Intro to Affinity Photo V2 on the iPad

1. Intro: Hello and welcome to this course, introduction to Affinity Photo version two on the iPad, my name is Ben Nielsen and I will be your instructor for this course. I'm immediate design educator with over seven years of experience teaching creative programs both in-person and online. In this course, we'll be covering the basics of how you can get started with Affinity Photo version two on the iPad, which means we will be diving into the core concepts of photo compositing. We'll be covering things like layers and adjustment layers. And how do you selections and masks to modify just portions of an image. And we'll also be talking about some non photo objects in a fee photo like text and shapes that you can add to your designs in order to learn these concepts will be completing a project as we go through this course, the project will be to create a YouTube thumbnail. Now you might not all be YouTubers or even video makers. But the reason we're going to use this project is because it's a great place to be able to combine all of these core concepts together and use them in one document, lots of other types of documents. We'll use just a few of these concepts, but a YouTube thumbnail will use all of them. So it's a great place for us to showcase our skills, even if we're not actually making a YouTube video. Now you might be wondering, how do I do that? Well, in the next video, I'm going to dive into the details of the project. I'm going to walk you through each piece of it throughout the course. And then at the end of the course, I will show you how to do a completed project so that you can follow along now that you know what you're going to learn in this course and what you're going to do, you might be wondering what you need to be able to complete this course. Well, there's just a couple of things that you actually need. The first one, of course, is going to be an iPad. You're going in iPad that can run Affinity Photo version two, this means your iPad will need to be running iOS 15 or later. Then of course, you'll need Affinity Photo version to download it onto the iPad if any photo version two can be downloaded from the App Store for free, but you're going to need a license in order to actually use it or sign up for their free trial. You can do either one of those things in order this course. And that's all you're going to absolutely need to be able to complete this course. There are a couple of other things that you might find helpful. One is an Apple pencil. I find this a really good way to navigate the interface of the affinity programs, but we aren't going to be doing any drawing in this course, so that is definitely not necessary. It's just a nice to have. You also might want to keyboard just because that makes it easier when you're dealing with texts or doing modifier keys like shift, Command and Option. But it's really not necessary for you to have because all of those fixtures are actually built in to a funny photo as well. The last thing that you might be interested in having you some of your own photos that you might want to put into your thumbnail that can make it a little bit more personal, but it's also not necessary because Affinity Photo has a stock photo library built-in you can use to complete the project if you don't have your own photos. And that's all you need to complete this course. I hope that you're excited to dive in and get started. Please follow along with me as we go through the course that will help you to be able to learn all of the concepts that I'm going over as you run into any trouble, please go ahead and ask me questions in the discussion tab for this course, I am more than happy to answer your questions. I don't want you to feel like you're in this alone. One last thing before we go ahead and get started. If you find this course helpful, I hope that at the end you will leave a review of it. Those reviews really help people to be able to find the course and know if the course is going to be valuable for them. So please don't forget to leave a review. Okay, I bet you're wondering about this project. So in the next video, we're going to dive in and go over the details of the project. 2. Project: Okay, so we all know that the best way to learn something is to do it, since I want you to learn to use Affinity Photo. Well, in this course we're going to be completing a little project. This project will help you to practice all of the tools and skills that we will be learning in this course. The project, as I mentioned before, is going to be to create a YouTube thumbnail. And as I said in the last video, this isn't because I think you are all going to be YouTubers or even creating videos. But it's because this type of document is really useful in that it can utilize all the different skills that we'll be learning throughout the course will help you to synthesize them and have them ready for use later. Because we are using this project to learn things, there are going be some requirements for your project to make sure that you've gotten all the concepts in the course. The first one is that you need to use at least one photo in this project. This is a funny photo after all, the next one is that you need to make sure that you've used at least one adjustment layer. And the third thing is that you need to make sure that you've used at least one mask from a selection. Now, don't worry if you don't know what all of these concepts mean right now, because you're going to learn them in the course. You don't need to know them ahead of time. The last two things are to use at least one text element and one shape element. This will help you learn how to bring non photo elements into your project. And don't worry, we'll be going over that as well. So no worries if you don't know what texts were shaped elements are right now, and don't worry if you forget any of this, I've listed all of it in the project section for the course. Now, if you have all of those things in your thumbnail, you will have a really good grasp of the basics of Affinity Photo and be able to use it in the future. If on the other hand, you choose not to complete the project, then you will not learn the concepts as well. And when you need them in the future, you probably won't be able to remember them and you will have to look them up and learn them again. So do take the time to complete this project. It will really help you in your learning process. Once you've completed the project, go ahead and export it as a JPEG image and upload it in the project section for this course. This really helps me to know how I'm doing as a teacher because I can see your projects and whether or not I am correctly conveying the concepts that I'm trying to convey in the course. It also really helps you as a student because it gives you a chance to receive feedback on your work, which is one of the critical pieces in your design journey. Now, speaking of your design journey, we should go ahead and get started in Affinity Photo on the iPad. So in the next video, we're going to go ahead and make a new document. 3. New Document: Now let's time to get started. And if any photo, the first thing that we need is a document to work in. This main area shows you the documents that you currently have open. I don't have any open right now, so you can't see them, but we'll see that in a second after we opened the document, there are a bunch of options along the left-hand side doing a lot of different things, but the option that we're looking for is new document. Let's go ahead and tap that and you can see there are more options here, different ways to make a new document. We're still just looking for the one that says new document. Go ahead and tap on that and it will open up the New Document Dialogue. We're going to see a bunch of different options and templates here along the left-hand side. Some of these are for print, some of these are for web summer press ready, some are for photos. It really just depends on what you are doing now because we're looking to create a YouTube thumbnail in this course, the one that you're going to use for your project is going to be a web template known as WQ HD, 2,560 pixels by 1,440 pixels. This is the correct dimensions for a YouTube thumbnail. So it's always good if you can know what you're making before you create your new document so that you can size it appropriately. Because if any