Fundamentals Of Affinity Photo

1. Intro & how to get resources: All right gig and welcome to skill share. Now, I've been teaching on skill share for awhile. And what I've found and what I love about the platform is that it is project focused. Now, there are other classes out there on skill share that cover all of Affinity Photo and everything we have to do. But this class is built around one project. You're going to be taking this image that I shot in downtown Detroit. And I'm going to teach you the top filters that you're going to need in one hour so that you can take your newfound knowledge and begin editing like a pro. So there's a very specific outcome for this class. In the download area, you're supposed to submit your finished JPEG of this wall. So after we go through the hour, you're going to take the JPEG, you're going to put it down there. That is the defined project for this class. Now, there are resources, right? The resources that we've got for this class include the concrete textures that we are going to use, the base image that we're going to use. And I've included my finished file so that you guys can follow along if you get lost, so you see how to do it. I really think that somewhere between fumbling around on say, YouTube tutorials and massive ten I recourses. There is a direct applicability for project-based courses here on skill share. And I am proud to present this one, the fundamentals of Affinity Photo to help you along your Affinity Photo journey. Alright, let's go ahead and get started. 2. Basics of the interface and opening the document: Alright, getting and welcome to the fundamentals of affinity photos. So we're gonna start off from the bare bones now. Again, this course is an hour in duration and we're going to cover fundamentally the things that you're gonna need to get up and running in that hour. This is not a ten hour dissertation on Affinity Photo. So let's go ahead and get started. Now the first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna introduce you to the interface. Now, up here along the top, you see how that's turning gray. There's my menu. Now. Down here in the left area, you see how there's little affinity symbol right there. There are four or five personas that are used in Affinity Photo and we're going to cover some of them. But I wanted to give you the overview. Most of the work you're going to do is here in the photo persona, right? Notice how when I hover over it, it says photo. We're going to show you the liquefy persona. We're also going to show you the develop persona Now that is used for raw files. If you're familiar with Photoshop, you know what a raw file is. If not, the last lesson in this course, we'll be the lesson on rock. Then we're going to show you tone map to thing we're not going to really cover is export persona. That's more of an advanced thing. And to get up and running, it's not something you're going to really need to learn. Alright, now, this area right here, this is called your tool bar. Now, this is customizable. You go to view and now you'll see here Show Toolbar and customize toolbar. If you wanted to customize the toolbar, you've got all these things. And again, as this is fundamental, you, there's no way possible we can show you how to use all these things in the hour. But if I use a tool that you don't have up here, you can go up and down in here and find it. Alright. Now, the other part of the interface, this right-hand side over here is called the studio. In the studio has panels. So you can swap panels from area to area. You can close panels. So notice I'll hit the x. And let's say I wanted that panel back. Go to View Studio. And here are all the panels, so I can bring it back. Now. I can undock, which means bringing it out of the studio. And if I click and drag, I can read OK. I tend to work with certain panels all the time. The Layers panel for what we're gonna do is going to be key. And I usually will have this front and center for you. So this right-hand area is the studio. That's really all you need to know. And this left-hand area are your different tools. So let's go ahead and light these tools up. Let's go to File Open. And the first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to be doing a very simple edit of the wall and bear, alright, this is a wall I shot in downtown Detroit. I do a lot of graffiti photography. I do a lot of urban photography. So I don't shoot a lot of people. So now notice when we brought this in, we now have the tools on the right-hand side. And so you've got your Move Tool, your color picker tool, all the normal tools. And if I ever use a tool that you don't have, go to View. Customize tools, not customize the toolbar, customized tools. And then you've got all sorts of different tools. I'll tell you, I don't use most of those tools. I use the default out of the box stuff. So as we just covered, the first thing you're gonna do if you just crack this program, go to file and you can open any sort of image. So let's say I wanted to open another one. And by the way, these are all the images that I've included in this course. Let's say we want to open the alleyway. Click and open. Alright, now you have two photos open. You see there's the alleyway here and there's the wall and the bear alleyway, wall and bear. And if you ever wanted to close an image and bring it up here and hit close document. Now, let's do our first simple adjustment. I want you to practice grabbing your Layers panel and bring your Layers panel out into the world here. Your Layers panel is going to be very important. And then what I want you to do is I want you to come down here and there is a lesson on this coming up. And I want you to click on Adjustment Layer. Now, an adjustment layer will change the layer that you have highlighted. You see the blue is the highlight. I want you to come over to this little lock here. And I want you to click on that. And if you ever wanted to lock layer, you could relock it on lock, relock. And if you wanted to make the layer invisible, just uncheck. There you go. Alright, so Adjustment Layer. One last thing here to finish up this lesson. Click on the Adjustment. And what I would like you to do is recolor. Okay? Now what recoloring is gonna do? It's going to apply what's called an adjustment layer. You see our new layers have been added. Let's go ahead and move it over to kind of this orangeish here. We're changing the hue. And let's D saturate this down a little bit. Okay? So hue, saturation and lightness are the things that you can control as part of the re-color. So the cool thing here is you now have this nice sepia, old tiny effect off from one simple adjustment layer. So in the first five to six minutes of this course, you've identified what an adjustment layer is. You've applied as sepia type of adjustment here to get that old timey look. And we've been able to teach you the fundamentals of the interface. Alright, let's go ahead and call this one, and we'll see you in the next one. 3. Working with layers in Affinity Photo: All right gang and welcome back to fundamentals of affinity photos. So this lesson is all about layers. Now layers are inherent in every sort of photo editing program you can think of. So the things that I'm going to teach you here are applicable if you use Adobe, If you do