity all the way down. Then I'll turn on an outline. I'm going to set the alignment to the inside so that we can see it. Then I'll just increase the radius. I think I'd like the radius to be 50 pixels. Then we can change the color. I think I'll change it to a lighter gentler color, maybe like a light tan, just as a good starting point for these borders. Feel free to change this to whatever you want. Go ahead and close out of this. Now, I'm going to lock this border in place so that you don't accidentally move it. Then I'll select the photo layer and I want to unlock this one. You can go ahead and feel free to move this however you like within this border. Before I finish, I'm just going to make it so you can change the border color with a slider. To do that, I'll go to where it says set effect. I'll make this visible, and I'll just leave that as color. We're done. I'll stop the recording and we can go ahead and save this. I'll call this simple border practice. We can go ahead and test this on another photo. I'll just click to apply it. You can see that worked. I think this color looks nice, so I'll apply that. Because we had the background selected when we finished, it's selected as we begin here. So I can just grab the move tool and move it just like that. Using this technique, you can make a simple border design macro for any type of ph, any thickness that you'd like for the border, any color. The possibilities are endless with this one. In the next couple of videos, I want to show you a fun way to make more elaborate frames using macros. 42. Flower Frame: Let's make a macro to add a beautiful flower frame to your photos. I have this photo up. Let's click on the flower frame to see what happens. This one's pretty simple. We have our beautiful flower frame, and then we have our image. I'm just going to move this downward so we can see it. I'll walk you through how I made this. But first, I just want to show you where you can find pretty frames like this. Because this frame is pretty unique. It has foliage overlapping onto our photo, and I think that looks pretty nice. To find this frame, first I went to Pixabay and then I just searched for frames. Then I went ahead and sorted my frames by vectors. Once you have that, you can scroll down and see all of these beautiful frames here. This is the one I'm using. But there are so many different vector frames that you can use that will overlap with your picture, just like the one I chose did. That one's really pretty. You can see we have quite a few really cool frames here. The next step after you find your frame is you can go ahead and open it up in affinity. With your new picture opened up. You can make sure you have this hand tool out the view tool. Then you can look right up here to see its pixel dimensions. This is what you'll want to resize the Canvas to as we make our macro. In this case, we have it at 2,500 by 2,500 just like last time. Now that we have that all prepped, we can go ahead and make the macro. I'll just press command or Control Z a few times to get back to the beginning here, and then we can go ahead and start recording. Just like last time, my first step is going to be resizing the Canvas. I'll go up to document, resize Canvas. I'll make sure we're doing it from the center point. Then I'll go ahead and unlock this, and I'll just type in 2,500 by 2,500. I'll just resize it now. Next, I'm going to add the flower frame into our image. I'll go up to the top to file, then down to place. I'll select our flower frame here. I'll open that up. Then I'm just going to click once to place this. Then I'm going to align this to the center. Align it horizontally and vertically, and then I'll hit apply. To really help sell this effect, I actually like adding a little bit of a shadow to our frame so that it helps with this overlap. You'll be able to see it a little better. I'm going to go into our layer effects, and I'm going to check on outer shadow. Then I'll just increase the radius to 25 and I'll increase the intensity to 25. Now you can see that much better. It's not blending in with her shirt, just to help it stand out a little better. I'll close out of this, and I'm going to lock the flower frame. Then I'll select our photo layer and I'll unlock this one. With that, we're done. I'll stop the recording, and I'll save this. That was very simple. It takes a little bit of prep to find the frame. But once you've done that, it all comes together pretty quickly. I'll just test this on another photo. There we go. Then I can just grab the move and move this in place. In the next video, we'll finish off this simple chapter by making a fancy frame with glass. 