Create Golden Hour Lighting in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Every day at sunset, there's a small window of time when the most amazing photos can be taken. This magical time of day is called the Golden Hour. I love the Golden Hour. But what if we could make all of our photos that warm and beautiful? Well, with a power of affinity photo, you can. That's why I'm excited to tell you all about my brand new course. We we'll learn how to create Golden Hour lighting in affinity photo. Affinity has all of the tools you need to transform a photo. But to make Golden Hour lighting even easier, I've made 40 assets that come included with the course. With these assets, you can easily add sun rays, boca balls, and golden lighting to any image. These assets are included with the course and we'll practice using them as we edit a series of photos together. I'm a big believer in learning by doing. That's what this course is all about. We're going to edit a ton of photos together and learn golden hour techniques all along the way. We'll start by editing some simple photos to learn the basics of adding Golden Hour lighting. Then we'll work our way up to more advanced projects. We we'll learn powerful techniques for combining the course assets with affinities built in tools. That way, you'll be totally prepared to add Golden hour lighting to your own photos after you finish the course. 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 the exercise files in the next lesson, and then we'll jump right into making Golden Hour Lighting and affinity photo. 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 Assets: The first chapter of the course, I'll show you how to use the Golden hour assets that were included with the exercise files. I think you're really going to enjoy them, so let's get started. 4. Installing the Assets: This video, I'll show you how to install the assets. You should have already downloaded the exercise files and we'll use those in this video. The first thing you need to do is to go to the very top of your screen and then click on Window, and then click on assets. This will bring up this assets window, which we'll use throughout this course, because we're going to use it so much. I'm actually going to click on the word assets right here and drag it over to dock it like that. That way, this will just stay accessible the whole time. It'll just live over here. Once you have that docked, go to the very top hamburger menu. And then go down to where it says Import assets. From here, go ahead and navigate to this very first Exercise file folder. It's called Introduction to assets. Then you can click on the Golden Hour Assets file and press open. And just like that, you have all of the Golden Hour assets installed. In the next video, I'll show you how to apply these assets. 5. Applying the Assets: Let's learn how to apply assets in this video. First, I want to open up an example photo. I'll go up to file, and then down to open. I'm going to choose this adorable duck photo from the exercise files. I'll just open that up. Now that we have a photo to apply our assets to. We can start adding assets. Now, there are two ways to add an asset to your photo. The first way is just to click and drag on the asset to bring it in. This will place the asset at its native resolution. For most of these assets, the native resolution is 4,000 by 4,000 pixels. This means that it will probably be a little bit smaller than your photo. Once you have it in, you'll need to adjust the size of it to make it fit just right. Because this involves dragging it and then adjusting it. I actually prefer the next method for bringing in assets. I'll just delete these. I'll show you that my favorite way to bring assets in is actually to double click on it. This will load your cursor so that it's right here, and all you need to do is click and drag to fill your document with this asset. If you have snapping turned on, this is super easy to get it snapped to the edges just right. Once you have the asset added. The different blend modes and opacities will be your best friend. We can go ahead and change the blend mode here. I think I'm going to change this one to screen, and then I'll lower the opacity by clicking and dragging on the word opacity. Here's the before and after of that. Just like that, you've added your very first asset. Great work. Now that you know how to apply assets. In the next video, I want to give you some tips for using the asset panel. T. 6. Assets Panel: Now that we've installed and used the course assets, let's take a minute to learn a little bit more about the asset panel. The first thing I want to show you is that if you go to the Top Hamburger menu, you can actually go down and click on Show as List. This will display your assets so that their name is right next to it, which will be pretty useful in this course. That way, as I click on different assets and apply them, you'll be able to see the name of it, which will just help you follow along better. I tried to name each one of these something useful and descriptive, but it was a little tricky. If you want to rename any of them, you can just right click on it, and then click on rename asset. Another thing I want to show you is that up here, we have different categories of our assets. We have the default, which is just the assets that came with the program, and we have our Golden hour category, which is what you just installed. Inside of each category, you have different subcategories. This is just useful for keeping things organized. For example, you might have a category for web design. Then within that, you might have subcategories, four different types of websites like blogs or social media or cooking websites. Having subcategories is just useful for keeping things like that organized. As you can see in this Golden hour category, we have two different subcategories. We have the default, which is what we used in the last video, and we have ready to go. The ready to go subcategory is actually extra useful and here's why. When you apply one of these ones, I'll double click and then click and drag this one in. You can see that we already have the screen blend mode applied to this. So it automatically blends in with our image, and over here in the layers, we already have the FX icon applied here so that we can just click on that and then adjust the gaussian blur from here to blend it in better. You might not need to blur every one of these, but it is useful just to have this available to you right in your layers, because we have the blend mode changed and the blur extra available to us. This just saves some time as we're applying the assets. I'm going to be using this ready to go category throughout this course. One last thing that I wanted to mention is that you can actually arrange the different assets within their categories. For example, if you find yourself using this one a, you can bring it up more toward the top. I'll just bring it back down to where it was. And you can also click and drag to rearrange these categories. Okay, now you know how to use the assets panel, which is perfect because we'll use it in the next video to make a new assets category. 