video editing, any of that, they're all based on layers. Layers are fundamental to digital art. So when we do this, the Layers panel is extremely important. And in the last lesson we took a recolor adjustment and we put it above the background layer. Now that term above is very, very important. Layers have order. So think of them like pieces of paper. If I took this recolor adjustment, I left-click and I pulled it down below. You see it's still there, but it's hidden. Why? Because the background layer is on top of it. So if I click drag and move back up, there it comes again. So layers are stacked in order of lowest at the bottom of the stack to highest at the top of the stack. Now we know how to make a layer visible and not. If you wanted to turn this off, you could click the little checkmark that turns a layer on and off. Very simple. Now, layers also have something called opacity. So let's say this recolor adjustment is a little strong for you. You can come down, click on the slider, and drop down the opacity of the layer. It gives it a little bit of tint. It's only 50% opaque, which means the other 50% is transparent. And then there's another lesson on what are called blend modes. You can go through and shift the blend mode of the layer to get different effects. And we'll talk about what blend modes are in that dedicated lesson. But I may be using blend modes from time to time, and I will call out when I do. So in the first minute here, you've learned how to reorder your layers by left clicking and dragging down. You've learned how to change the opacity of the layer by hitting this slider. And you've learned how to change the blend mode of the layer. You also know that the blend modes have a hierarchy. The lowest one is at the bottom of the stack. The tallest one is at the visible part of the stack. Now let's change that back to normal. Alright, let's rename it. Let's go to the background layer and I want to uncheck the lock and just double-click. And let's call this bear. And alright, perfect. So now you know how to rename a layer. Now, layers can come in what are called groups. So layer structure is important. I want you to hold shift, and I want you to click on the bear and then the re-color. I want you to right-click and I want you to say group these. Now what we've got to think of it like a folder. The folder has the recolor adjustment and the bear in M. Now, if I decide to create another adjustment layer, stay with me. Let's go to adjustment. What's go to black and white. Alright, now where did it go? I create a new layer. It dropped it inside of the folder. Now, that's not what I want. Let's click and drag it up. And notice what just happened. The black and white adjustment is now applied to the entire group. So it doesn't matter if we have this recolor Adjustment. We've now created an adjustment that applies to the whole folder. Now, if you wanted to adjust the black and white, you see this little white square. Double-click. And now we can change the reds in the image. We can go ahead and we can change the greens and the image turns out there wasn't any of them. We can change the yellows and the image. And so if you click on the x now and you ever want to come back into the black and white adjustment. It's alive filter. And alive filter means you can adjust. Now let's do one more because I'm going to show you how to do a really cool black and gray layer. Let's go to adjustment and let me show you the levels. Okay. So notice I applied the levels above the black and white. And now let's push the blacks a little bit, make the blacks a little bit darker. And we're gonna push the lights and make the lights a little bit lighter. And you can even change what's called the gamma, which is the overall lightness or darkness of your picture. So this lesson, what I wanted to show you is you could take that traditional old school type of look. And you can apply the black and white adjustment and you can do this same picture only gives it a completely different field. Now let's see, the Blacks are a little too dark for you. You can come down to the output level and you can reduce those. Look over here, watch what happens when I don't adjust it. And you see how dark this side is, come over here. Now I can adjust the whites and I can adjust my gamma. A little bit darker, lighter, black levels. You can change the sliders up until you get to just that look you're looking for. All right, now let's delete a layer because I haven't showed you this and then we'll wrap this up. Let's go into the group, grab the re-color and hit delete. Now grab the bear, click and drag the bear out of the group. Now, this is key. You see how the bear was blue. Watch what happens when I bring it into the group. You see where my blue line is right here. That means it is nested inside the group. This little indent here. It's like a hierarchical thing. The bear is now indented or nested inside the group. Here, it's on the same level as the group. So layers have a nesting structure or a parent and child structure. And there are levels to this game. So make sure that your images are in the right level. We'll talk a lot more about that as the class goes on. And let's say this group now is empty, right? There's nothing in the folder anymore. Right-click and Delete. All right, folks, that's it on this lesson on layers. Let's go ahead and call it. And in the next lesson we're going to go through and we're going to show you something about what's called a live of filter layer. We've been dealing with adjustment layers, which are right here. We're going to show you in the next lesson how to work with live filter layers. All right, we'll see you the next one. 4. Live filter layers and adjustment layers : All right folks, welcome back to infinity photos. So in this lesson we're going to kind of round out our layers discussion by showing you an Adjustment Layer, which you've already seen in preview, a live a filter layer. And I'm also going to show you how to find the effects tab. Alright, so let's go ahead and I'm still working on the Layers panel. And we have this Levels adjustment with a black and white adjustment on this bear. So let's practice deleting. Let's delete the black and white. And let's delete Levels Adjustment, bringing back our bare. Now I'm gonna use this little area down at the bottom here to kind of move this over. And if you want to, I'm going to introduce you to the zoom tool. The zoom tool is down here. It's a little magnifying glass. Click and drag to zoom in. Click and drag to zoom out. Alright. So you now know where the Zoom tool is. We use the zoom quite frequently. You can also use what's called the context Toolbar, which is up here. There is always a context toolbar. And depending on the tool, see I'm flipping through the tools. This context bar changes. So each tool has their own context. Alright, I'm gonna go back to the Move tool. I'm going to be working on my bear. Now what I want to show you, we've been working in adjustments, so let's go ahead and make an adjustment. I'd like to show you now how to do an exposure adjustment. Now exposure means lighter or darker. So if you underexposing image and you want to kick it up a notch, that is how you make an adjustment exposure to the positive. And if you overexposed and wanna make it darker, you