43. Black & White Frame: Let's make a fancy frame for a black and white photo. To start, let's apply this macro to see what we're working with. Right away, you can see we have quite a few layers going on. That's because we've turned this photo into a black and white photo and it looks like it's behind glass. We have a lot going on to get there. But first things first, we have a layer selected called Move this layer. I'm going to grab the Move tool and I'll move that so that it's in place. Then I'll just turn off these layers so that you can see what we have going on here. First, we actually have a duplicate copy of our background layer here and that's because I wanted it to be in the group so that it's affected by all of these different effects. We have that duplicate copy first. Then we desaturate it. We reduce the contrast so that it looks like it's behind glass. To really nail this effect home, we have this glass layer here. This is actually just a rectangle that we've applied a gradient overlay effect to. You can see we'll mess with some of the settings in here to get that looking just right. Then of course, we have the black and white frame that we've chosen to overlay on top of everything. We can go ahead and start making this, but before we do, let's just open up our frame that we'll be using so that we can see how big we should resize the canvas to. You can see that this frame that we'll use is 24 80 by 08. You can go ahead and write that down and we'll use those exact measurements as we resize the canvass later on. I'll just close out of this. Then I'll press command or Control Z until we have just the original photo again. With that done, we can go ahead and start recording. As a first step, let's resize the Canvas. I'll go to document, resize Canvas. I'll make sure we're going from the center point. Then I'll unlock this and type in those measurements that we just saw. We have 24 80. By 30 508. I'll hit re size, and now's the perfect size for our frame. Next, I'm going to merge visible just so we have that duplicate copy of our layer. I'll go up to layer and then down to where it says, merge visible. I'm going to rename this, move this layer. Then I'll group this with command or Control G, and I'll rename this black and white frame. I'll just select our child layer again. Then we can go ahead and add our frame to this image. I'll go up to file, and then down to place. I'll select the black and white frame. I'll click once to place it here. Then I'll just make sure that this is aligned center horizontally and vertically. As a final step, I'm going to add a little bit of a shadow to this frame. This frame actually already comes with a shadow, but I wanted to include this step just in case your frame that you choose to use doesn't have a shadow. I'm going to go into our layer effects, and I'm going to apply the outer shadow. I'm just going to make the radius 15 and the intensity ten With that finished, you honestly could be done at this point. I already think this frame looks really nice for this photo. But we're going to take it the extra step and make a macro inside of a macro as we turn this photo black and white. I'll select move this layer and we'll apply all of the black and white adjustments on top of this. To start, I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. I'll lower the saturation all the way. I'll just rename this layer D saturate. Next, I'll reduce the contrast with a levels adjustment. This is my favorite adjustment to use for this class effect because moving these output sliders is just so easy to reduce the contrast. For this, I'm going to do ten for the output black and 90 for the output white. We'll just rename this reduced contrast. It's time for the fun part. We're going to make our glass layer. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and I'll just drag out a rectangle that spans the entire document. Then I'm going to go into our layer effects, and I'm going to turn on the gradient overlay. Now, first, I'm actually going to lower the fill opacity all the way. Then I'll go into our gradient and I'll begin to change this. First, I'm going to double click to add a node here, and I'll double click to add a node here. I'll make both of these white. Here we go. Then I'll click on each of the outer nodes, and I'm going to lower their opacity all the way to make them transparent. You can see we already have a bit of a glass glare going on there. I'm just going to change the angle to somewhere around here, 118 about there, so that it's a little bit more off. I think that just makes it look more realistic. Then we can go ahead and lower the opacity to 80 so that we can see through this. You may notice that the edges are looking a little harsh. A great blond mode you could use to combat that is screen. Screen really softens that up. Last, you can change the offset y to lower or raise where this is positioned. I think I'd like mine more toward the top. I'll put it about there. Then I'll close out of this. I'll rename this glass glare. All right. Then I'll just select the move this layer one last time, and we're done. I'll stop the recording, and we can go ahead and save this. Let's just test this on one other photo. I'll click to apply it. You can see this worked beautifully. I'll grab the move tool so we can move this layer around. If you want, you can also move the glass layer around if you don't like how it's positioned, or you could even lower the opacity if it's looking a little too harsh. But I think this looks great. Here's the before and the after. Great job. Now that we've finished this borders and frames chapter, we're ready for the final chapter of the course. Were I'll show you how to batch process multiple photos using macros. 44. Batch Processing: Macros are amazing for doing quick edits. But what if you could apply your macro to multiple photos at the same time? We could edit an entire photoshoot with the click of a button. Well, lucky for you. In this chapter, we'll learn how to do just that. Let's get started. 