7. Asset Categories: This video we'll make a brand new asset category. For the next two videos, I want to show you how to create your own categories and how to make your own assets, just in case that's something you're interested in. To get started with this video, we'll create a new category by going to this Top hamburger menu, and then clicking on Create New category. I'm going to name this category, colorful assets. Then I'll press, and we're in. It automatically becomes the selected category. We already have one subcategory here. But let's just make one more subcategory to make multiple subcategories. Just come to the top hamburger menu and then go down to where it says, create subcategory. We have a category with two subcategories. I'm just going to rename the top one. I'll call this one red assets. I'll rename this one blue assets. Once you have a subcategory, you can make an asset to add into it. I'm just going to pick any shape. I'll just choose the rectangle here. Then I'm going to drag out a square while holding shift. I want to put this into our red assets. I'm just going to make this a red square. To add it as an asset. All you need to do is have its layer selected. Then go to the Hamburger menu next to the subcategory you want to add it to, and then you can go down to where it says add from selection. As you can see, we now have this asset added right here. This will also take the name of your layer as the name of the asset. But you can go ahead and rename that if you want by right clicking on it and renaming it. Next, we can go ahead and make this rectangle blue so that we can add it to our blue asset. I'll also rename the layer by double clicking on it, and I'll just call this blue square. Now that we've changed the name, watch what happens when we add this as an asset, I'll go to the hamburger menu and add from selection. You can see this one's named Blue square because that was the name of our layer. I'll just delete this blue square now to show you that we can go ahead and add these assets now. I'll double click. It's loaded into our cursor and I can click and drag to add this asset. Just like that, you've make your very first asset. This was just an example though. I'm going to go ahead and delete these. I'll delete the blue square. To delete just one subcategory, you can go to the Hamburger menu and go to delete. Press. Or if you want to delete an entire category, you can go to the top hamburger menu and then go down to where it says, delete category. Press yes. And just like that, it's deleted. Let's go back into the golden hour assets. The blue and red assets really was just for practice, but here's an example of a subcategory that you might actually want to make. I'm going to go to the top, and then I'll press on, create subcategory. I'm going to rename this subcategory, and I'm going to call this one favorites. I'll press. Then I'm going to close this up and then drag it to the top. With that, we're all set up for the next video, where we're going to learn how to add assets into this subcategory. 8. Making Assets: Learn how to make beautiful assets in this video. When I make assets, I like to start with a blank slate. I'm going to create a new document to make our assets on top of. I'll go up to file and then new. From here, I want to make a document that's 4,000 by 4,000 pixels. Right now, we're in the print section, which is making our measurements set to inches. I'm just going to go down to where it says web, and I can click on any of these to change our measurements to pixels. Then I'll just click in this box and type in four. Then I'll press Enter, and I'll do the same for the height. Now we have a perfect square that's 4,000 by 4,000. You could really choose any measurement you want for this file. But just to keep things consistent with the other assets I've already made, I'll go ahead and set it to 4,000 by 4,000 for this one. I'll press Create. Using this blank document, we can go ahead and begin. The first thing I want to show you is how to save existing assets into our brand new favorites category. To do this, I can go ahead and just click and drag to add this in. Since these assets are the exact size of this document, clicking and dragging is no problem. It'll fit perfectly. Now that we have it in our document. All we need to do is go next to the favorites and click on a Tamburger menu. Then click on Add from Selection. Just like that, we've added this asset into the favorites category. You may have noticed this is a pretty roundabout way to duplicate an asset, but that's what we have to do because that's not actually an option when you click on the assets. This is just a little work around. I'll delete this one and I want to show you that you can actually add multiple assets at a time. I'll just click and drag a few more assets into here. With all three of these assets, I'll hold shift and click. Now all of their layers are selected, and I can go up here and add from selection. This allows you to add multiple assets at the same time as long as their layers are selected, which is. I also want to show you that you can actually modify your assets before saving them. To do this, I'm first going to start by just bringing one of these circles in. Then I'm going to add a blur to it. I'll go to our f X. I'll check on the Gaussian blur option. Then I'll bring the radius all the way up to make it nice and blurry. With that, I'm just going to go up to our favorites category and add this from our selection. Now you can see we have this blurry circle saved. Another way you can modify these assets is actually taking any of these top ones here, bringing it in. Then you can actually change the colors in this gradient because I just made this with the gradient tool. Go ahead and click on the gradient tool. You'll be able to see all of the different colors that I added to create this. If any of these colors aren't really working for you, you can just click on one of the color stops and you can change the color from right over here. Once you have that modified, you can go ahead and save this into the favorites category. Once again, I'll click the Hamburger menu and add from selection. And just like that, we have a brand new asset created. Of course, I want to show you that you can also make your own assets from scratch. To do this, I'm just going to click on the rectangle. Then I'll click and drag fitting this to size here. This has actually saved the colors from the last gradient. I'm going to click on the gradient tool, and I'll just delete this middle color stop, and we can create our own brand new gradient here. On this top one. I'm going to make this a nice dark blue color. And for the bottom one, I'll select that. I'm going to make this a nice light blue. I'm going to double click to rename our layer sky. With that layer selected, I'm going to add this to our favorite category. And just like that, we have a brand new asset saved. You can also make any photo an asset, which is what a lot of these assets that came with the course are. You can use your own photos or you can find them online. Then you can just save them as an asset just as we've been doing. With that, we're done with the first chapter. Great job. Now that you know all the basics of assets. In the next chapter, I'll walk you through some practice projects so that you know how to make the best use of the assets that come with this course. 9. Practice Projects: That you have the Golden hour assets. Let's learn how to use them. But instead of doing a bunch of boring technical lessons. Let's have some fun and learn by doing. In this chapter, we'll learn practical skills for using the Golden Hour assets by editing a series of photos together. We'll start off nice and simple and then work our way up to more advanced projects. By the time we finish, you'll be totally prepared to add Golden Hour lighting to all of your own photos. I'm really excited to do these projects with you. They're going to be a lot of fun. Let's get started 10. Simple Sunburst: For this first project, we'll make a beautiful, simple sunburst. First, we need our exercise file, so I'll go up to file, and then down to open. This is the second exercise files folder, and I'm going to choose the first one for this, and then I'll press open. For all of these projects, we're going to use the ready to go assets just to save a little time. To add a simple sunburst to this one, I'm going to scroll down. I'm actually going to add star explosion three to this one. I'll just double click on this. Then I can click and drag to add this end. Just as a quick tip, you want to place your asset where the light could be coming from. In this picture, I think it's coming from this top corner. I'll just place this right here. I actually think this one might be a little too much, so I'm going to delete this one. Sometimes it might take a little experimenting to find just the right one. I'm actually going to use unburst number three. I'll double click, and I'll add this one in. You can see this one's just a little bit softer, which I think will look really nice for this picture. I want this to cover the whole picture and be set in this corner. I'll need to make this a little bit larger. All right. I think this one looks really nice. Here's the before and after. In this video, I just wanted to show you how sometimes you'll need to try out a few assets to get the look you're going for. Keep that in mind as you use them. There's no shame in trying out a bunch of them to get the right look. Now that you know that. In the next one, we're going to add some rays of light. 