photo is a raster based program, you aren't going to be able to infinitely resize things the way you would in a vector program like a faint designer. So let's go ahead and make sure that we are clicked on WQ HD. And you can see that it shows that at the top. And then we have all of our options here. We're not going to worry about adjusting all of these options right now, because these options are set up the correct way for what we are going to make. So go ahead and click Okay. Once you do that, it's going to take a second and it's going to generate your new document. As you look around here, there's a lot of different pieces and we're going get into this in the next video on the interface. The only thing that I want to point out right now is the way that you get back to that screen that we were just on is to press the arrow in the top left corner. Go ahead and tap that, you'll go out. It's really important that you do that before you switch apps, because sometimes when you leave a funny photo, if your iPad doesn't have enough memory, if any photo will be rejected from the ramp. All that means is that what you've done won't be saved unless you've clicked that button to go back. I know that that can be a little confusing, but just make sure that you get into the habit of doing that. Now, when you look at this here, you can also see that there is a little hamburger menu. When you tap on that, you get the save option, your project while it's here in the project area, it's not actually saved anywhere except in the Affinity Photo app. So when you want to save it to another place, like the internal storage on your iPad or to an external hard drive that you've connected through the USB-C port. You want to go ahead and click Save or Save As here, so that you can actually save that document elsewhere. When you want to open a document that you've saved somewhere else, you're gonna go to Open and choose Open document. That's going to take you into your file structure. Okay, those are just some tips to know. Now we're going to tap back on the document to dive back in. And in the next video, we're going look at what the different areas of the interface are. 4. Interface: Now that we are in the main workspace of a theme photo, I want to get you oriented to the interface before we start working, there are four main areas of the screen. The canvas in the middle, the menu bar along the top, the toolbar on the left, and the studio panels on the right. So we're going to take a look at each of these in turn. First up, we want to take a look at the menu bar on the top. This one actually contains several sections. The first section has regular menus which will be there no matter what tool you have selected. The first button is the Back button that we looked at last time, where it takes you back to the document screen. The second button is the persona button. It looks like the Affinity Photo logo. If you're in the photo persona, the persona you are in can completely change the tools that you have available to you. So if you ever feel really confused, chances are you've just switched persona's accidentally. Now some of these persona's can't even be opened if the right kinds of things haven't been put in the document, e.g. if I try and click on liquefied, it's going to say cannot liquefy, please select a pixel layer mask before liquefied. So because they don't have anything in document, I can't even use a bunch of these persona's. The only one that I can actually get into right now, is the export one, which we will not need in this course. We're going to be doing everything within the photo persona. So just make sure if you ever feel confused, just makes sure that you are in the photo persona. Next, there's the hamburger or three-line menu. This is the document menu and we'll have a lot of things that you might be used to seeing in a file menu, in a desktop program will use some of these, but not all of them throughout this course. Next to that, we have the meatball menu or three dot menu. This one has a lot of things that you might expect from an edit menu or from a right-click menu in a desktop program, the last option here is the selection menu. This will help us as we make selections and we will go into more of these, though not all of them, as we get into the selection part of this course, which will be a little later, this next area, it doesn't show anything right now because it is a contextual tool menu and it changes to pay in which tool we have selected. If we change from the hand tool to the arrow tool, you will see that some options up here. If you ever feel like there's something missing from this area that I'm using, but you can't find, chances are you are just on the wrong tool. I need to switch to the same tool that I am using. The last area contains three sets of options. The magnifying class is the zoom option, the windshield wiper is the Preview option, and the magnet is the snapping option. These buttons serve as toggles and the small buttons on their sites have more detailed menus. The next area we want to look at is the left hand toolbar. This contains all of the tools you will use, as we've already seen, the tool you are on, will affect the different options you have available to you in the context menu bar. And also what's you're able to do in the canvas area. You won't use every tool in this course, but we will cover the most important basics. At the very bottom of the toolbar, you will find the trash can, which is not a tool but will serve as the Delete key. On the right-hand side, we have the studios. The studios are ways you deal with lots of the details in your work, things like color and effects. And of course our favorite, the layers which we will be talking about shortly. Once again, we won't be looking at every single studio in this course, but we will look at the most important ones for getting started. One important thing to know is that the very bottom of the studio bar is a question mark. This is not a studio, but when you hold down on it, you will be able to see what all the different buttons on screen are called. The last area is the main part of the screen, which is the Canvas workspace. This is where all of your work will happen. It's where you will place and manipulate your images. A couple of things to note here are that you can use gestures to execute some commands on the screen. A two-finger tap will undo. Three-finger tap. We'll redo pinching in and out will control your zoom level. Lastly is the command controller minus down in the left-hand corner. When I tap on it, you can see the command buttons appear. If you don't see the command controller, go up to your document menu and choose toggle command controller that turn mine off. I'll turn it back on. When you tap on this, you can see that you have all of the four buttons that you would have on a standard Mac keyboard. This controller allows you to use those modifier keys without having a keyboard attached. You just have to slide over to select them and to keep them on. You just slide past them if you need it, shift and command on at the same time, you could make that happen here. Okay, I think that's it for introducing the interface. In the next video, we're going to get started learning the concepts by placing an image on our Canvas. 