45. Batch Processing 101: Let's learn the basics of batch processing. You have a photoshoot and you want to edit them all in a similar way. This is super common. Maybe the white balance was off or the lighting, whatever it is. It'd be easier if you could do this all at once, let's do it. I'm going to go up to file, and then down to new Batch Job. We're going to use this dialog box to add all of our images. To do that, first you go to where it says sources, and then you go down here to add. Now, I have a folder in the batch processing chapter called Batch Processing one oh one. Go ahead and open that up, and then you can select all of the pictures from this photoshoot. Then just click Open. Once you have all those added, you can start to adjust the settings over here based on whatever you want. First, at the top, we have output, which basically just means where will these be saved? Right now, we have save into original location turned on, which means that this will replace the original images with these new ones that we're about to save. If you want to avoid that, you can click on Save into, and then click on these three dots right here to choose where they'll be saved. You can even make a brand new folder right from here. If I add a new folder, this will be a new folder inside of this folder. I'll click that and then I can rename this whatever I want. I'll click Create, and. Now, these will be saved into that new folder. Next down here, you can choose how these photos will be saved. Right now, all that's checked on is save as an AF photo, which is just an affinity photo file. If you wanted to, you could also save them as a J peg, or you could turn this off and just save them as a J peg, whichever makes sense for what you're doing. I think I'll just save them as a J peg this time. Once you have that done, you can go down here and choose which macro will be applied to your photos. I'm going to go into our basic macros, and I'll choose the warm color macro and then I'll press Apply. Over here, you can see which macros we've applied. Keep in mind on this step that if you choose a macro that has sliders to adjust, the default slider position will be applied to all of your photos because there's no chance for you to change the sliders in this batch process. It'd be better to choose one without any sliders. Then you can just click, and your batch will begin to be processed. All of these warm versions of the photos, were saved into our new photos folder, which is inside of our batch processing one oh one folder. You can see all of these are a lot warmer. Let's take a look at the differences here. I love how quick and easy this was to apply a macro to this whole photoshoot. In the next video, I'll show you another way that you can alter your photos using batch processing. 46. Resizing Images: In this video, I'll show you how to resize all of your images in a photoshoot at the same time. I already opened up images here and I chose a folder to save them in. Now, I want to change the sizes. I'm going to save these as J pegs and to change the sizes. All you need to do is type in a width or a height into these boxes. I'm going to start by typing in 1920 into the width box. Make sure you don't press enter or you'll process all of these. Just type 1920. Once you've typed that into the width box, this means that every image in your batch will fit into that width. Whether that means they need to shrink down or grow. Make sure you keep this A checked on. This A box just means that your image won't be distorted in any way. Once you've done that for the width, you could also type in 1920 for the height. This will make whichever side of your image is bigger set to 1920. The small side will keep whatever aspect ratio that is. But all of your images at maximum will be 1920 for the big side. You can also click on the three dots next to this. This is how you can change the quality. I like to go in here and just make sure our quality is set to 100 so that they won't be downsized and the quality lowered. With all that set up. We can go ahead and press k to process these. All of your images will be exported and you can check out how they look and their size. In this case, I just want to right click on any of these and then press on get info so that we can see how big these images are. For that one, it says it's 1920 by 13 34. The bigger side is 1920, and we can check that out for any of these. This one's also 1920. It has a different smaller number because for some reason, this photo is in a slightly different aspect ratio. But no matter which side is the big side, it's 1920. What about this one that's more vertical? All the rest of these are horizontal. Let's get the info for this one. You can see that 1920 is the large side. That's awesome. All of our pictures now have a matching maximum width, and I think that's great. Now that we know the basics of batch processing and resizing images. For the rest of the videos in this chapter, we'll spend some time making macros that are perfect for batch jobs, starting with making a watermark macro. 