11. Simple Light Rays: Let's add some simple light rays in this video. For this first image, it looks like there's a skylight up here with light shining down behind our subject. I'd like to add some light rays up here that are streaming down onto our subject. To do this, I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to use light ray one. I'll double click to load that. Then I'll zoom out so that I can cover the whole picture with these light rays. I think I'm also going to angle this a bit so that it looks like it's streaming from this direction. All right. That looks pretty good. I think I'd like to customize the blur a little bit. I'll click on the F X icon right here. Then I'm just going to increase the radius to soften that. Next, I want to show you a little trick that you can do with these assets, and that's that you can mask them. I'm going to apply a mask to this layer. Then I'm going to grab the paint brush tool. Now I can paint in black paint with a nice low flow. I'd like 10% for this. We can go ahead and remove the asset from off of areas where it doesn't quite belong. In this picture, since the light is coming from behind our subject, I'd like to remove this a little bit from our subject's face, and any other areas where it's just standing out a little bit too much. Here's what that looked like. Here's the before and after of the mask. Here's the complete before and after. I think I'll also lower the opacity of the light rays a little bit. But I think this looks great before and after. It's so much fun to add light rays to things. Let's do it one more time. For this example, I'd like to add some light coming from this direction with a rays streaming down onto our subject. For this one, I think I'm going to use a light ray number six. I'll double click. I'll zoom out a little bit, and then I'll cover the whole photo with these light rays. These light rays are pretty harsh. I'm going to go over to our ef and I'm going to increase the blur to soften them. That already looks nicer. But I'm also going to use our masking trick to remove it from our subject just so it looks more like the light is coming from behind her. I'll add a mask. Then I'll grab the paintbrush tool and I'll paint in black paint with a low flow once again, just to remove this off of our subject. You don't need to be too scientific with this. Just do whatever looks good to you to your eye. You might not need to remove every single light ray you see, but I think just softening it a little bit off of our subject looks pretty good. Especially on her dark pants, these light rays are really standing out. I'm going to pay special attention to remove the rays from that area. The reason I like using a low flow is because you can slowly build up your paint to remove. I think this just makes it look a lot more natural because you have more control over it. With that, here is the before and after of our mask. I think I might paint a little bit more on her face here. And here is the before and after of that. Now, this still looks pretty intense to me. I think I'm going to lower the opacity of this one. Just to tone it back. But here is the before and after. I think this looks so good. Now that you're acquainted with light rays and you know how to mask assets. In the next video, we're going to have some fun as we add some light rays to a window. 12. Window Light Rays: This video, let's add some light rays to a window. I want the light rays to be streaming into our subject from the window. I'm just going to double click on L light ray six. Then I'll drag this out so that it covers the whole image with the center point of the light, landing about there. First, I'm going to remove some of the harshness of these rays by customizing our Gaussian blur. I'll click there and drag this up. I think that looks pretty good. Next, we're going to do some painting to remove this from some areas. I'll add a mask. I'll grab the paintbrush tool and let's paint in black paint. Now, this window image is a little bit trickier because there's more elements that are blocking the light. For example, this window pane area right here shouldn't have light cast on it too. It should have a little bit of light since the light is probably bouncing around the room. But for the most part, I'm going to remove it from this area. Then I'm going to remove it from our subject just so I can see here a little bit better. It should be coming from behind her. Especially make sure you get it off of her legs, since it shows up pretty harshly on her pants. I think I'll paint it off of this side of the chair a little bit since this part of the chair should be blocking those sun rays. Anywhere where it makes sense to you that the light wouldn't be shining, go ahead and lightly remove it from those areas. Another thing that always helps with this painting is just to lower the overall opacity. First, I'm just going to show you what this looks like before and after with the mask. Now I'll lower the opacity and show you the before and after with those light rays. I think this looks pretty natural before and after. Now, one thing I want to show you in this video is that you can combine adjustment layers on top of your assets to really help sell the effect. To help this effect stand out more, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. To start, I'm going to drag up the black point, which will just fade the shadows a little bit more. Then I'll bring the white point over just to make it extra bright. I don't want the whole image to be this bright though. I'm actually going to add a gradient, so I'll select that tool. I'm just going to drag it up from the bottom. You can see this is mainly being applied down here and then it slowly fades out. Here's the before and after of that curves adjustment. You can see this is especially just helping this area to brighten up those shadows. All right. With that, now we can see a complete before and after of this window light ray project. How fun is that? Great job. In the next video, we're going to do another effect by adding a sunset to a photo. 