just shift to this side. Okay, the reason I show you the exposure of adjustment as a photographer, I will be the first raise my hand and say I'm an awful photographer. I'm an awesome editor, but an awful photographer. So it's not uncommon that I underexpose or overexposed my images. So let's go ahead and just expose this one up a little further. I don't want to blow out the whites, but I do want to show you the technique. So I've got an exposure adjustment, and this is from the Adjustment Layer. And now we're going to show you what's called the Live filters. Now there's two ways to get here. Live filters are right here. Or if you show choose Layer, live filter layer. So we can do this either way you wanna do it. I'm going to use this menu because it makes sense to me. And when you look at life filters, the reason they call them alive filter is it's adjustable. You're not destroying the image. So let's bump up the clarity here a little bit. Now. There's a clarity filter right here. And clarity is a fancy way of saying more detail. So let's go ahead and click that in. You see the clarity filters created. Now, this is why I showed you how to zoom. You can crank up the clarity quite a bit, but just see how I'm way out of here. I can't really see it. Grab the magnifier. Let's zoom in. And now remember the clarity thing disappeared. Double-click on the white box. And now we can really see in the brick, the details begin to emerge. So when you are doing this in your photos, if you have a photo that was taken in, it's not quite as sharp and crisp as you would like. Try a clarity adjustment, okay, that's the easy way to do it. Now there are 900 different ways to add detail. I don't wanna go into all 900. That's a discussion for another time. The clarity filter is one of those frequently used tools. So I'm going to crank this up quite a bit to get a little more pop to my image. Once you were are where we are. We're gonna go ahead and we're going to zoom out here. And if you ever want to check what that did, watch this, we're going to toggle on, Toggle Off. You see the, the chart. Toggle on, toggle off. That's really showing up nice in those bricks. So this is a live layer. Now let's do another live filter layer. Let's come down here and this is one that you're going to use all the time. The ever popular vignette. Not okay, right there. Now it's going to come up. And the first thing you do, you crank down the exposure. I always reduce my hardness on the vignette and I increase my scale. So this is a tool that I use all the time. My filters, my work. I always use the vignette to try to move the I where I need it. And the nice thing is if you click off it, notice here, you could always double-click and bring it back. So that's another life filter layer that you will use all the time. The last live filter layer I want to cover before we go to effects. Click here. This is my favorite here. Now this one is a very complex one. This one is lighting, okay? Lighting creates an artificial light. And the only thing you need to know and fundamentals there, spotlight, there's point light, and there's directional light. I'm gonna go ahead and use a spotlight. And you click using these little blue nodes. And if you run out of room, Don't forget to zoom out. And you can always come back. And then you can push the intensity up. You can do whatever it is you want to do. This has a way of putting some really cool dramatic work in here. Because let me show you the cool thing here. Let's say you want to change the ambient light color. Now you can put this, let's do a green. There we go. That thing is cool. Alright, you want a little bit more? We can zoom it out here. All right? And when you're done, just close it out. And if you really wanted to go to crazy town, you could come in and change even the light color that you're doing here to get that looks so not only is this the ambient light change, but the color of the light is going to change. Delight filter changes the entire game. Because if you're able to come out here, now you're able to move it around. You're able to push it out. You're able to do a whole lot of other stuff. This thing is pretty awesome thing. And like if you were doing a meme and you wanted to put some text down here, which we will do later. That's part of that key. Alright. Last thing I want to show you, there are what are called layer affects. Click on this. Now. If you wanted to, on a layer, you can use layer effects. And the easiest way for me to show you this is to add a text layer. Let's go ahead and add an artistic text effect. Click and drag and call this bear. Ok, now select and let's change the font. I'm just going to change it to some like that. That'll work. Now watch this. This layer has a special, a ion and this is a special type of layer. It's a text layer. And if I click on effects, I can go out or shadow. And I can create a radius and I can offset. You see what that just did there. You see that little shadow. And I can up the intensity of the shadow. These effects are pretty cool. The ones I use all the time, outer glows. There you go. And then you can drop the opacity, the glow of you wanted to, you can up the intensity of the glow if you wanted to. You could do a lot of different stuff with it. And using the Move Tool, you can put it anywhere you want to put in. All right, so I don't wanna make this go too long. We're trying to keep these pretty short. So in this lesson, let's go ahead and close this out. You learned about live filter layers. You learned about layer effects, and you learned a little bit about some of the other adjustment. There's Alright folks, let's go ahead and take the next one. Alright, see you the next one. 5. Mask layers in Affinity Photo ....: All right, folks, welcome back to Affinity Photo. Now, I'm going to teach you one of the most complex things when it comes to layers. But it's one of those you're just going to have to work with and get comfortable with. And this is the thing called masking. Now, when you mask, mask is a fancy way of saying making not visible. So we're still working with the bear here, right? Very simple stuff. And so the last thing that I want to show you here is the mask layer. This is right here. And the thing that I wanna do, I want to show you also where to go to get shapes. So shapes are over here in the tool area. And you see this little triangle thing by my triangle. Click on the little triangle and they've got all your shapes. Now what I'd like to do, I'd like to come up here and you see I've got a green line and the red line. The thing that I want you to do, come up to your toolbar and turn snapping on. Snapping is a way to align it to make sure that it's right in that corner. Now, let's click and drag. And let's make this shape read. Now how do we do that? I'm going to come over to Phil and you see him in the context toolbar up here. Click on the fill and turn it red. Now, depending on what's going on with your software, you might have all sorts of these little dropdowns here. If you click right here, I like to use the HSL color wheel, makes it read. Now what I'd like to do, I would like to drag this down to the bottom of the stack and you see that there's no more red rectangle because there's all these layers buried below it. Now I'm going to use every