5. Placing Photos: In this video, we're going to go ahead and place some images on our Canvas. So we have something to work with. We're going to look at two ways to bring in images. First, how to bring in our own pictures, and second, how to bring in stock photos from the stock studio. First of all, I want to point out that since we are going to be creating a YouTube thumbnail in this course, that needs to have a specific aspect ratio and it will contain multiple elements. We're going to place our images in the document instead of just opening a single photo. If you just want to edit a photo, you could just open the photo. It's specific size, but because we need the entire thumbnail to be a specific size, we're going to place them here. If you just want to open a photo, you would do that from the Open menu that we saw earlier. So here in our document, we just need to go up to the document menu and we need to choose place. This is going to open up a dialogue where we can choose whether we want to place from our files or place from our photos. If you have your image in the file's app, like in a folder somewhere, you'll want to choose that. That would include anything that's on an external hard drive or in Cloud Storage if you've connected those to your iPad, but if your photos are in the photos app, you will choose the one on the right. My photo is in the photos app, so I'm going to click that. I'm going to go ahead and click in my recents and choose this photo of the yellow van. You can see that it loads it up in this place menu on the right hand side, all we have to do then is tap on the canvas and it will be added to our document at full resolution. Now, you can see that that is fairly big, but it doesn't take up the whole screen because the resolution of our canvas is larger than the resolution of the image. Let me go ahead and do a two-finger tap to undo. And I'll show you how we can add it at the resolution we choose. Let's go ahead and go back to document and place place from photos and choose our photo. We're going to go ahead and drag it out and we can place it at whatever size we choose, as opposed to tapping it which places it at its full resolution. If we want to move this photo around, just make sure we are on our move tool, the black arrow, and we can move the photo around. Okay, so that's how we would place our own photo. But what if we don't have our own photo or we don't have a photo of the thing that we need for our thumbnail. We're going to go ahead and use the stock library found in the stock studio here. There are two stock libraries here. If you tap where it says pixels, you will see that you can choose from Pexels or Pixabay. It's worth searching in both of them to find the image that you want, make sure that you've checked this. I understand button down here to agree to the terms and conditions. These are both free stock libraries that allow you to use your images. So let's go ahead and search. I'm just going to search for a VW van to match our other image and we'll see what we find. Now we see there are a bunch of different options here. I like this one of the man on the beach. So I'm just going to tap on that until my finger picks it up and then I can drag that out and place it in my Canvas. Now, these always placed at full resolution and they can be very, very large. So just be aware of that it can take a second. Now if we zoom out, we can see the bounding box for this image is huge. So making sure that we're on the move tool again, we're just going to drag down on the corners to make it smaller. We can use our finger pinch to zoom in. And that's how we add a stock photo from the stock studio and Affinity Photo. Now that we've placed our images, you can see that they are covering each other up and things can get a little cluttered and confusing. So in the next video, we will learn how to use the layer studio to select and organize things. 6. Layers: Now that we have some images on our Canvas, it's time to talk about our first core concept in if any photo, that is layers, this is really one of the most important concepts when it comes to making photo composites. It is one of the things that separates professional programs, like a funny photo from consumer programs like the photos app on your phone. You open up the layer studio by tapping the first icon in the studios bar on the right. Conveniently, it looks just like a bunch of sheets stacked on top of each other, which is essentially what layers are. When we open that studio, we can see that we have two images stacked on top of each other here, whichever image is on top in this stack will cover up the image on the bottom wherever they overlap. If they're the same size, you won't be able to see the bottom image at all. We can change the order of the stack just by tapping on one of them and dragging it. You can see that at that van with the waterfall is now on top of the van with the beach. This can seem pretty simple, but once you start adding lots of layers, it can get more and more complex. Almost everything that gets added in Affinity Photo resides on a layer. So complex documents can end up with dozens or sometimes even hundreds of layers. For our thumbnail projects, we will end up with at least five or six different things in our layers. Panel layers essentially act like a stack of papers, but there are few cool things we can do since they are digital. First, we can turn them on or off using the little dot on the side. If I turn off the top layer, I can see everything that is underneath it without the need to move it or delete it, which is really convenient. Let's turn it back on. There are a number of options along the top of this studio. Most of these we don't need for this class, but I wanted to point out a few of them that will likely be relevant. First up is the folder's icon. This is used to group multiple layers together. You just select multiple layers by swiping over the top of them and then you can press the folder icon to group them. This is really helpful for organizational purposes because it can keep things that should be together together and stop you from losing them. If you ever want to ungroup layers, just make sure that you have it selected and go ahead and tap the Group icon again. Next up, we want to talk about the three dots or meatball menu here. Let's be just be selected on one photo and then let's hit that three dot menu. This is going to take us to an area with a lot of different details. But the important ones are the visible lock and solo options. Visible acts just like that little.in the first part of the studio did, which means it will turn it on and off the lock button makes it so you can't edit that layer. This is great if you want to make sure that layer will never get moved or changed accidentally. Lastly, we have the Solo button which will turn off all the other layers and just let us see this layer on its own. Let me zoom out here a little bit so you can see this better. You can see when I solo this one disappears. You might want to see it from the other perspective as well. Let's go to the van on the beach and let's click solo. And we just see that this is great when you have a lot of layers and you want to be able to work on just one of them. Come in and solo it. And that will make it a lot simpler to work on just that layer. The only other thing that I want you to worry about in this panel is if you tap on the name of the layer at the top, you can go ahead and rename it. So I could call this one van beach and click Okay, That's just going to make it easier for me to identify it in a long list of layers. Okay, let's back out of here by tapping the layer options and now we're back to the regular layers studio. Lastly, if you ever need to delete a layer, you just make sure you tap on the layer and then hit the delete button. Now I don't actually want to delete that, so I'm going to use the two finger tap to undo it. And that is your introduction to layers. Again, it can seem simple right now, but make sure you have a good grasp of it because it's foundational to what comes after. In the next video, we're going to talk about a special kind of layer called an adjustment layer. 7. Adjustment Layers: Now that we know what layers are, we're ready to learn about a special kind of layer called adjustment layers. Previously, we've only had imaged layers on our document. We have two pictures of vans, but if we want to change the way these photos look, we're going to need to add adjustment layers. This is where we start to edit our photos. We add adjustment layers from, you guessed it, the adjustment studio. This is the fourth one down and it looks almost like eight Yin and Yang symbol. If you scroll on this list, you will see that there are lots of different types, adjustment layers, basically anything you might think about doing in your normal photo app. And then sub, we're going to start with a basic one that you will probably end up using a lot. And that is the brightness and contrast option. Tap it and we will get a brightness and contrast layer applied. We can see this if we go back to our layer studio and we can see brightness contrast adjustment layer on top. You can also see that we now have a set of controls down in the bottom right-hand corner of our screen. Different adjustment layers will have different controls. In this case, we have a brightness wheel, it contrast wheel, and an opacity we'll dragging bright on an adjustment wheel will increase that attribute and dragging left will decrease that