13. Walking at Sunset: This video, we'll use the assets to create a beautiful sunset. For this picture, I wanted to look like this couple is walking toward the sun. I'd like to place it somewhere around here. I think this will also look good because the clouds look like they're going out in that direction. That could add to the effect. The asset I'd like to use for this is called Sun flare two. There it is. I'll double click on that. Then I'll just zoom out a little bit so I can cover the whole picture with this asset. I wanted to be in this area but I also want to angle it so these harsher rays aren't directly covering her face. I might need to make this a little bit larger. Another strategy is just to rotate this. Now you can see her faces in between those rays. I think that looks. With that set, I'm just going to go over to the layer and click on the F X, and I'm going to increase the blur, just to soften it. I think around ten pixels looks pretty good, so I'll close out of that. Then I'm just going to add a mask to this layer. Now I can grab the paint brush and I can paint in black paint just to remove it from a few areas. Again, I just want to make sure it's definitely not on her face, but I'll also paint it off of her since the sun should be shining behind her. I'll paint it a little bit off of this subject as well. I think that looks pretty good. Next, I actually want to add one more asset, and I'm going to fill the whole photo with this Sunburst square right here. I'll double click, and then I'll click and drag from edge to edge to add this to the photo. Right now it's set to the screen blend mode, but I'd like to try different blend modes for this. Let's just see what could look good. I think we'll go with overlay for this one, but I'll lower the opacity quite a bit. We have that nice warm coloring being added. Here's the before and after. I think I'm done with the assets. I'm just going to add a few adjustment layers to finish this off. First, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. Because I want to just make sure that this photo is bright enough for it to make sense for sunset, all these sunrise are streaming in. I'm actually going to take the white point and drag this over and you can see how bright this becomes. It's way too bright right here, but we'll fix that in a second. I think this looks pretty good. To remove it from that area, I'm just going to grab the paint brush and I'll paint in black paint over the sky just to tone that down. But you can see the rest of the photo is a lot brighter now. Here's the before and after there's still a few areas that are a little too bright like the sky behind her. That's okay. We can just quickly paint that. Here's the after of that. As one last step, I think I want to add even more saturation to this ph. I'm going to go ahead and add an HSL adjustment. I'm going to increase the saturation. I think this is actually looking a little bit too red now on the skin. I'm going to take the huge shift slider and I'll just bring that down a little bit to remove that. Just a little bit. Here's the before and after of enhancing the colors a little bit. Now I'll just select all of the layers to show you a complete before and after. All right, this looks so good. Now that you know that you can stack multiple assets on top of each other. In the next video, we're going to do this again. Using multiple assets to create a beautiful effect. 14. Summer Drive: 's use the assets to create a summary effect for this photo. Right now, this girl is just sitting in her car. It looks a little dark. But I want to add some nice sunshine to it, just to make it look more comfy cozy. The first thing I want to add is called a star explosion number one, which sounds really intense and it is. I'm going to double quick. Then I'm going to zoom out quite a bit so that I can drag this over the whole image. You can see what this looks like, and I think I actually want these to be streaming downward. I'm just going to flip this upside down like this. Then I'll place this up in the top corner where it looks like the sun is streaming in. I like these light rays and these little dots here, but I want to soften them a little bit, so I'll go into our effects, and then I'll just increase the gaussian blur. About like that. Maybe I'll also lower the layers opacity a bit. Here's the b four and after. It's always nice to make this a little bit more subtle. But you can still see the nice sunshine effect. I want to keep it subtle because we're going to add a few more assets on top of this. The next asset I want to add is called the lens flare Boca. I'll double click, and I'll drag this one out. I like this one. It just adds these two circles here. I think I'll angle them like that. It looks like it's coming from this direction, and I'll just push these off to the side. I'll go into our gaussian blur next, and I'm just going to tone this down by blurring it more. Something like that. I'll lower the layer opacity as well, just to tone this down. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. As one last asset to add, I'm going to go back up to our squares and I'm actually going to select the colorful square. I'll double click and then I'll click and drag to fill the whole picture. I don't actually want this to cover the whole photo. I actually think it'd be nice if it was streaming in from the side. To mask this. I'm going to add a mask. Then I'm going to grab the gradient tool and I'm going to click starting from the left side and I'll just bring it over to the right. Now that we have that beautifully streaming in, I'm just going to select the whole layer again and I'll lower its opacity. I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of adding in that color. We're almost done. I just want to add a few more adjustments. First, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. With this curve, I actually want to add a little bit more contrast. To do that, first, I'm going to brighten the photo a bit by bringing over the white point. But then I'll darken the rest of the photo just to enhance the shadows a little bit more. Here's what that looks like before and after, after. I think that's a beautiful difference. Last, let's just add an HSL adjustment to bring up the saturation of our colors. I'll bring that up to around 10%. Here's the before and after just a subtle difference, but it adds a little bit more color there before, after. And now I'll just select all of our layers and I'll press H to get the hand tool out. All those boxes go away. Now you can see a complete before and after. V n. All of those layers made subtle differences, but I definitely think this looks more like a warm drive. Very nice. In the next video, I'll show you a few examples of how we can get even more creative with our assets. A 15. Getting Creative: Let's get creative in this video. So far, we've seen a lot of ways to use the Golden Hour assets in sunshiny photos to add a sunset or to add some light rays. But before we continue with more golden hour projects, I just wanted to detour and show you that you can use these assets in a lot of other ways. Even if that's not necessarily what they were made for, we can still get creative. For this first one, this isn't exactly a golden hour lighting, but we're going to add some beautiful rays coming from this lantern. To do that, I'm going to use a sunburst number three. I'll double click. Then I'll just zoom out so I can bring this over the entire picture like that. Then I'll just place this over the lantern. I'm just going to blur this a little bit using the Gaussian blur. Bring that up a little. All right. This might not be a sunset, but as you can see, this light looks just right for the lantern. I think this one turned out really nice and very simple. Let's go to the next one. This one is a nice dark nighttime photo. It doesn't really make sense to add a sunset or something like that. Instead, we're going to use this really cool one called a light leak. I'm just going to double click on the first one, Light leak number one. Then I'm just going to click and drag to bring this over the photo. And I'll lower it down like that. I think I'll lower the layer's opacity a little bit. I think this one looks really nice so far. I just want to add an adjustment layer to enhance this even more. I'm going to go down to our adjustments and add a curve. For this one, I actually want to brighten the black point to fade out the dark areas of the photo. But then I'll just click and drag to the rest of this to the spline in the middle