tool that we've talked about. I'm going to grab the bear. I'm going to hold the Shift button. I'm going to right-click and I'm going to hit groups. So you're grabbing all those layers and you're forming them into a group. Now I'm going to apply the mask layer to the group. Ok, so you see I now have this white rectangle here, square. And if I twirl this down, there's a mask layer that's created. Now, get this down deep in your soul. Black conceals white reveals. When it comes to masking, again, black conceals white reveals. So on the mask layer, here's a new technique for you. I'm gonna grab a paintbrush, my paint brushes right here in my toolbar. And I'm going to come over to my color tab that where's my color tab? It's somewhere in the studio. I'm gonna click and drag mine out. And I'm gonna put it on this panel Fourier so I can flip back and forth. And I'm going to click the black color, ok. So whichever colors on top here is the color that there is. As an example, if I come over here, you see all my colors are determined. And if I wanted to switch, I could click there and I could go with black. So now the black is on top. Alright, so I have the brush, I have the color. Now watch what happens when I paint black on the mask layer. It's revealing the red underneath y because I'm concealing this top layer. Now masking is a nondestructive technique because if black conceals, which notice when I just paint regularly on painting black, Control Z to undo that. Make sure you're on the mask layer. And let's paint white. Look good that my image comes back totally non-destructive. So if I want to reveal some of the background, I can, I know this is making a couple of heads spin right now. Realized that the layer that you're on, I applied the mask layer to the group. I'm concealing that visual when I use black paint. See the black pain. Not on the mask layer. There we go. What I'm telling Affinity Photo is hide this layer. Now, when I switch to White, What I'm telling Affinity Photo is reveal that layer. Now you might see me switch and brush sizes up here in the context toolbar for brushes. You can change the size up and down. And you can also change things like float opacity, that's a tale for another time. In this fundamental lesson, we're working with masks. So there's my mask layer. It's on the group. Now let's do this. Let's practice. Right-click. Delete the layer. Now let's do this. Grab this red rectangle and bring it above the group. Now, you should know by now why the red rectangle showed up above the group. Let's switch brushes. I'm going to come over to my brush. And if you get lost, your brushes panel is over here in studio. And I'm going to use a hard edge to brush this time. So I go to Basic and I go to hard edge. Raise that up color black to conceal the rectangle and I create my mask layer. Now, I just paint this away. And if I want to bring it back color, please reveal. And there's our reveals. Alright. The reason I used contrast and color, just so you all know, is you're going to want to practice with this and you don't want to do subtle adjustments because then you'll never know if it's working or not. The easiest way to do this, folks get two rectangles, make one red, one blue, put them on top of one another in the layer stack and practice, practice, practice. You'll need your layers, your color, and your brushes tab. I bring all three of these out just to illustrate for you. They're all in the studio. And if you don't have them go to View studio and you can click on them to find them there. All right, let's go ahead and call this one unmasking. And the next one we're gonna go through blend modes. 6. Blend modes in Affinity Photo : All right, folks, welcome back to Affinity Photo. So as you've figured out by now, we're building this image a little bit at a time. And I worked through the techniques so that you understand what we're doing. So when we use them here in a little bit, in an actual application, you're familiar with them. So let's come on up to the layers panel. Right-click in, delete that red rectangle. It really doesn't do us any good. All right, now we still have this group, right? And this group is looking pretty sweet. So let's go ahead and in this lesson we're going to show you all about Blend Modes. Now to do this, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna work with this text layer. I don't know how I got to pixel layer there, but okay, now we're going to show you what blend modes do. So let's start with this pixel layer, I should say, this text layer. And let's go ahead and come over to the effect. Now to do this, I clicked on the little FX tab. Let's do Outer Glow and let's change the color to something a little greenish. I kinda like that. I think that that's pretty awesome. Alright. Now, if we're doing this, we're going to now change different blend modes. So let's go ahead and shop. These are largely grouped by the behaviors that they have. And I will tell you, I have been doing this now for five years. I call it blend mode shopping. There are common blend modes that you will use time and time again, like if you're shadowing into digital art, you'll use multiply or average. Bun. I always run through everyone because I never know what is going to give me which result. All of these blend modes up here, we'll evaluate the color above which I'm on, the bear layer. So you see the green and the color below and it will choose the darkest. So watch what happens here. Once I switch over to the lighten. Notice that it only shows the lighter of the two. And it makes sense. What's lighter? The black in the text or the wall behind it. Very, very simple screen. There's not a lot of change in here, but now you get things like overlay, overlays, a cool one. Now I'm just gonna go ahead and zoom in here so you can see what the differences. Where would you possibly use this? Well, if you took overlay and you kind of ran down the opacity a little bit on this thing. That gives a pretty cool effect to that back wall there that I really like. So you can use blend modes a lot. Some are based on color, summer, based on luminosity. The average is going to take the lightness and darkness of one layer and kind of average amount. Some negotiate. There's no way in a fundamentals class that I can share with you what every blend mode does. And eventually as an artist, you'll will get comfortable knowing which blend modes are your gotos. So from my side, for this one, what I'm planning on doing, I really liked the lighten. I think that that outer glow is kind of cool. And so I think I'm just gonna go ahead and keep that just as it sits there. Kind of frame it in there. Alright, actually, let's go ahead. I'd like the overlay. I'm gonna go with the overlay and I'm going to turn down the opacity. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. So where else would you use this? As an example? Blend modes are used when you go to shade. So let's go ahead and I'm just going to shade out a little bit. You don't have to do this at home. But let's say that I wanted to add a little bit more darkness over to this area here. I would come up to my pixel layer. I'd create a new pixel layer, put it up at the top there, and now I'd find the right color. So I'm gonna do a gray. I'm going to find the right brush. And now, if I wanted to darken this, and then depending on what I wanted to do with it, I could change the blend mode of it. You see, I'll multiply completely changes the look from a normal That looks like a big opaque gray down the Now something that's tolerable. And I will probably keep that. Let's go ahead and drop down the opacity just a little bit. That's pretty awesome. Alright, now let me show you how this works with something called a texture. In your downloads for this course, I've included a concrete texture. Now notice, I'm now gonna go to File Place. I haven't showed you this before. There's something called Concrete one. When you place an image inside of a photo in Affinity Photo, This allows you to bring an image in. So we haven't done this before. And now notice where this is in relation to the group. I'm putting it up on top of the group. Now I'm gonna change the blend mode. This is called a texture. And you use textures to unify and to add some really are good artistic elements. 2-year Peace. Now you see what this concrete texture is doing Depending on the blend mode. I'm able to determine what i want this concrete to due to the layer below it. And that overlay is again quickly becoming one of my favorites. I love the soft light. I think that's solid. I don't mind the Hard Light. Differences. Kinda cool. Alright, I'm gonna go through, I think after playing blend modes shop, and I'm going to overlay. And then I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to reduce the opacity of it. Maybe do about 30%. Alright, now what did that just do? That really created a really awesome cover here. Turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on. And if we zoom in, that added a whole lot of visual interest to my image. Now, I'm going to show you some that you already know. I'm going to do something now that we haven't done before. And actually we have done before. I'm going to add a Levels Adjustment and I'm putting it at the top of the stack. Blacks are going to be darker. Whites are going to be wider. And I'm going to shift the gamma just a little bid. That thing is cool. And then I'm going to come up here to bear. And I'm going to up the contrast Just a little, or the opacity. Alright, that thing is looking pretty awesome. So in this lesson, what you identified is that blend mode is a thing. There is no one way to utilize Blend Modes. And blend modes ask the layer how they want to interact with the layer below it. I use the term blend mode shopping. And there are common blend modes like multiply or Overlay or average for things like shading. So in each one of your projects, if you're looking for that artistic pop, try changing the blend modes. The last thing that I'm going to show you here, every one of these layers, like the lighting layer, comes with an adjustable blend mode as well. So notice how changing the blend mode from this to a pin Light completely changes the game of this image. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna turn this over to pin Light. And I think that is actually pretty awesome. Alright folks, sometimes you find those happy accidents. This happens to be one of those times. All right, we'll see you the next one. 7. Color adjustment : All right folks, welcome back to infinity photo. So now what we're gonna do, I'm gonna go ahead and grab a Move tool. I'm going to grab the Levels adjustment in the concrete and I'm going to drag it inside of the group. So you see we're doing here with the group, we're just making it one. Now what I wanna do, I want to show you how to color this now color grading is a class all into itself. I'm not gonna show you all the ins and outs of color grading, but color grading is about modifying the colors so that you get a different effect. So I'm going to show you the most commonly used filters for this. We're going to come down to the Adjustment Layer. The thing that I want to show you at first is called the HSL adjustment. Now, HSL stands for hue, saturation and lightness or luminosity. I'm gonna move it up on top of the group so that we can work with it. And now we're going to use every tool we gotten our arsenal here. When you shift the hue, you're shifting color. So watch the color there of the entire image. You see how every color is shifting. So when you make this adjustment, let's say we shift toward the reds, watch the purples and the color of the record. And you see how now as we move from red's over to blues, you get a very different look at the color of this record. Now, let's say you didn't like that. You can always come in and you can get close. Or you can always come in and you can delete bringing it back. So let's bring it back. Hsl. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to Hugh shift this thing to write about here. I like that. And now watch the saturation. You can over at least saturate this thing to make it really what I'll call punchy. I tend to use heavy saturation and my work. I liked the look. Some people like the subtlety you can under saturate. And if you go to 0 saturation, guess what? You now have a black and white image. So I'm gonna turn it the saturation a little bit here. And then you can shift the lightness of the image. So this is your hue saturation and lightness. And now the last thing that I want to do here with the HSL, You see this is the white square. If I didn't want to apply this only to the record, watch this. Come over with my paint brush. I grabbed a hard brush. My flow is up, my opacity is up, and I'm painting in black. Now watch this. I can mask sections of this image that I don't want the HSL to apply two. Now let's go back to layer. You'll see I have these little black spots. Those are these black spots. So each layer where you adjust, you can specify where you want it to apply or where you don't want it to apply. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to delete this whole thing. Now I'm gonna show you the second way that I color a line and we're going to use another adjustment layer. Now in the first lesson, you saw the recolor, right? That's just blowing it out. That's making it, for lack of a better term, monochromatic, let's say. I'm going to right-click and we're going to delete that. And the color one that I use a lot that I really like to use, I call it selective color. Now Selective Color says, let's take some of the blues, right? Because there's some blues in here. And in the blues, let's crank up the amount of cyan. Let's reduce some of the magenta. Let's increase the yellows. And wherever there's blue, let's adjust the darks a little bit. You can also change what are called the neutrals. So if I wanted this whole image to be a little more blue, boom, just like that. Little more red. And our CIJ say little more magenta, just like that, a little less. So this is a nice way to play with the individual colors and get something that you really like. Okay, so there's three, the HSL, then you have the re-color option. And lastly, you have the selective color adjustment, and these things are additive. So let's say that I choose a selective color adjustment. I can always come in now and I can add in a HSL adjustment. Now notice this is on top of that. I can now shift the entire hue of this thing over to get a really awesome effect. And I can desaturated, I can saturate it more. This