attribute. If you ever wanna make fine tuned adjustments, you can always just tap on the wheel to get the calculator. In this case, I'll just reset it to zero and I'll reset the contrast is zero as well. So you can see how you can make a lot of different adjustments using these types of things. Let's take a look at one more of these after we adjusted our brightness and contrast, Let's say that we also wanted to adjust our color mix a little bit. So we'll come down here and we'll come to our color balance. Now, Color Balance is a bit complicated, but I just want to show you a little bit here. I can add in more red, I can add in more magenta, add in more yellow or blue. I can just adjust the mix of colors here. This is an adjustment layer. And the reason I wanted to show you that is so that you can see when we go to our Layers panel, we now have two adjustment layers stacked on top of each other. Just like before we had to photo layer stacked on top of each other. And these can be turned off and on, just like other kinds of layers. And the way that they interact depends on how they stack. Now you might be wondering, after I've added a new adjustment layer, can I get back to the last adjustment layer and still adjust it? Say can I adjust the brightness and contrast yes, from the layers panel, just tap on the icon for that layer and you will bring those controls back up again. So there's lots that you can do with adjustment layers. I encourage you to play around with some of them, see what they do. And remember that in these videos, I will often show you an extreme so that it's easy to see on screen when you are actually editing your photos. Subtlety is the name of the game. Now one thing that you might notice is that these adjusts the entire canvas and you might want to adjust just one image or just part of an image. So in the next video, we're going to learn how to do that by using selections. 8. Selections: Now that we know about the Layers panel and how to use adjustment layers to edit photos. It's time to learn how to edit specific parts of photos. It ain't just a part of a photo involves the next core concept which is selections. Now because we want to add it just a portion of a photo. You can see that I've turned off those two adjustment layers that we started out with, the color balance adjustment and the brightness contrast adjustment. So we're going go ahead and try and make a selection here, all of the selection tools are found partway down the toolbar. There is firstly, smart selection brush, the Flood selection tool, and the rectangle marquee tool. If we hold down on the Rectangle Marquee will find a few other selection tools as well. All of these tools can be used to select individual parts of an image or layer. But for our purposes, we're going to focus on using the smart selection brush because it is the most useful. The other tools make selections based on shape or color. The smart selection brush instead tries to make smart selections based on the image itself. For this reason, it's the most useful brush when it comes to selecting specific objects or even people in a photo. So I'm going to go ahead and try and select the van in the beach photo. So I'm going to drag that up in our layers panel to the top. Remember, that's how you can rearrange and then makes sure that I'm selected on the layer so that this tool will sample from this layer. When I take my brush over the van, you can see that it starts to select whenever you see these marching ants going around something that shows you the area that is selected. So let's just try and brush onto here. Now you can see that this is not exactly perfect. So we're going to need to add a little bit just bumper down here. And we're also going to need to erase parts that we don't want to erase. We just need to hold down Option on our keyboard or on our control wheel. And you can see that it will erase different parts from there. Now one thing to note is that on the left-hand side there's a little slider that appears and this determines the size of the brush. So the smaller the brush, the more particular it's going to be about what it is selecting. So I'm going to go ahead and make that a little smaller hold down Option. And coming here, try and de-select. Select little bit here. Places where there's less contrast or less distinct lines are harder for it to select. So you can see where the yellow is blending in with the background here. That's where it's getting a little bit tricky. So let's just go ahead and make it smaller. You can see the size of the brush there in the middle of the screen. There we go. That gives us a better one and we want to add here, and let's make sure we get these. So making a good selection can take quite awhile. So you need to decide how precise you want to be based on your use case for something like a YouTube thumbnail. You want your selections to be good, but you do not need to spend a lot of time making them absolutely perfect. Thumbnails are generally viewed a pretty small sizes and so tiny details don't show up most of the time. So I think this is good enough for our purposes right now. I wouldn't want to spend an extraordinary amount of time on this particular selection. But there's a few more things that I want to tell you about selections, particularly using the selection menu up at the top that we mentioned earlier when we looked at the interface. There's a lot of options here, and I don't want you to feel overwhelmed by them or feel like you need to know what they all do. They're not all important to us right now, but there are a few of them that I want you to understand. One of the important ones is how to get rid of a selection after you've started it. Because you can only work within that selection once you've made it. You will often, once you're done, need to de-select it. So there's a de-select button right here. So you can just go ahead and hit de-select, then it will disappear. Now, if you did that by accident, you can bring it back by going to the selection menu and choosing, re-select. It will bring back your last selection, which is really useful in case you de-selected accidentally. Another one you want to know is the invert selection option. Sometimes it's easier to make a selection of the thing that you don't want to change rather than the thing that you do just because of the contrast between it and maybe the background or something else. So in that case, you want to know how to invert the selection. If you come to invert selection, you can see that we now have marching ants going around the edge of the border. You can just barely see them there. It still looks like our van is selected, but that is actually the area that is not selected and everything else is selected. So that's how you invert the selection. Let's go ahead and invert it back. You can see those marching ants go away from the border of the canvas and we just have the van selected. Now once we've made this selection now it's time to go ahead and apply our adjustment layer. We want to do this by going back to our adjustments. And then let's just say that we wanted to make this van black and white. We'll go ahead and we'll tap the black and white layer. And you can see that it has applied only to the van, not to the entire image, and not to the entire canvas. Now within the black and white adjustment layer, we can make further adjustments. This van is yellow, so I'm just going to adjust the yellow one here. And you can see I can change how black and white it is. That's how you can apply the adjustment just to a specific thing. So if you had an area that needed to have its brightness and contrast controlled separately, or you needed to just mess with the color and in particular area. That's how you would use selections to do that. Well, we haven't learned yet is how we could get rid of all the rest of this image in case we wanted to bring this van into another picture. So that is where our next video about masks will come in. 9. Masks: With our understanding of layers, adjustments and selections, we are now ready to move on to our last key concept, which is masks. Masks are a way of hiding part of a layer. And if any photo just like a mask you would wear, would cover part of your face. Masks are added two layers. To add a mask to a layer, we need to be in the layer studio. Then we're going to go to the plus icon and we're going to choose mask