Master Blend Modes in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to your Blend Modes master class. Blend modes are one of the most magical things in photo editing because they allow you to easily combine layers. Just take one layer and another, and then you can use blend modes to merge them together. I love using blend modes and in this course, you'll learn everything you need to know about them. We'll start by learning how blend modes actually work. That way you won't have to wonder why you're clicking on random blend modes. You'll have a deep understanding of how they work, so you can know exactly when and why to use them. Once we know how blend modes work, then the fun can really begin. We're going to do a bunch of projects together so that you can see how to put your new skills to good use. Using blend modes, we can add dreamy snow to a winter stay, or we can take the opposite route and add beautiful sun rays falling from the sky. Or we can take a regular photo and dramatically enhance its lighting. Or maybe you want to take a photo like this and completely change its mood with a misty layer of fog, or maybe you want to do something simpler, like adding a flock of birds flying in the sky. Or you can have a little fun and add a firework show to any image, or you can be more subtle and add a glimmer of stars to the nighttime sky. You can take a dull photo like this and add sunshiny warmth to it, or you can take an image like this and turn back time with a vintage effect. You can also do artistic edits like adding texture to a photo or creating a soft glow or a double exposure or adding neon light. You can even use blend modes to create amazing designs for any occasion. We'll cover all of these examples and more so that you can walk away from this course as a blend mode master. It's going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the project and resources tab. Then click on the Download Link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Introduction to Blend Modes : To start off this course, let's learn the basics of how blend modes work. Blend modes allow you to combine multiple layers together, and they work like opacity. So to begin this video, let's take a quick look at opacity. For this demonstration, I'm just going to put a red fill layer on top of this photo. So first, I'll come up to the top of the screen to layer. Then I'll go down to where it says new fill layer. With that applied, we can go ahead and change the color over here in the color panel. So I'll just make this red. Now we can go down to our Layers panel, and we can adjust the opacity by clicking and dragging on the word opacity. So as I do this, notice how the red gradually disappears. And as I bring it back up, the red comes back. By changing the opacity, I'm able to effect how this red fill layer will blend with the photo underneath it. But there's nothing smart about it. I'm really just making the red more and less visible. But if I were to use blend modes, then I can combine these layers in more interesting smart ways. Let's go ahead and take a look at how it looks when I use different blend modes. First, I'm going to apply multiply, and you can see what that looks like. Then I'll go down to screen. And last, I'll go down to overlay. We'll learn more about these blend modes in the next videos. But for now, there are three things I want you to keep in mind when working with blend modes. Those three things are the blend layer, the base layer, and the result. The blend layer is the layer that you're applying the blend mode to. In our example, the red fill layer was the blend layer. The base layer is the layer that's underneath. It's the base of everything. In our example, that was the photo of the woman and the result is just what the final image looks like, which in our example looked like this. By knowing these three terms, you can begin to understand how blend modes work. At the most basic level, every blend mode is really just a math equation. By using math, affinity will create a resulting image by combining the base layer and the blend layer. But depending on the blend mode you use, the exact variables in this equation will be different. Just as an example, here's the equation for the ten blend mode. You do not need to memorize this formula, but in simple terms, all this equation is doing is it's finding the brightest pixels from our base layer and the blend layer, and then the result only keeps the pixels that are the brightest. So as a simple example, you might have a base layer that looks like this and a blend layer that looks like this. Then if you use the ten blend mode, only the brightest pixels from each layer would be kept in the resulting image. Every blend mode has a different formula that it uses, making each blend mode useful in different situations. So in the next few lessons, we'll take a closer look at a few of the most important blend modes, and then we'll learn when you'd want to use each one of them. 4. Multiply : This video, we'll take a deep dive into the multiply blend mode. If you remember nothing else from this video, just remember that multiply will make your photo darker. That's the main thing to remember. But of course, there's much more to it than just that. Now, before we dive into multiply, I want to take a look at an even simpler blend mode that's related to multiply, and that's the darken blend mode. To see how this works, first, I'm going to add a fill layer to our image, just like how we did