47. Making a Watermark: Before we can create our beautiful macro that applies a watermark to every photo, we need to make the watermark itself. First off, I'm going to create a new document. And I'm going to make this document 1,000 by 1,000. Then I'll press create. I'll fill this whole space with a logo that we'll use for a watermark. Now, to make this watermark look nice and fancy, I found an ornament that I can add to the design, and I used Pixabay to do that. All you need to do is type in ornament or banner. Then make sure you're searching by vectors. Then you can scroll down and see all of these great ornament banner type things that you can add to your watermark to make them look fancy. I believe this is the one I found for this design. Back in affinity, I'm going to go up to the top of our screen to file, then do to p and then I'll place this image into our document. I'm going to start at one corner with snapping on, and I'm going to drag this so it fills the whole space. Then I'll just make sure it's centered. Now that we have our image, we can go ahead and type out any initials that you want or a word that you want. I'll grab the artistic text tool. I'll click and drag out. Then I'm just going to type in the initials A R for Affinity revolution. I'll grab the move tool and I'll change the font. Then I'm just going to resize these letters and position them so that they look very nice here. Nice and centered. To prepare this even more to use this as a watermark, I want this to appear on a transparent background so that we can see the picture behind this design to make the background transparent, just go to the top to document, and then go down to where it says transparent background. Another thing you might want to do is you might want to change this entire design into white to see it better on photos. To do that, go up to the top again to document, and then go down to the bottom to where it says flatten. As you can see, this has flattened your document into a single pixel layer. Now we can go into our layer effects. We can check on color overlay, and we can make this any color we want. Feel free to use any color. I found that white stands out nicely on a lot of photos, but you really could choose any color that you want, anything that looks nice. With this done. Now we're going to export this document. I'll go to file, and then down to export and to preserve the transparent background. Just go up here and make sure that you're exporting as a PNG. Now, strangely, it looks like I might have typed in the wrong number. I'm going to unlock this and just type in 1,000 right here. Just to make sure this is 1,000 f 1,000. I'm not sure how I messed that up. But now you can go ahead and click Export. You can go ahead and save this. And then hit save. Now that that design is finished. We can create a larger document that will be overlaid onto any photo we want to add a watermark to. I'm going to go up to the top to file and then new. This time, I'm going to make a very large document. Let's go with 7,000 by 7,000. I'm just going to click Create. I think 7,000 by 7,000 is a good size because it's larger than any of my pictures that I shoot. But feel free to use a bigger size than this, if you'd like. To turn this into a watermark overlay. Next, we're just going to go to the top of the screen to file, and then down to where it says place. Select the watermark design. Go ahead and open that up. Then just click once to add this to our document. I'm going to place this right up here in the top corner. Then I'm going to rotate it 15 degrees by holding shift and clicking on this rotation right here. I think I'll rotate it like that. Then I'll press command or Control J to duplicate this. I want this to move in a very specific amount of pixels. I'm going to actually get out the transform panel for this by going to Window. Transform. With this duplicate layer selected, I'm going to move it on the x axis, and I'm just going to say plus 1,500. You can see that just jumped over right there. That's perfect. Now I'm just going to power duplicate by pressing command or Control J, and this will jump this logo across that exact same amount of 1,500 pixels. We've now filled this top space, but it's getting a little tricky to see. I'm going to go to the top to document transparent background just so we can see our design and how it's been duplicated across. We have our first row. I'm just going to select all of these layers with the first one selected, I'll hold shift and click on this bottom one. Then I'll press command or Control J to duplicate all of this row. To drop this row down, I'm going to go into the y axis right here, and I'm just going to type in plus 1,500. You can see that just jump down, and if I press command or control J a few times, you can see now this will fill the entire document. I think this is ready now. I'm just going to export this as a PN G. I'll go to file export. Make sure that's a PNG. I'll say, yes, that's right. Now we can go ahead and save this. We're all prepared now with our watermark design. We have this giant document saved and ready to be used for making the watermark macro. We'll create that very simple macro in the next video. 