thing is going to look pretty awesome by the time we're done. Alright? So things you need to take away from this lesson. I showed you three selective color, HSL, recolor. These things have masked layers already built in. So you can apply some or none. And you can also adjust things like the Blend Modes of these layers. So for this HSL, maybe I want to change it to only affect, say, the lighter areas. Or I might want it to overlay. And then I might come in and take a subtle adjustment down. This thing is turning out to be pretty awesome. An infinite variety of things you can do. Alright, that's a little bit on coloring. Let's go ahead and call this one. And then we'll take a look at the basics of brushes in the next one. 8. Using brushes and cropping : Alright folks, let's go ahead and talk about brushes. Now. Brushes are right here and the thing we are going to be looking at is called the paintbrush tool. Now there is a little triangle. There are a couple other types of brushes. We're just going to be covering this one because this one is the one you're gonna use 99% of the time. And when you see this brush, you want to get it synonymous with the idea of brushes in the studio tabs. So you might find this somewhere in your studio. I'm gonna pull mine out. And if you come down to the drop-down menu, you have different categories. Now Affinity Photo comes loaded with some. However, you can always purchase more, right? I've got a son of brushes in here. So we're going to be using the basics. And the one I use all the time is sprays and spatters as well as textures. So you have the sprays is batters and the textures, you pretty much good. I don't use a lot of the dry media or the acrylics or any of that jazz. So brushes all work at a very simple premise. The size of the brush is dictated up here. Now, I like to use my left bracket and my right bracket keys. That changes the size. If you're not a hotkey fan, you can adjust this area here. I hate it when people just teach hotkeys. Opacity is the opacity of the stroke. Now let me show you what that means. I'm gonna choose a color, I'm gonna go black. And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna put a pixel layer. You see that I'm choosing this pixel area on top. Now watch this boom, big black stroke right there. Okay, let's crank the opacity down to next to nothing. Now the same stroke. You'll see how this is there, but it's not opaque. Now how do opacity and flow differ? Opacity is like the maximum capacity, so it doesn't matter if I make 5500 passes at this. It's only going to get to 11% max. But let's say my opacities up at a 100 and my flow is down to ten. What's going to happen now? Every time it's going to add. And it's going to then get to the point where I do have a 100% opacity, but only 14% of the time. And the last adjustment in reality is hardness. I don't have my hardness up to anything on any of my brushes that I make because I liked the soft edges. Now, you create a layer you don't like. You can always delete it. Right-click Delete. And if you put down a stroke you don't like, you can always control Z it. Alright, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna show you how to kind of add in a little bit of spray paint texture for this. So we're going to add a layer and we're gonna rename it and we're going to call it spray. Alright, perfect. Now let's practice. Go to brushes, find sprays and spatters, and find, say the ink spatter. Okay. Now let's go ahead and I'm going to use right bracket. And you see now this batter comes up. Now that's cool, but it's a little bit dark. So let's go ahead and see if we can't change this in to something in a little bit of off-white. Alright, now I'm going to choose something maybe in a grayish area right about here. Okay. Now I'm going to include this in areas where I don't care if the viewer sees, like you see, I'm not really obstructing the bear portion. And you can then switch brushes in the middle. So if you wanted to, along this edge, can come up. And we can add a little bit of artistic freedom there. Alright, once you have this the way you want it, the reason I worked in grey is I'm going to come over to layers. I'm going to choose this layer. And now I'm going to choose a blend mode. And the Color Dodge blend mode is kind of cool. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drop the opacity down on this. And that's gonna give me a really nice type of texture on this. So your brush icon is here. The color that you're working with is always the color that's at the front. And you can alternate between the two. And your brushes are here, and this is where the category is. Now, if you choose to purchase brushes, you use what is traditionally called the hamburger menu. I don't know why my students call it that, but that has now become the term for infinity. And you can import brushes. So anybody who buy brushes from, even if it's myself, we will show you how to go ahead and import brushes. All right, so that covers the brush sides. Now, the last thing that I wanna do here is I want to cover something around cropping. So I am going to add in cropping now because let's say this image is good, okay? Here's the thing your crop tool is over here. Now when you do this, affinity is a non-destructive cropping operation. When you crop, it's going to cut. And what you can do, you can set different ratios. Let's say that we go unconstrained. So now I can take the entire image. Or if I just wanted to take some of the image, I can take some of the image. Maybe I want to cut off this tag here. Okay? Now, let's say that you're working on a 1920 by 1080 screen size. You can type this in 1920 by 1080. Now that's all it's going to give you because this is a pretty massive thing, but maybe you liked this ratio. So you can grab it by the corner. And now you can adjust it so that if you brought this into a screen, this is what would show. Now when you're good with this, you want to hit apply. I'm going to be using this for Instagram. So Instagram prefers square. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna come over to the COG. And we do have some common ratios like the one-to-one. And what I'm going to do here, I'm just going to come into here. And I'm going to shrink some of this down here. And I'm gonna put this guy just like that. And when I'm ready, I hit Enter aright. So that's a little bit on cropping. Now if you don't like that, you can always go Control Z and it's back. And you can make any sort of adjustment that you want. When it comes to cropping, There are some preset ratios. You can always do a custom ratio. You can crop my pixel size, or you can even choose your dpi. Alright, so that's a little bit on how to crop. Let's go ahead and in this one. 9. Liquefy and tone mapping : All right folks, welcome back to Affinity Photo. So we're gonna cover three things actually in this lesson. We're rounding the end of this edit. Now, here's the way that I don't want to do this. We're going to take the spray, the HSL adjustment to selective color. And we're going to drag them all down inside there again. And so this group is ready to go. Now, let's go ahead and, oops, if you ever see this little dot, go to Select, de-select. We're not covering selection in this class because this was about getting you up and