like that. Maybe even more. Here's the before and after, and you can see how that's faded out the image. Now we can select both of these to see the complete before and after. I really like how we use this light leak to mimic the colors of the car lights in this parking lot. It's definitely not golden hour, but it's making this nighttime shot look really interesting. Let's do one last one. For this one, I want this to look like a beautiful sparkly fantasy. This might not look the most realistic. But for this one, I'm going to add a bunch of golden sparkly light. To do this, I'm actually going to use the golden Boca, and I'm going to use the one that says bottom. I'll double click on that. The reason this is called bottom is just because the light is coming from the bottom area of the photo. You want to position this so that you can still see her face nicely. I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to adjust the Gaussian blur next. I'll just increase this a little to soften the edges of all of these boca balls. Then I'm going to add a mask to this, and I'm just going to paint in black paint to remove anything that doesn't look quite right. One thing that definitely doesn't look right is this line going across the bottom. That's because this is where our layer sits. You can see it right across there. If you want to get rid of that, an easy way to do that is just to make the whole image. But if you don't want to make it, you like the positioning, then you can go ahead and paint in black paint on the mask to remove that line. So far in the course, I've always made our asset picture larger just so we don't need to deal with these edges because it's annoying when that happens. But I just wanted to show you how to deal with that. And I think I'll also mask some of the sparkles off of her face. I just want to add one more sparkly Boca asset. Just for a variety, I'm actually going to use the Golden Boca Top one. I'll double click and I'll click and drag this out. But I'm actually going to flip this upside down, and we're just going to fill this bottom area with it. To bring in a little bit more sparkle. I'll click on the Gasian blur and I'll increase the blur of this one. Then I'm just going to add a mask to this, and I'll paint in black paint just to remove this line right here. You can even increase the flow all the way if you want to just make this faster. Paint it all the way away. Then I'm going to lower my flow with a larger brush, I'll use the bracket keys to make this. I'm just going to lightly paint over the area, just to blend it in nicely. Let's just add a couple of adjustment layers to round this all out. I want to make the photo brighter because it's starting to look pretty dark. I'm going to go and add a curves adjustment. I'm going to make the White Point brighter, which will just brighten up the highlights even more. I'll bring up the midtones as well. Here's the before and after. I don't really like how this is brightening some of the voca balls a little too much. I'm actually going to lower this underneath so that we're only brightening the photo. I'll click on the top layer again and to finish, I'm just going to add an HSL adjustment. I'm going to increase the saturation. That's pretty bright. I'm actually just going to invert this with command or control I. Now it's hidden, and I can paint in white paint to reveal that saturation wherever I want with my low flow paint brush. I'm just going to lightly paint and white paint over her face to add that warmth then. I'll paint it over her hands as well. With that, I'll just select all of our layers so that you can see the before and after of this magical portrait. As you can see, with a little creativity, these assets can be used in so many ways to create unexpected effects. Now that you know how versatile these assets are, let's keep going and make a beautiful beach sunset in the next video. 16. Sunset Beach: This video we'll add a sunset to a beach. This picture already has a sunset going on, but I just want to raise the sun in the sky a little bit so we can see its beautiful rays shining out. To start, I'm going to go to where it says Sun flare two. You'll have to scroll down a little bit to get there. I'll just double click on it. Then I'll click and drag this over our document. All right. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to click on the F X so that I can blur the rays. That looks pretty good. Now, at this point, you could add a mask and remove some of these light rays from off of their backs. But I think I'll just leave it for now. Next, I want to add a little bit more color for the sun. I'm going to do that with solar flare one. I'll double click, and then I'll click and drag this out. You can see how this just adds a little bit of golden color there. I'll put that like that. I think I'll click on the blur just to blur this even more. It's already pretty blurry. But the more you blur it, the more the colors will spread, so I think this will be pretty good to blur it more. Last, because I did insert this at a smaller scale. You can see the lines going around it. I'm going to add a mask, and then I'll grab my paint brush and I'll paint in black paint on the edges just to smooth them out. We don't want to see these lines going around this. I'll increase the flow a little bit, and then I'll paint it off of the edges. And then with a nice big brush and a lower flow. I'll just smooth it all around. Next, I think I want to add even more color. I really like that golden coloring, but I want more color in the picture. I'm going to scroll to the top of our assets, and I'm going to choose the Sunburst color circle. I'll double click on that. I'm just going to put this right up here at the top. Then I'll go ahead and click on the F X so that I can blur this, and I'm going to blur it quite a bit. When I raise it all the way up, that's pretty good. But I think I'm going to type in one. Which will really blur it. Now you can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after just adding some of that pink color to the sky. Because we blurred it so much, it's also coming down even farther. I think this looks pretty nice. For one last asset, I really like the lens flare Boca. I'm going to use that one again in this one. I'll double click on that. I'll click and drag out these two little circles here. I think I'm just going to angle them, so it looks like it's coming from the sun and I'll place it. It's overlapping with our subject a little bit like that. I'm going to blur this. I'll just raise this up about like that. Once again, I'm going to add a mask so we can just remove the lines going around it. These ones are a little faint, but they're still there. I'm going to grab the paint brush. Once again, I'll just raise up the flow so that I can paint this a little quicker. The ones on top I can't really see. I guess if I can't see it, they're not really a problem? I'll just leave it like that. Then I'll select the whole layer and I'm just going to lower its opacity to make this more subtle. All right. This looks so good so far. Here is the before and after with those assets. As one last step, I just want to add a color adjustment to really help bring all of this together. I'll go to my adjustments and I'm going to apply the color balance adjustment. This adjustment allows you to change the colors of the highlights, mid tones, and shadows all separately. It's very subtle, but I think this makes a really good difference in the end. First, for the mid tones, I'm just going to increase the reds. Maybe I'll add a little bit of magenta by bringing this lighter down. Then I'll add some yellow by bringing this s lighter down. The yellow magenta and red will all help to warm up the photo. But I do think this is getting a little too warm. I'm going to go to the highlights next and I'm going to cool