48. Watermark Macro: Make a watermark macro. This is a super simple macro. We'll basically just need to add the large watermark image to our document. I do have this photo open just so that we can record the macro on something. Let's go ahead and begin. I'll hit record. I'll deselect the layer. Then I can go ahead and place the image by going to file place. Let's select the image that has lots of watermarks on it. I'll open that up. I'll click anywhere to place this. Then I can go up here and just make sure that it's nice and centered. I'll hit Apply. Last, you might want to lower the opacity of this image just so you can see through it a little better. I'm going to lower my opacity to 70%. We're done. I'm just going to stop this and I'll add it to our library. There we go. We now have the watermark practice finished. Next, let's apply this to a batch job to make sure that this works. First, go on up to file and then new Batch job. I'm going to add all of our images in this folder. Let's save these into a new folder. Then we can go ahead and save these. I'll save them as a J peg that's nice and small to protect our work. I'm just going to do 100 by 100. Then I can come down here and apply the watermark practice macro. I'll just hit apply. There it is. Now we can go ahead and press. Those have all been exported. But before we finish, I just wanted to mention that at this point, you could go ahead and delete these watermark design images. This watermark overlay has been permanently stored in affinity with that macro. You don't need to save this on your computer anymore. We can go in now and see our watermark photos. Here's how those images turned out. They all have the watermark overlaid on top of them and they look great. Water marks are such a useful way of protecting your work. But if you simply want to sign your work in a more subtle way, then I'll show you how you can do that by adding a signature to your photos in the next video. 49. Signature Macro: Let's add a signature to our photos. First, we need to create our signature image. You can do this in a lot of ways. If you have a tablet you could use, you could just draw out your signature in affinity using the brush tool, or you could find a pretty font and just type it out. What I did is I actually just used my iPad. I drew this out using the procreate app, and then I brought it over to my computer. No matter what method you use, just make sure that your signature is in white and that it ends up on a document that's one than by 1,000 pixels. Also, make sure your image has a transparent background. I just added this rectangle so you can see it. I'll just delete that. You can see we have a transparent background. Remember you can do this by going up to document and checking on transparent background. Once you have that image, we can go ahead and start creating this macro. I'll use this picture to create it and we can go ahead and begin. I'll hit record. I'll click off of this to deselect the photo layer. Then we can go up to file place, and we can go ahead and add our signature image. I'll click anywhere to add our signature into the image. With that image placed. The next thing I want to do is I want to resize the signature. To do that, I'm going to go up two filters, distort a fine. Then I can come down here and I'm just going to adjust the scale of this. I'm going to make it 110 for both of those. Just to scale this up a little bit so we can see it better. You could also scale it down if you want this to look more subtle. Either way, resizing it is just a good way to customize it, but it also rasterized our layer, which is an important step. It means that the extra space on the top and bottom of the layer has now been cut off. The layer is perfectly cut out to whatever size it looks like. This will come in handy as we place this in just a second. I'm just going to hit apply. You can see that dead space was cut off. Now that that's set up, I'm going to go and adjust this by bringing it over to the right side and the bottom right. Then I'll hit a ply. I wanted this to be on the bottom right, but you can see that the signature is actually touching the sides. I want to shift this over just a little bit. I'll go back up to filters, distort, a fine. Then I'm going to change the offset to negative two. I'll do that for y as well. You can see this was just scaled up and over a little bit, so it's not touching. I'll hit a ply. With that, we're finished with our macro. I'll just stop this and I'll save it. Okay. Let's quickly apply this to a batch to see what this looks like. I'll go up to file, new Batch Job. I'll just add in our photos. I'll save them into a brand new folder. I'm just going to check on JPEG, and then I'll apply our signature practice macro to it, and we're done. Just as a reminder once again, feel free to delete your signature image at this point. You don't need it anymore. Let's check out how these signature photos turned out. All of these images have the signature overlaid and even our one image that's more vertical, the signature still looks great, just tucked into the corner like that. Great work to finish off this chapter and this entire course. We're going to edit this batch of photos so that they look beautiful and polished. 