running. Selection is an advanced topic that requires its own three hours to disgust. So you might hear the term rasterize right now. All of this is still modifiable. I can always come in and adjust the levels. I can always come in and I can adjust the coloring. But when you hear the term rasterize, here's what it means. Let's right-click and let's duplicate the entire thing, right? And now right-click on the group and hit rasterize. Now what is this going to do? It is going to flatten this thing out. No more, adjusting no more anything. It is now a flat image. Alright, watch ago, it's now choosing its thinking, it's flattening. And watch the group up here. Now, the group is going to shift to a pixel layer. Boehm. This thing is now rasterized. And whereas down here we have all this group stuff. Here, we got nothing. Now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna lock the group so I don't mess with it and I'm going to turn it off. Now. Notice if I turn this off, I have nothing. Now the two things other than rasterization that I wanted to talk about in this ten minutes here. I'm going to show you some of the other persona's. Now the first person I'm going to talk about is a liquefy persona. This is a lot of fun. This is used in photo retouching to kind of move the models hips in, move arms around, make subtle nudges to certain features. Whatever you feel about how they use it. This is what it is for. Now, when we do this, the reason I wanted to teach it when we rasterize, it only works on pixel layers. You cannot liquefy and entire group because there's all this junk inside of it. So once this thing is finished and flattened, let's hit liquefied. Now what this does is it creates a grid. And the two things that I want to show you where I'm going to use the left brackets shrink down my brush. I use the push forward tool a lot. So what I would do now is right here where I see that this two-by-four should move this E. I will go ahead and Iwill liquefy it. Now what am I doing here? Notice what we've got here. Now I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna reconstruct this mesh. Alright, and apply. All right, watch this push forward Tool. And I want to just grab this area and I want to pull it forward. And I want to pull this forward as well. And I want to move that up a little ways. Alright? And I want to move that down. And what that's doing is it's kind of mirroring the way that it would go on top of that sort of beam. Now you can get crazy with this. So I'm going to show you this part. I'm going to apply this. And it kicks me back to the photo and I'm gonna come in one more time, but I'm not going to apply this. Watch what we're doing here with this. If I grab this push forward, I can kind of shrink the bear up or I can pull it out. And I can do a tremendous amount of damage, right? So liquefy allows you to manipulate the grid. I'm going to hit cancel. You can use subtle nudging and adjustments and liquefy to get through things like drips of cones and that sort of thing. Now the other thing that we can do with the pixel layer, this is a lot of fun. A standard JPEG has 256 colors in it. What we're gonna do, we're gonna do something called tone mapping. So we're going to come over, and this only works with pixel layers. Let's go ahead and tone map this thing. What it's doing, it's reading it. And it's going to try to compress the colors. Ok? So what it's doing, it's reading all of the tones. And it's saying, you know what? I can take it and I can use certain algorithms. And now let's look at it as a studio, right? And if you don't see what you need there, go to View studio. And let's go ahead and grab the tone map icon. You can come in and you can change the amount of tone compression. You can up the local contrast to get a really cool look, you can create different exposure points. What this does, it's like taking a flat image and doing all sorts of really crazy stuff with it. So this is a ton of fun artistically, and there's something called the preset. I use this a lot. You can trial different people's presets for these things. So we've got extreme presets that come loaded. You've got a set of default presets that come loaded, right? So whatever you decide you want to do, here are all the adjustments that that person made in order to get that high contrast black and white. There are some that are native to affinity like James Richardson who works for affinity. He puts some of his in here and they give it very different looks. And this is a story for another time. If you find one that you like, that you say Adjust exposure and you really like, you can come up here and you can then create a new category and add a preset for yourself. I did a couple. Right here. There's a chunky black and gray grainy one. And I was working with some intense vibrance there where we did a really cool one here. So there's some from affinity Forum. I've got these off the form from a guy on affinity forums. So these are presets that are created by them. So anything you really want to do here, there may be a tone mapped preset for, and if you like this one, just note as destructive. Because the minute you apply, watch what happens. It brings it back into the photo persona. And now you have that as your image. Now the reason that I saved my work down here, if I didn't like that, I can always come back to where I was. Alright, what I'm gonna do here, we're gonna go ahead and we're going to end the discussion on the bear here. And for the purposes of this tutorial, I think were relatively good. Then the last final lesson that I want to show you will deal with what is called the developer persona, where we will take a look at raw images, which is something you guys may not know. Alright folks, we'll see you in the next one. 10. Exporting : All right, again, let's go ahead and take the last step in your workflow. Now, we've got this image here. We've got the group. You've created, mirror in good shape. The last step is export. So this is going to be a short one. This thing goes file, save as, and we can call this ball and bear in progress. That's cool. Yep. Now this is an Affinity Photo file which you have to do is export it. Now if you're unfamiliar with that term, exporting is a simple way of saying I'm taking the image and I'm continuing it into something that everybody can read. So the way you do that, you go to file export. Now, there's a whole lot options. I'm going to tell you that for 99.9% of what you do, JPEG is the one you want to go with if you're posting on web. Now we did include a download infographic, or I should say an export infographic as a download into the downloadable for you so that you can make a choice. But you will most likely with most photos, want to be working in JPEG. And the thing that you want to look at, what is the size, you want to export it that and you see the little lock here. That means your aspect ratio is locked. So if I drop this to 3 thousand, hit enter, this side drops the same amount. And the quality is a 100% compression and it's 8.406 meg. If that's a little big, I can drop it down. I'll tell you, I get to about 85% quality. At 1.83. Nobody's going to really be able to tell the difference on a web application, right? And we're going to export the whole document. Then you go through an