layer. Don't worry about the other types of mask layers for this class, we just need the basic one. Right now our mask is completely white, which means the entire layer is showing. If we want to work on our mask first, we need to select it by making sure it is highlighted. If your layer is highlighted, you'll work on your layer. But if your mask is only highlighted, then you will be working on your mask. This can sometimes be made easier by opening up the layer group by clicking the little chevron on the left and seeing that the mask is highlighted either way will work, but sometimes this way it's a little bit easier to see what's going on. Then all we need to do is switch to our paintbrush tool, which is a little over halfway down on the toolbar with our paintbrush selected, we want to go to our color studio and make sure that our first color drop is set to black. With that set to black, we can now paint on our mask, make sure that we're on the mask and now we can paint. When we do that, you can see that wherever we paint black, this layer will disappear. Now if we want to bring back part of it, we just need to make it white again by switching to the white color. And then going back just like our quick selection brush, we can control the size of our brush here with the slider on the left. And we can just paint that back in. When we look at our layer, you can see that it is all white. Now, the important thing to remember is that wherever the mask is white, you will be able to see the layer. Wherever the mask is black, you will not be able to see the layer that the mask is on, which consequently means that layer is underneath will show through. This can be a little confusing, but it's very important to get because this is a very powerful tool. Use when you're doing photo compositing. Now, if you've been paying close attention, you might notice that we've done a mask before. The black and white adjustment layer that we used on the van has a mask on it. We can see that if we come here, click on it, and then we go ahead and solo it. You can see that this mask is white where the vanishes, which means that, that black and white adjustment layer is showing through its black everywhere else, which means the black and white adjustment layer is being hidden, which is why we have color. Let's un-solo that so that we can see it again. And that is how masks work. So being able to use a selection and your mask together can be really helpful. Let's go ahead and delete this mask that we put on the van beach photo. And then let's reapply our selection by going up to our selection space reselect. And now let's apply a mask to just this layer. We're not going to apply an adjustment layer with a mask. We're just going to apply it to this layer when we do that click mask layer and that will automatically turn everything that was selected white on the mask and everything that was not selected black. So you can see that we've now hit in the rest of the layer. Now we call this non-destructive editing because nothing from that layer is actually gone. If I turn the mask off, you can see that it all comes back. So this is how you might get rid of something in a photo without actually getting rid of it just in case you needed to bring it back. And of course, these can be turned off separately as well. So if we want to bring the color back, we just turn off our black and white adjustment layer and we have a yellow van again, we turn back on, it's black and white. We can of course, always come in and paint over particular parts to hide them or not hide them. So say I wanted to get rid of the windows so that it looked like the windows were going through. I can grab my paintbrush. I'm going to scale that down a long ways. Make sure that I have my black color selected. And now I can go in here and I can erase. I'll need to be a little bit bigger. You can see that on the mask. If I go ahead and solo it again, you'll see those areas that I have removed master, really important concept to get. And so it'd be good to take some time to just practice with them. Practice making them from selections, practice using brushes to paint on masks. Make sure that you paint on the mask and not on the layer itself. Because if you paint on the layer itself, you'll just paint black onto that layer, which is not what you would want. And it's very important to realize that mass can be applied to any kind of layer, just like we've done here with the black and white we've applied to choose part of it by using a mask. They can be applied to image layers, adjustment layers as well as layers that we're going to talk about in the next couple of videos like shapes and text. 10. Shapes: Now that we know the key concepts of working with images and if e1 photo, it is time to move on to other types of objects we will need in order to complete projects like thumbnails. In this video, we're going to talk about shapes. The shape tools are found almost at the bottom of the toolbar. Most of the time, it looks like a square. But if you tap on it a second time, you will find that there are all kinds of different shapes available from basic shapes like circles and triangles to more complex shapes like cogs and clouds. For our purposes, we're only going to need the basic simple shapes. We can use the rectangle to make a background or border for our image, we want to draw a shape. You just select the one you want from the toolbar. I'm going to choose the rounded rectangle and then go ahead and drag it out. You can see that it uses the color that's selected in the color panel to draw out the shape. As you can see when you finished drying your shape, you can then adjust it using the handles on the bounding box. You can adjust both proportions using the corners or you can adjust just a single proportion using the sites. You might notice that there's another handle that is orange off in the corner. Orange handles indicate a special attribute about a shape that can be adjusted. So in this case, because this is a rounded rectangle, we can affect the roundness of the corners. We can go all the way out, perfectly sharp. We can come all the way in to perfectly rounded or anywhere in-between. Some shapes will have multiple orange handles because they will have multiple properties that can be adjusted. If we want to change the color with the shapes selected, we can go to the color panel and we can select a different color from the color wheel or from the swatches. One of the things that shapes are particularly useful for when making thumbnails is backgrounds. So let's go ahead and let's drag this rectangle back behind all of our layers. And now we can go ahead and we can just take it out to the edges. Now you'll notice that it's not snapping and that's because snapping is not currently turned on. So let's turn on snapping, which is very useful when working with shapes. And let's go ahead and snap this bounding box into place. Then to make sure we can see it, Let's go ahead and take our rounded corners all the way to the edge. Now, you might notice that something funny is happening here with these gray border around it. That appears to be where our mask or a black and white adjustment layer is interacting incorrectly with our shape. In order to fix that, all we need to do is go ahead and clip this. In order to clip it, we just grab that layer and drag it onto the thumbnail of the layer we want to clip it to. And now we don't have that anymore. If we want to see what's going on there, we can go ahead and solo this layer. And we can see that when I moved to the van, it opened up a white part of the layer there. We could go ahead and paint that black, but it's going to be easier to just clip that layer in. When you clip a layer, it can only show through in the layer that is clipped to. Alright, let's go ahead and un-solo that. That's how you can work with shapes as you're going along in Affinity Photo. Now one thing that I would like to note is just how you can adjust the shapes with your move tool. So let's go ahead and get another shape. This time, let's use the triangle. I'm just going to drag one out here. And let's change its color to red. We can use our attribute handle to make this a right triangle, and I just want to put it in the corner. So using the Move tool, I can move this shape around. I can also use the handle at the top to rotate it. If I hold Shift, then I'll be able to get it in correct increments. And then I could just move that into the corner, let it snap into place there. And that's how we move them around. If I want it to be smaller, I can just adjust it a little bit holding down Shift to keep it incorrect proportions. And that's how you work with shapes. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about another non photo element, the element of text. 11. Text: The last non photo element that we're going to talk about is called text. Text is a really important element of thumbnails, especially because it can help to draw a viewer in. But it is also very important to not try and do too much with texts. You want to limit texts to just the essentials on documents like this. Let's take a look at how a text works. In Affinity Photo, the text tools are found all the way down at the bottom of the toolbar, just above the delete button, you'll see that this first one is called the Artistic Text tool. But if we tap on it again, we will see that there are two tools here aren't texts and frame text. To understand the difference between these two, it's easiest to just see them in action. So first let's start with the art Text tool. When we go to set up the art Text tool, we will tap and drag like we would with the shape. As we drag, we're going to see the size that we're going to set it up. So however big we make it is how big our text is going to be. So then we're able to go ahead and type out. Now you can see that my text is currently black, so I'm going to go ahead and set that to read just so that it's easy to see. I can then type, I'm going to use my keyboard. But if I didn't have a keyboard than the keyboard would appear, or I can make the keyboard appeared by tapping the keyboard icon in the bottom right, then I can get all my keyboard tools. Just like with shapes, I can use my move tool to move my text around. And because this is art text, I can also resize it freely. Now one thing that you will note if I tap back in here so that I can type more, is that no matter how much I type here, It's never going to move on to another line unless I make it by hitting the Return key. That's because it is art texts. And that is in comparison to the frame text tool, which we will look at now with the frame text tool, when we click and drag out, instead of drawing out a letter size, we drag out a frame size, which is how big our textbox will be, not how big our texts will be. I'm going to go up and in the context menu at the top, I'm going to actually make this text bigger. Let's just go up to like 48 here, just so that it's easy for you to see. Let's change this color to blue. And you can see that when I approached the edge of the box, it will then move on to the next line of its own accord. If I grab my Move tool and I resize this, I'm only resizing the text box and where the line breaks are. I don't resize the text itself for this reason, when you're doing headline texts like you are in a thumbnail, you almost always want to be using the art Text tool, whereas the frame text tool is much better for creating documents like you might do in Affinity Publisher. That's a much better program for that. Now of course, once you have any of these texts tools down on screen, you can click on them and then double-click on them to edit the text and you get all of the regular thing we saw size before. Well, there's also justification, decoration. All of those different texts tools that you might need will appear in that bar if there's ever a text tool that you find you need but you don't find it there. It's going to appear in the text studio on the right-hand side, this is where you can see all of those again and get even more options. So now that we know the core concepts of photo compositing, as well as the shapes and texts. We're ready to start on our project. In the next video, we'll talk about sketching our thumbnail before we start designing it. 12. Sketching: One of the most important processes in any design work is sketching. You always want to sketch out your ideas before you start to make them in the program. So we're here in an app called concepts right now, so that we can go ahead and sketch out our thumbnail ideas. Now normally I would suggest that you sketch on paper with pencils, but it can be a little hard for you to see me do that. And so right now I'm going to use the concepts so that it can screencast this and you can see what I'm doing. Now. You want to know what you're making your thumbnail for. In my case, I'm going to just pretend that I'm having imaginary video. That's a review of fidget spinners. I'm going to pretend that that's what I'm going to create something for. So I'm just going to draw out here just a rough thumbnail shape. It doesn't really matter how well you do this. You really can do it very roughly with just simple shapes just to block out your ideas and you don't want to use color or anything like that at this point, I know that I'm going to have a photo of a person who is very excited because that works well on YouTube. And I'm just going to sketch out what that person might look like and what spot they might take up here. And then I'm going to want to have the fidget spinner. And fidget spinners are normally something like three circles together. Now I know that that's not exactly what they look like, but it doesn't matter. It gets the idea across so that I know what I'm going to be doing here. And then I might want to put some words down here that says Best Spinner or something like that. It doesn't matter if the text is exactly what you used, were just roughing it out here. So as I go, I'm going to try out some different ideas. I might try to switch up where I'm gonna put them. Bearing in mind where things should go. It doesn't matter if you go outside the box a little. You can always adjust that when you're actually doing yet. But I know that I don't want my text down there because I remembered that that it's where the timestamp goes in a YouTube thumbnail. So I'm gonna go ahead and just try out a different one where maybe I don't have a person at all and I have just some text. And you can see that you can very quickly mock up a bunch of different types of thumbnails. So we've got a couple of ideas here. Now that we've sketched, Let's go ahead. We will jump into Affinity Photo and we will start working on the actual design. 13. Making the Thumbnail: Alright, now that we've learned all of the key concepts and how to combine different elements together, it's time to go ahead and complete our project of making the thumbnail. So I'm going to walk you through this parts of this video. I will speed up as I go ahead and just do the work. But I want you to be able to see the entire process from beginning to end. And I want to be able to remind you of all the things that we've learned as we go through the process of creating an actual project as opposed to just learning the skills and kind of a hodgepodge collage like we did before. So let's go ahead and start with a new document. We're just going to click on New and then new document. We're going to make sure that we're still on the WQ HD, which is the 2,560 by 1,440 pixels, because that is the appropriate aspect ratio for a YouTube thumbnail. Let's go ahead and click okay, and we will get started here. Now it's important to refer back to our sketches so that we know what's going on. So I'm just going to swipe over two concepts here so they can see what I was creating. And I think I like the one with an excited person. And then I want to make sure that we get it in the right spot. We can always move our concepts around, but I want to at least get them in here. Let's go ahead, let's go back to Affinity Photo. And I think we're going to start by placing an image. And the image that we're going place is going to be of the spinner because that is going to be the focal point of this whole thing. So let's go ahead and go to the stock photo library right here. And I'm just going to search fidget spinner. When we do that, we're going to get a bunch of different ones. Now, I'm going to select for this project, one that I think will be really easy to cut out, one that should be simple to make a selection and then make a mask on. So I'm going to go ahead and choose this one. I'm just drawing, drag it out onto the screen. Now, it's going to take a second because that's again a high resolution image. So I can grab my move tool and