them down a little bit just to counteract this. I'll add Cane by bringing the slider down. I think adding a little magenta actually looks good for this. I'll do that. Maybe I'll add a little bit of yellow. I think it was just looking to red before. Yeah, that's what needed fixing. Now that that looks nice and balanced, I'm just going to go to the shadows and the shadow sliders are actually really sensitive here. You can see as I drag this. This whole sandy beach area changes completely. I want to be very careful of this and I'll just add a little bit of yellow and call it good. Now you can see the before and after of that color balance adjustment before and after. Now that we finished adding in all of those assets and adjustments. I do think that I want to go back and just mask this first sun flay off of their backs just a little bit. It was a little more subtle before we started stacking all of these adjustments, but now I think it just looks a little too obvious. I'll click on that first layer and then add a mask. With my paint fresh tool, I'm just going to softly paint across their backs. I do need to lower my flow a little bit to make this more subtle. All right. So I'll just paint this to remove this a little bit. All right. I think that looks better. And now we can go ahead and select all of the layers to see complete before and after of this amazing sunset photo. This photo just looks so warm and relaxing now. I want to go to the beach. I think changing the colors like we did with that color balance made a huge difference. In the next video, we're going to continue this process by using more assets and more color adjustments to warm up another picture. 17. Sunny Field: This video we'll add warmth and sunshine to a portrait. For this portrait, I want to add a little bit of sunshine coming in from this direction. You can see she has a lot of highlights on her head. I think it makes sense to place it over here. I'm just going to scroll down and I'm going to use the one that's called Sun raise one. I'll double click. Then I'll just click and drag to add this over our portrait. I think this one's so pretty with all of its sparkly boca balls coming in and the light rays. But I do think I want to tone this down. These rainbows on her face look a little unrealistic, even though they are beautiful. To tone it down, first, I'm going to click on this F X, and we'll just increase the blur. And I'll increase it quite a bit and you can see how this has removed those rainbows. But we can still see all the sparkly light and this big red spot. I'll just close out of that. Next, I actually want to use an adjustment to modify only this asset. I'm going to go ahead and add an HSL adjustment. But instead of affecting the whole, I'm going to place it as a layer to our asset. Now as I adjust this, you can see only that asset is being changed. The first thing I want to adjust on this is actually the luminosity slider, which is a little strange how this one works. We don't usually use the luminosity slider, but in this case, it actually tones down the colors in the photo, and I think this looks pretty nice. I'm going to lower that down. But now it's starting to disappear too much, so I'm just going to increase the saturation to bring back some of that color. Now I'll just go to our child layer so that you can see the before and after of that. With that nice and tone down, I'm just going to select the main layer again. I'm going to add a bunch of global adjustments on top of everything to really help sell this sunshine effect. The first adjustment will do is the color balance adjustment. I love the color balance adjustment for how subtle it can be. Let's go ahead and start with the mid tones and we'll subtly warm up the mid tones. I'll bring it over to add some red. I'll add a little bit of magenta and a little bit of yellow. Next, we'll do the shadows. I just wanted to explain really quick how I'm deciding where to move the sliders because it might be a little confusing. For this, usually, I just move the sliders back and forth and decide which color combination I like better. Do I like more blues or do I like more reds? In this case, I think the shadows look nice when they have a little bit of blue added. I'll move it over like that, and I'll do the same for the next one. I think the magenta looks pretty nice, so I'll bring it over toward Magenta. And I just do that for every single slider. If I run into a slider like this one where I don't think either look very nice, I'll just double click to reset it and leave that one alone. Last, let's do the highlights. Don't like that one. That one looks really bad. I think it will just cool down the highlights a little bit. I think that looks nice to counteract all of the warmth that we've added. This is pretty subtle, but here is the before and after. It's added some nice warmth to her skin, and I think the biggest difference is definitely the shadows over here. But I think that's a really good start. The next thing I want to do is just add a little bit of contrast. I'll add a curves adjustment to do this. I'm just going to bring the white point over to brighten everything and I'll bring the black point over to darken the shadows. You can see how pretty this makes her hair look just to enhance the shadows a little bit. But I don't want the photo to get too dark, so I'll just brighten the mid tones a little bit. Here is the before and after adding in that contrast. I think this took a lot of the grayness out of her face. This looks really nice. To really sell this effect even more and enhance the warmth. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. This will make it look a little extreme, but we can always tone it down with the opacity later on. First, I'm just going to increase the saturation. Then I want to add a little bit of red. I think this photo looks very yellow right now. Just adding a little bit of red like that. Like I said, this is way too much. I'm just going to lower the opacity of this layer and we can decide where it looks best. I do like the warmth this redness is adding to her skin, so I think I'll leave it about like that. As one final touch, when there's sunshine pouring in, this will often lead to more highlights and shadows in the picture in different areas. I actually want to paint on some shadows and highlights. To do that, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I'll make this one dark. Then I'll invert it with command or control I, so it's invisible. Now I can just grab my paint brush and I can paint in white paint to reveal this darkness. The sun is shining in like this and it's hitting her head very brightly. But I think her neck would be covered in shadow, as well as the right side of her body here. Before and after. Then I'm just going to add another curves adjustment, but this time, we'll go ahead and make this nice and bright. I'll invert this with command or control I. Now I can paint in white to add some more light. I think I'll add a little more light to her face and the left side of her body. I'll select both of these layers by holding shift and clicking, and you can see the before and after here. I think I want to tone down the opacity just a little bit. But I think that looks really nice. With that, I think we're done. I'll select all of the layers so that we can see the before and after. Nice job. This photo looks so much nicer and warmer now. Great work. In the next video, we're going to layer multiple assets to warm up a wedding photo. 