export and we call it jpeg. We'll call it done. And save. Now, the reason I say you'll use JPEG for most of it, because the file sizes are a lot smaller. And if you're working in web, you don't want a ten megabyte file for somebody to have to download when they come to your website, that's going to stink. But there are times where if you have a transparent background, right, let's say, and now you don't want to do this, that I want to just delete this thing and I want to export this square. Now you see how I have just checkerboard here. We're gonna go File Export. Oops, File Export. Now I want to use a P and G, right? Because PNG supports transparency. So this is going to be a 68 kilobyte file export. And let's call this gray square. Alright, save. Now that's not sexy, right? Alright, let's go ahead and delete this rectangle. I'm going to bring this back. And now to prove this out, I'm gonna go to File Place. There's my gray square. And when I bring it up, there's my gray square with no background. So the thing that I want to connect with here, you go to File Export, PNG, and JPEG is what you'll use 99.9% of the time. If you plan on using this with Photoshop, you might use a PSD file. Okay. Other than that, we're not going to get into the high res file types in any of that stuff. And many of these export formats are only used for vector. So if you know PNG and JPEG, you've got enough to be dangerous. And if you're posting on Facebook, if you're posting on websites, work with JPEG. If you don't need transparency, keep your quality low to keep your file size low. Alright folks, that's all I gotta say on export for this one. Let's go ahead and take the next step. 11. Raw development : Alright folks, one more functionality that Affinity Photo has the ability to work with raw photos. Now, how do you know if you have a raw photo? All of your major cameras have a raw photo setting and most of your cell phone cameras do as well. So when we did this into the downloads for this lesson, I put in this airplane image raw. Now notice the item type. This is a d n g file. Not like a PNG, not like a JPEG, not like any sort of extension that we're familiar with. What a raw file is, is it's a tremendous amount of data. So what this does is it has 8.91 megabytes worth of data on a 378 by 672 image. That's a lot of data for such a small image. So what happens is you need a special processor in order to do that. And Affinity Photo does it. We go to file and let's go ahead and open. And let's bring it in. Now it's not going to open in the photo persona. You see the photo persona is over here. It's going to open it in what's called the developer persona. Now, if you don't have the same sort of studio tabs I do. Again, Studio. I like to use the basics. Sometimes I will use the focus, right, which gives you the length of the focus and all of the stuff around that. But most of the time it's the basics, the details and the tones. I don't even use Lens Correction a lot of times. So the way this works, the reason you edit in RA, there is like ten times the amount of data that there isn't a raw file as opposed to a JPEG. So your colors come out richer, your edits come out truer. And a lot of people do a lot of editing in wrong before they do any of their stuff in photo. So like the flow would be to go to Developer, Go to the photo, and then finish up with the liquefy and maybe your tone mapping. Alright, so let's go look at the basics. You can adjust the exposure of the entire image. One of my favorite things to do with this is adjust to the black point of the image because there's so many different colors, the black point, I get a lot more interesting here. I'll kick up the brightness, just a hair. I don't want to blow out those whites. Raised the contrast up just a little. And I'm going to crank the clarity up. That's a crazy amount. Look at how much clarity we're able to gain with that. Now this is a fun one. The saturation gives you some really, really deep blues. And then you can do things like white balance, right? And you can adjust the temperature so we can make it a little bluer if we wanted to. We could make it a little more magenta, e if we wanted to, or little more greenie, somewhere in the middle. And then what I'd like to do is in the tones panel, I usually do what's called a Curves Adjustment. And we don't cover this in this class because again, curves is one of those things you gotta get comfortable with. But I dropped the darks little And I'll raise the lights a little. There we go. It looks pretty good. And here you can also do your black and white or your split toning. And the last one that I use on the routine is the noise reduction. If you have an image that has that grainy gritty look, that's a lot of noise. You can reduce noise. Or by contrast, you remember when we use the clarity filter, we can define the detail a little bit more. So to see this, let's go ahead and zoom in here. I've got one over to the magnifier. And now we're gonna do, we're going to crank up the radius just a little bit to 17%. And then we're going to kick up an incredible amount. Now, notice what's happening to these clouds in the background. We're getting a lot of chunking is in there. I'm not thrilled with that, but I turned it up to an extreme level just to show you what's possible. Alright? Now, there's a lot more things you can do in wrong. This is not designed to be a class on how to edit in raw. Turns out Those are all over. You can do what are called overlays. You can erase the overlay. You can remove blemishes, let's say if you're doing a photo retouched. So Ra is one of those things that you will work on. Get to the point where you're comfortable and then hit develop. Now once it develops, if taking all of that data and it's complete, pressing it into a crazy size. And I'm going to show you how this works. Let's export this. If we export it as JPEG in its current size, it is only a 685 kilobyte file. Let's move to a 100% quality. At best I can get it to 6.69 megabytes. In its native form. It was sitting at just under nine. So that gives you an idea of how much data is present in a raw file and how much you lose during compression into a jpeg format. Now, wrapping this class up, the thing that we want to pay attention to is File Export. And for web applications and such, JPEG is traditionally your best option. But if you want a trance parent background, you're going to want to go PNG because JPEG does not support transparency. Alright folks, that's a little bit on Affinity Photo. Hope you learned a little something. Alright, let's go ahead and take the next step. 12. Conclusion : There are again, a good argue for finishing, even though it's a one hour project focused course, you would be amazed how many people never, ever finished so good on you for getting to the end. Good on you for submitting the JPEG down below. I'm excited to see it. Hopefully, we got you the top answers in terms of what you can use in direct applicability when it comes to Affinity Photo. If you'd like more, check out my other courses right here on skill share where we teach you more about Affinity Photo. And we can continue the journey together right here on skill share. Alright, on behalf of seven seasoned studios, Thank you so much for the journey and we'll see you in the next one.