I can scale it down. And then I want to also do this search in Pixabay just to see if there's something that I would like better. So I just switched to Pixabay here and I'm just looking to see if there's anything good here. Let's see this blue one. Be easy to pull out. So I'm going to go ahead and drag that down, make sure that you click. I understand if you haven't done that for that service yet, I can just choose which one of these I want to use, or I could end up using both of them. So this is a very large image, so let's go ahead and scale it down here. The background on this one might be a little bit more difficult to get rid of than the background on the other one. Just because, as you can see here, this one is much more plain and this one is much more busy. So it might be a little bit more difficult, but I think both of them should be fine. I now want to bring in and excited person. So let's go back here. I can take a picture of myself, but for the sake of this class, I'm just going to go ahead and just search. Excited here. Let's go ahead and try pixels. Alright, this guy looks very excited, so I'm gonna go ahead and pull him in. And that is very large. So let's go ahead and scale him down. Now the next thing that I want to do is go ahead and mask these things out so that the backgrounds are gone and I can see how I want to arrange them on the page. So let's just start with this guy. We might have a little bit of trouble here with his hair because it's kind of curly. So this is more of a difficult mass job than we've done except that the background is pretty plain here, whereas with the vamps, the background was a lot more complicated. So we'll just have to see how it goes. So check our brush size here. I want it to be fairly big. It should be easy enough to get his bottom half here. And then his head is going to be the prom. I just hold down option here to erase part of this. Make sure that we get it right. Scale our brush down to make it more refined. Selection. If we can just get it over to his arm. Now remember, these are viewed at very small sizes, so we're not super concerned about getting this 100% perfect. If we miss some of his hair, that's not going to be the end of the world, but we can try and see if we can get it. Make sure we don't leave out any part of his face or something. Okay. We can spend more time doing that. But just for the sake of showing you how this refinement brush works, I'm going click on the refinement brush up here and we're going to refine over where his hair is. The refinement brushes useful when it comes to hair, especially because it will really go in and reevaluate that and see if what parts look like the background, what parts look like part of the object. So we're just trying to get it to the point where most of that white is gone. There. You want to refine the edge of his arm here slightly. That's looking much better. Okay. So now that we have that all set up and correct there, Let's go ahead and make sure that we click the check mark to accept that refinement. And then we'll go ahead and mask it by going to our layers panel and choosing mask layer. So now we can go ahead and deselect that and see how it turned out. And I'd say that's pretty good. We did a pretty good job on selecting that. Now, if we try and move this right now, we're going to move the mask, which is not what we want to do. So let's undo that. Let's make sure that we click onto the layer itself and then we can move that layer. For now I'm going to go ahead and just hide this layer. So just turn off the little dots so that we can move on and work on the fidget spinners continuing with our selection tool here, we're going to just go ahead. Select this. That's almost perfect. You can see it had a little bit of trouble here in the middle, so we'll just run back over that. Makes sure we have all of the center selected and we'll go ahead and mask it. No need to refine this one. It's got a clean edge. Let's go ahead and turn that one off as well. And now we will go ahead and select the yellow spinner and select the Move tool because I want to make sure that I have the whole thing on the screen because otherwise it won't mask out all of the background. And then if we move it around, we might have a problem later. Grab our selection brush again and that's run over it. Now this one is going to be slightly more tricky simply because those parts in the middle are going to be blue and we don't want that. Now you can see that the first one is already not selected. So it already didn't go over that. But down here in the bottom too, you can actually see where it's actually taking out the black. And we don't want to take out the black. We want to select that, but we don't want to select the blue in the middle. So we're going to have to scale our brush down a little bit. And then we'll go in while holding down option and we'll try to get this blue in the middle app. So the contrast was still pretty high there, so it worked okay, but we need to remember to do that. Otherwise, it would look weird to have this blue showing through if we didn't have a blue background. So let's go ahead and make our mask and de-select to see how we did. Now let's turn on our other objects and we can move them around. So let's select our blue fidget spinner. And you can see what we've got a problem with here is the centers. So we didn't think about the centers on this one because they were darker. They didn't stand out as much. But now we've got the wood chips centers there and we need to take care of that. So the way that we're going to do that is to select the mask remembered that white is where we will see. In black is where we will not see. So we need to paint black with our brush on the mask so that we can get rid of that. So let's grab our brush, check our size here, and go in and we're going to paint this out. Okay, so now if we look at our mask, we can see we have three black dots in the center where we have now masked out that background. With all of these, we can go ahead and start setting up our image. Now one thing that we might want to do is change the color of a fidget spinner. So let's say that I want this background to be yellow, but I wanted to be able to use this yellow spinner because it was easy to cut out and convenient. So we're going to do that with an adjustment layer. So let's go ahead and grab our adjustment layer. And you can see that currently wants to apply it to everything. So we don't want that to happen. So there's two ways we can do this. We can either make a selection on this or we can go ahead and clip the selection to it. I want to show you one thing here. If I come to this mask, I go to selection and I choose selection from layer, it's going to select just that layer. Then that's an easy way for me to make a selection without redoing all of the selection work that I've done. So now let's go ahead and grab our adjustment layer and we are going to choose. It's still showing that it's hitting everything, but it won't. Once we actually make it, we're going to go ahead and choose a color one to HSL here, with HSL selected, we're going to change the hue. So if we want it to be on yellow, we might want it to be orange. Now the way that this works is I'm not dragging to orange because it's interacting with the layer underneath it. To get this orange color, I have to drag into the blue. And that's just because it was yellow to start out with. I can bump up the saturation. I can make it brighter or darker, double-tap to reset. And now I have this orange object instead. If I wanted to make it yellow though, I would actually want this to be purple. So I'm gonna go ahead and make it purple and then I'll try and making my background yellow, blue and the purple would both show up nicely on a yellow background. So that's how we could use an adjustment layer there. Let's go ahead and deselect that so that we can continue to work. And we're going to make our background by dragging out a shape, drag out a rectangle shape behind, looks like snapping is turned off, so let's turn that back on so we can snap to our corners. And we'll make sure that we drag this layer all the way to the bottom. The black is actually not bad either. But let's go ahead and try and change this to a yellow. So we'll drag our color wheel around here. And you can see that something very funny is happening. And that is because of our HSL adjustment