18. Autumn Wedding: This video we'll take an average wedding photo and turn it into a magical autumn scene. I took this photo because I thought this would be a really nice area to have light streaming in. To start, I'm just going to go to our assets, and I'm going to choose Sunburst two. I'll double click. Let's zoom out a little and I'll overlay this and place it right there. I like the light rays coming in. I'll just click to blur this a little bit more. All right. And that's looking pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. Next, I want to do a very similar technique to the one I used in the Sunset Beach video, where we take a colored circle and then blur it a lot to change the colors of the whole photo. For this one, I'll double click on the orange circle. I'll click and drag to add this to the top here. Then I'm just going to blur it one and like I did for the other one. Now you can see what this looks like before and after. Let's add one more asset. For this one, I'm going to use the light leak asset. Let's go with number one. I'm going to click and drag this so it covers the whole photo and brings that light in like that. Maybe I'll angle it a little bit. There we go. Just going from one corner to the other. I think I'll lower the layer opacity down to make this more subtle. Like that. Here's the before and after. Very nice. I think this looks really pretty. Now, you might be wondering, how does Ali know what layers to use? The thing is, I don't. There isn't really a right or wrong answer. Just have fun with it and layer different assets and adjustments together and see what you like. It's a lot of trial and error, and that's just how I do it. Now that I have all of these assets in place. I think the next thing I want to do is just start layering on some adjustment layers. To start, I think this whole image is just looking a little too bright after all that we've done. I'm going to add a curves adjustment. And I'm just going to make this a little bit darker. I think that looks better. Now, another thing that the lighting, now that I'm looking at the picture is that it looks a little unbalanced because this side of the picture just looks so much darker than this side. I don't know if you can see that, but maybe if I zoom out, you can see just a lot more darkness over here with the dark bushes and things and then her white dress really stands out, which is nice. This is a wedding photo. But I think I want to add just a little bit more depth and darkness to this side to even that out. I'll add a curves adjustment. Let's darken the shadows by bringing the black point over. To add it just to this side, I'm going to grab the gradient tool and I'm just going to click over here and drag it to about halfway in the photo. Now you can see the before and after, and how that evens out that darkness. But her white dress still stands out very nicely. We're just darkening this background area. To finish this off, I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. I just want to boost the colors a little bit. I'll increase the saturation. I do think there's a little bit too much redness going on. I'll take the hue slider and bring it. When you bring it downward, it adds green, which counteracts the red. But of course, I don't want to do this. Just a little bit like that. Now you can see what that looks like before and after, and I'll select all of our layers so that you can see the complete before and after. We layered a lot of different assets to make this magical photo, and I think this is a really big improvement. In the next video, we're going to do another wedding photo just because I think it's really fun to add sunshine to them. 19. Summer Wedding: Let's do another fun wedding project in this video. I'd like to add some light to this photo, streaming in from behind them right up here. To start, I'm going to add the solar flare asset. Let's go with number one. I'll just zoom out a little bit so that I can click and drag this over the whole image. This one adds such beautiful warmth, but I think these light rays are a bit too harsh. Let's click on the F X and increase the Gaussian blur. I'll close out of that. Now that we have such beautiful orange colors up here. I'd like to add a little bit more of this orange coloring down here. I'm going to do this by using the orange circle asset. I'll double click on that. Then I'll just click and drag it so that it covers the bottom area right here. I'll raise it just so it includes both their faces like that. Then we can go ahead and go to the FX, and I'm going to really increase this. I'll type in one and, and then I'll press enter. We definitely need to lower the layer's opacity. I'll just click and drag to lower this down. All right. But you can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after. Adding that same hazy color to the rest of the photo. I'd like to add one more asset just to bring some rays of light coming down. I'll go to our assets, and I'm going to use light ray three. There it is. I'll double click on that. I'll zoom out a little. I'll click and drag to bring this over the whole image. A Let's just blur this. And we can lower the layer's opacity. Very nice. So far, this image looks very majestic with all of these assets. To enhance this even more, let's just add a few adjustment layers to bring out some depth. I think that this looks really bright right now. I'd like to add a little bit of darkness with a curves adjustment to start. We're losing a lot of the shadows on his tuxedo right here and their hair is pretty faded. I'm going to go over here and just darken this area, darkening the shadows. But then I'll bring the highlights back up to meet the spline like this. And you can see that's already helped a lot. Here's the before and after of that. I really like how this has added some nice darkness to the edges of the photo. I think I'd like to add some more darkness to the bottom as well. To do this, I'm just going to add another curves adjustment. This time, I'm going to darken the black point to really get it nice and dark. And then I'll select the gradient tool so that we can just have this applied to the bottom area. I'll click and drag like that. Now you can see this is adding some of that same depth to the bottom of the photo, which just frames out our couple nicely. The next adjustment I want to apply is actually some color correction to their faces. After all of the lighting that we added, I think their faces just need a little bit more saturation added to them. I think I might do them separately. Let's start with the man first. I'll add an HSL adjustment. I'll increase the saturation. I think I'll make his face a little less red. To do this, I'll just bring the hue slider down. Just a little bit. Since I only want this applied to his face, I'm going to invert this with command or control I. Then I can grab the paintbrush tool and I can paint in white paint to apply this to his face. I'll use a nice low flow just so it doesn't look too extreme. But I think that looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that color correction. Maybe I added a little too much, so I'll just lower the opacity. Before, after. In addition to this, I think he needs some contrast added back into his face since it looks a little washed out, and that does make sense with all the lighting we added, but I still want him to be the star of the show as well as the woman. I'm going to add a little bit of depth here. I'll add a curves adjustment. I'll make it a nice dark curve. I'll invert this with command or control eye. Then I can just paint in white paint over the areas I want to enhance. This would be his eyebrows and his eyes, his eyelashes. We could also paint this over his beard and his hair anywhere where there's already shadows. I'll look nice just to bring out the shadows even more with this painting. Here's the before and after of bringing back that contrast. It might be a little too much, so I'll lower the opacity. But now you can go ahead and see the before and after of his color correction and lighting adjustment. I'm going to do the same thing for the woman now so that she has nice saturation added to her as well. I'll add an HSL adjustment to start. I'll increase the saturation of this. I think I actually want to add a little bit of red to her. I'll raise the hue slider a little bit. I'll close out of that and invert this with command or control I. Now, using a low flow, I can just paint this over her face. Just to add a little bit more of that color. She actually already has some nice depth to her hair and her eyelashes. I don't actually think I need to paint on more contrast for her. I think she already looks pretty good. Now I'll just select all of those layers we just did, so you can see them before and after of their color correction. We added a lot of color and warmth to their skin, and I think this looks really nice for this picture. As one last finishing touch, I think it'd be pretty fun to add one more asset. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to apply the Star Boca asset. We haven't used this one yet. I'll double click. I like this one because it applies some beautiful, sparkling stars to the image, which just adds to the magic of this beautiful day for them. I think this is really fun. It's actually already blurred enough for my liking, so I'll leave the blur alone. As usual, whenever you add an asset that doesn't fully cover your image, we should double check to make sure there aren't a lines, and I do see a line on this one. I'm going to need to paint that away. I'll add a mask. And then I'll grab the paint brush tool, and I can paint in black paint to remove those lines. I'll just increase the flow. I'll make my brush nice and large, and I'll paint that away. Then I'm just going to lower my flow. We can also paint away any areas that don't really make sense. For example, these areas that are overlapping on his face, I think I'll just remove those little Boca stars there. But I think this looks really nice. Here's the before and after of adding in those stars, and I'll just select all of our layers so that you can see a complete before and after. All right. That was a lot of layers, but I think the end result was worth it. It went from a cool toned photo to a very warm sunshiny one. In the next video, we're going to do one last project together. 20. Golden Hour Portrait: This final project, we'll do one last portrait project together. Honestly, I just couldn't help myself. Making these projects is so fun. I had planned to only do ten photos with you because ten is just a nice round number, but I couldn't help doing one more with you. This portrait is a little bit different. It seems like the light source is in front of her based on the light in her eyes and the way she's lit. But just because I think it looks nice. Let's tick another light source right up here at the top left. Sometimes in photoshoots, there's multiple light sources. To start adding our first light source, I'm going to scroll down and select Starburst three. I'll zoom out, and I'll click and drag this over the whole image, and I'll just place this right up here at the top. All right. I'm just going to blur this. I'll click on the F X and I'll bring up the radius. I think I'll blur it all the way. That softness looks really pretty. Let's add some more light rays now. I'm going to use light ray one. I'll click and drag to add this. Then I think I'm going to angle it, so it's coming from that corner. This looks pretty intense. To start, let's just add some more blurring. Then I'll lower the layer's opacity to make this less extreme. Here's the before and after of that. These assets look really nice so far. The next thing I want to play up is the colors. I'm going to scroll up to the top and I'm going to use that Apricot square. I'll double click on that, and I'll just drag this from end to end of this document here. I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. Then I'll lower the layer opacity. You can see the beautiful colors that this is added. Here's the before and after. I think this is really nice. Next, let's add some adjustments in. I think I want to add a little bit more contrast to this image. I'm going to add a curve. I'm going to make a little by S curve here. I'll bring up the highlights just ale and I'll bring down the shadows a little. I really like the way this contrast has darkened the shadows. I think I want to do that a little bit more making more of the photo darker. Let's add a curves adjustment. I'll make it darker. But then we can go ahead and invert this with command or control I. Then we can grab the paint brush and just paint this darkness where we want it. I want to paint this pretty much everywhere except for her face and the stun burst area. I'll darken her hair a little bit. Make sure you have a low flow for this. I think I'll paint a little extra darkness at the bottom of the photo. Maybe I'll add some extra depth under her neck because the lights coming from up here, there should be some more shadows over here. Here's the before and after of that darkness. That contrasts really nicely with all of the light. I think I'll just lower the opacity a little. But I think that looks really nice. Now that I've darkened that, you can see that some areas of the photo have made her skin look a little bit too red compared to her face. I'm going to fix that with an HSL adjustment. To start, I'm just going to drag the hue slider over and remember we're only trying to affect these areas. It's okay for face looks green right now. Maybe I'll take away a little of the saturation as well. I think that looks pretty nice for the colors. I'll invert this layer with command or control, and then I'll paint this in white paint only over the areas that look too red. You see how that fixed it by adding a little bit of that green and desaturating it. This made a really good difference for this area. So far, we've added a lot of darkness with our adjustment layers. Next, I want to add some shine to the photo, especially her hair, where the light is coming from. I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I'm going to watch her hair as I do this. I'm going to really brighten these areas to add some highlights. Then I'm also going to add some depth with some shadows. I know this looks extreme, so I'm just going to press command or control I so that I can paint this just where we want it. In this case, I mostly just want it to be on the top of her head down on the left side ale bit as well. I did paint a little too. When that happens, just switch your color to black and remove. You just want to make sure this doesn't bleed out onto the background or it'll look a little strange. Here's the before and after of adding that contrast in. I think that looks pretty good. To finish this off, I think I actually want to add a little bit more color to her face and neck area. We took away a lot of the red from her arms, but I do think she could use a little bit more redness up here. I'm going to add another HL adjustment, and this time, I'm going to increase the saturation and increase the red. I'll just drag the hue slighter up. I'll press command or control I to invert this. Then I can use white paint to apply this. I'll just apply this over her face a little, her shoulder and her hand right here. But one area you do not want to apply to is her lips. You see how bright they became before, after not so good. I'm going to grab the black paint. I'll just carefully paint on her lips to remove that. There we go. Okay, now here's the before and after of adding that redness in. I think this looks really nice. I'll just select all of our layers so that you can see the complete before and after of this magical golden portrait. And with that, we're done. Great work on this final project. 21. Class Conclusion: Great job. You finished the course. I hope you had as much fun as I did. Now you're totally prepared to add Golden Hour lighting to your own photos. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.