50. Editing a Batch of Photos: Okay. Let's edit our batch of photos. First things first, make sure all of your images from your batch are JPEgs or PNGs. We can't actually apply macros or do batch processing on raw images. But luckily, all of these images are J pegs. It looks like we're good to go. Next, open up an image from the shot. I'll just go with this one. I want to experiment with what will look good for the photoshoot. I'm going to start editing this photo like I would with any other photo. The only difference is that I'll take note of everything I do so that we can turn this into a macro later to apply to all of our photos. First, I want to adjust the lighting. I'm going to apply a levels adjustment. I think I'll stick it out 5%. Then I'm going to bring the gamma over. To 0.75 just to lighten everything up. Here's the before and after of that. Just brightening things up, but keeping the shadows nice and dark. That was a good start. Next, I want to do a color balance to adjust our colors. I'll start in the shadows. I'm just going to shift the slider. I think I'll add a little bit of cyan. I don't think the magenta slider looks very good. Maybe I'll add just a little bit of blue. We've added some blue tones to the shadows. Let's go into our mid tones. I think I'll bring the red up quite a bit. I'll leave the magenta slider alone, and I'll add a little bit of yellow. Last for the highlights. I'm just going to add a little bit of red. The highlights are a little more sensitive. I'll just do a little bit of red and ale bit of yellow. That looks pretty good. Next, I think I want to add just a S curve, just to add a bit more contrast. Really small bring up the highlights and bring down the shadows. I think I want to increase the saturation for our colors. I'll use the HSL adjustment. I think in the main color channel, I'm just going to increase the saturation. Maybe two round there. Let's go into the reds and I'll increase this a bit. Let's go into the yellows and increase that a bit. I'll bring that to around 10%. Then I'm going to go over to the Blues. I'm just going to increase the blues to bring out some of the colors in his sweater, and I'll bring this to 25%. Last, I'm going to add a couple of macros to really help this look nice. I think I want to add the vignette macro. Very nice. Let's add the signature macro. That's so nice. Here is the before and after the picture is so much more vibrant. We have beautiful focus on the couple. Now we have our battle plan. We can go ahead and record a macro with all of these adjustments applied. I'm going to delete all of these layers. I'm going to start from the very beginning. I'll begin recording the macro. Then I'll click off. And we can go ahead and start with our levels adjustment. For this first one, the black level was 5%, and the gamma slider was around 0.75. Since this is just a quick macro that I'm making specifically for this photoshoot. I'm not going to rename my layers and group them like I normally would. This is just to save time, since this macro is probably only going to look good for this specific batch of photos. That's just something to save a little bit of time there. Next, I'm going to add the color balance adjustment. Starting in the shadows. I'm going to make the science slider negative seven, and then I'll bring up the blue slider to 5% in the mites. I'm going to bring up the scan slider to 30%. Then I'm going to add some yellow by bringing this to negative 20. Next for the highlights, I'm going to bring this up to 5%. I'll bring this down to negative five. Next, let's make our baby S curve to add a little bit of contrast. Then we'll go and add an HSL adjustment to boost all the saturations. For this one, in the main color channel, I'll just bring this to 12%, and the red channel, I'll bring it to 5%. In the yellow channel, I'll bring it to ten. Last, in the blue channel, I'll bring this up to 25. And finish this off. I'm going to add the Vignette Macro. There it is. I'll click to add it. Back in the macro panel, you can see this has been added as a step, applying the Vignette Macro, which is pretty cool. I'm also going to add our signature macro. B here, you can see that has been added as a step. We're done. I'll stop the recording. I'll just save this and I'll call it Couples photoshoot. All right. Let's apply this to our entire batch of photos. I'll go to file, new batch job. I'll add all of the photos from our shot. I'll save them into a brand new folder. In this case, I'm going to export them as an affinity photo file and as a JPEG. That way we could go back and make adjustments if a specific picture looks too bright or too dark or just need some fine tuning. Last, I'm going to apply the macro that we just made, and then I'll press. That's been finished. Now we can open any of these files to make some tweaks to them if we'd like. But before we do that, I have noticed that sometimes this will cause the program to crash. Once you've finished exporting the batch, go ahead and restart the program. I just restarted the program and here's the folder with all of our JPEGs and the affinity photo files. At this point, we could go in and open up any of the affinity photo files to make adjustments. Here you can see we have our lovely couple here, and here is the before and after of this one. I think this one looks pretty good, but to be honest, I think that this looks a little bit too dark down here. I may want to go into the levels adjustment and bring down the Black level just to get that detail back a little bit. In fact, you might want to do even more editing to this one. Say this is your favorite picture from the shot. You might want to save this version and save another version with maybe a moodier look. Maybe we could apply the dark moody macro or something like that. You could do anything you wanted at this point, really. As you can see, using macros makes batch editing a breeze. Great work on finishing this batch editing chapter. 51. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. Now you have everything you need to make amazing macros. I'm so proud of you for sticking it out, and I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.