layer. Now, that's actually not the worst effect in the whole world. But I want to show you why that's happening. And that is because our mask, if we come down here and we click on our mask and we solo it, we can see that the mask is applying just to this layer. So it worked initially for us to change that color, but there's still all this white around here. We can either go in and black that out or we can do what we talked about before and we can just clip this. So let's go ahead and clip this layer in. And now we have all yellow. So that might have been a little confusing, but it's just the way that that mask is interacting with that layer. Because we had masked just that picture. But that picture when we took up part of the layer, it only masked out part of it, which I know that can be a little bit confusing, but as you play around with it more and more, it will make more and more sense. I'm going to hop out of here just to make sure that it gets saved in the memory before I switch apps. So I've hopped out now I can go back in. That will just stop me from having any problems later. I'm going to swipe back over here to concepts. And I'm looking here at what I've drawn. And I'm thinking about the place where I want the text to be, and I really want the text to be at the top. So that's what I'm going to try and add here. So I just need to rearrange this a little bit first. I'm going to go ahead and select the excited person. And I'm going to place him off in the corner here because if his arm gets covered up by the time, that's not going to be such a big deal. And then I'm going to move blew down a little bit, and then I'm going to move purple down as well. Maybe re-size purple, slightly bluish needs to come down just a little bit further so that we have room to put the text. Alright, so let's go ahead and add our text. So I'm using the Artistic Text tool because that makes a lot more sense for what we're doing. Easy to resize. Know what I might wanna do is size this up a little bit too far and then move it behind his head. Because that can create a three-dimensional field which is pretty useful. And then I obviously want to make this stand out. So I might try using the same purple color as we have on the fidget spinner. So let's come down here. I'm just using the eyedropper tool from the color panel right here. So let's make sure that we select the text here. And then we'll apply that and we'll see how that stands out. The one thing that I might wanna do is change the font. So let's go ahead and click back in, select our text again, and then we'll try some different font styles here. Quicksand is one that I really like. There's also some larger, thicker, those often stand out better. So let's try rough all caps. I think that one's pretty good. Now might not be one that you have on yours depends on if you've bought it or not, but you can try some that are thicker, those tend to stand out better. Now, see that it's overlapping with the blue one. So let's just move this all the way to the bottom so that it's behind everything else. And then let's reposition it slightly. So a lot of this is just positioning things here. Now the next thing that I want to do is just check over the project details and make sure that we've met them all. So we've got at least one photo? Yes. We have at least one adjustment layer. Yes, we've put that onto our purple guy here, use at least one mask making a selection. We did that three times. Perfect. We have a text element and we have a shape element. So that's perfect. This is a done deal. We have been able to create a thumbnail and now all we need to do is export it, which we will do in the next video. 14. Exporting: All right, Now that we've finished designing our thumbnail, it's time to export it. In real life, we would be exporting this two that we were able to upload it with our video to YouTube. In the case of this class, we're going to export it so that we can upload it to the project section for this course. Exploiting is fairly easy here. And if any photo, you just have to go up to the document menu and then you're going to choose Export. There are a bunch of different options here. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed by this. You don't have to worry about all of these options and knowing what they all mean right now, the most important thing is what format we choose, which is the little rectangles at the top. We want to make sure that we're on JPEG because that's going to be the best for uploading the project. The other thing that we want to pay attention to is the file size, which is down at the very bottom of the screen right above the cancel and okay buttons. You can see that this says it's 2.32 mb. We want that to be below 2 mb because that's what we would need for a YouTube video. It has to be below 2 mb. So in order to adjust that, we just need to adjust our quality. So this quality circle, which is towards the top middle of the screen, we can just scrub that down just by clicking and dragging on it. And we'll try going down to about 98% and see what that does. And 98% we're at 1.33 mb and so that's perfect. That's exactly what we want. If we want to see what our thumbnail is going look like, we're going go ahead and hit the Preview button in the bottom right, and you can see what your thumbnails going to look like at full resolution. This looks pretty good. Bear in mind that people on YouTube would never view the thumbnail this large. They would always see it much smaller. So the little jagged edges that you see around the fidget spinners is not going to show up to them. This is at 100% and they will never see it that big. So it's fine if we lose a little quality there. Let's go ahead and hit Close. It's always important to keep in mind what you are making something for. And in this case, it would be to go onto YouTube. Now, we're gonna go ahead and click Okay, so that we can export this. Now, this is going to pop us into our file system. We're just going go ahead and save this to our Affinity Photo folder. We can name it down at the bottom. So I'm just going to call this one fidget thumbnail. And then for some reason this button is called move instead of export, but it just says move up here. When you click that, it's going to go ahead and actually export it. And now it's been export to whatever location that you told it to go to. You can then take that and then go ahead and upload that to Skillshare. When you do that, make sure that you upload it to the main body of the Skillshare project and not just the thumbnail area, even though this is a thumbnail, Skillshare's thumbnails are not size the same as YouTube thumbnail, so I won't be able to see the whole thing if you don't upload it into the body section project. Now sometimes when you do that, it takes a minute for Skillshare to upload it and you may think that nothing is happening, just wait patiently and it will eventually show up. So don't let that discourage you. If you just wait patiently, it'll show up and then I'll be able to see what you made. Alright, now that we've export our file, the last thing that we need to do is wrap up this course and talk about your next steps. 15. Next Steps: Thanks so much for watching this course on Affinity Photo version two on the iPad. I hope that you've learned a lot of the ins and outs of using this amazing program. Now that we're done, you might be wondering what your next steps are. Well, I've got a couple of suggestions. First of course, you should submit your project. If you haven't done that already, make sure you go to the project section for this course and upload it. Then you might be wondering what you should learn next. Well, if you purchased all of the affinity apps for your iPad, then you might want to check out my intro courses for Affinity Publisher and a fiend designer as well. You'll find those really helpful as you get started on your design journey with the iPad. Then if you're also interested in any videos on your iPad, you might want to check out my course on Da Vinci Resolve for the iPad. This is a new program that is an amazing video editor that will be really helpful to you if you want to be able to create videos. As always, if you have any questions, please go ahead and reach out to me in the discussion tab for this course. I'm happy to do my best to answer them. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next course.