in the last video. For this fill layer, I'm going to make the layer 50% gray. Basically, what that means is over here where you can see the values, I want the luminosity value to be 50, and you can adjust this by going up and down on this side of the color wheel. Now we can take a look at the darken blend mode. So I'll click here and then change it to darken. This blend mode is the opposite of the ten blend mode, which we learned about in the last video. So instead of keeping the brightest pixels from the base layer and the blend layer, it will keep the darkest pixels from each layer. So if I turn this layer on and off, you can see that gray is being added to the sky, her skin, and sunny parts of the grass. That's because 50% gray is darker than those bright areas. On the other hand, her black shirt is completely unaffected by this blend layer because black is darker than gray. The resulting image is only the darkest pixels from each layer. Knowing that, now let's take a look at the multiply blend mode. With this blend mode, you can see that everything has become darker, even the black shirt. That's because multiply combines the darknesses from both layers. If I make the fill layer darker, then the resulting image will become even darker and if I make the fill layer lighter, then the resulting image becomes less dark than before, but it's still darker than the original photo. Here's the before, and here it is slightly darker. So why is that? If I change the fill layers blend mode back to normal, you can see that this is a pretty light shade of gray. Even though it's such a light color, the resulting image still becomes darker when we use the multiply blend mode. So why is that? What's the math behind that? Well, get ready because we're about to learn the secret formula for the multiply blend mode. Drum roll, please. And here it is. Look at that beautiful equation. Using this equation, the multiply blend mode will take the color value of the base layer and then divide that by 255. Then it will multiply that by the blend layers color value divided by 255, and then multiply the whole thing by 255. That will give you the new color value for each pixel in your resulting image. Now that I've told you what the secret formula is, I'm sure you know exactly how the multiply blend mode works. Well, not really. Unless you're an even bigger affinity nerd than I am. This formula probably doesn't mean anything to you, and that's totally fine. I've been using affinity for nearly a decade and I've never needed to use this specific formula. In fact, the main reason I'm showing you this is so that you can see that it's not important to understand the math behind every blend mode. I've watched videos where people explain the math of each and every blend mode. Honestly, knowing these equations just isn't important. What is important is knowing the general principle of what a blend mode is doing and then when Y, you would want to use each one. So knowing that, let's learn the general principle of how multiply works, and then we can see it in practice. To understand multiply, I like to think of this simple equation. In this equation, you just combine the darkness from the base layer with the darkness from the blend layer. And really, that's all you need to know. Just remember that multiply works by adding the darkness from each layer. Okay. Now let's jump back into affinity and see how multiply works on a practical level. This gray fill layer isn't very dark, but it does have a little darkness to it. So when I change the blend mode to multiply, then that little bit of darkness is added to the photo beneath it. And if I make the fill layer even darker, then more darkness is added to the photo, since the fill layer has more darkness to add to the equation. Because the darkness from each layer is being added together using multiply will almost always result in a darker image, almost always. There are two exceptions to that, and those are when pure white or pure black are involved. To see what I mean, let's make this fill layer totally white by bringing it to this corner down here. Now if I turn this layer on and off, you can see that nothing is happening. That's because the color white has zero darkness in it, so it has no darkness to add to the equation. To see a simple example of why this is important, I'll place another photo into this image. I'll go to the top of the screen to file and then down to place. I'm going to add this black heart image to our document. Then I'll just click and drag to add it in. In this example, I want to add this black heart to the main photo, but I don't want to include the white background that's surrounding it. Lucky for us, this is super easy to do with the multiply blend mode. So with this layer selected, I'll just change this to multiply. Now, the heart is all that's left because white becomes invisible when you use multiply. Isn't that cool? In addition to that, now that we've added this black heart, we can also see how multiply works with pure black I mentioned before that multiply almost always makes things darker because it will combine darknesses from your blend layer and the base layer. But I want you to pay attention to the heart as we change the blend mode. I'll set the blend mode back to normal. This is how it looked before and then back to multiply. I'll do this a couple of times and ask you, does using multiply make the heart any darker than it already was? You can probably see that the answer is no. It looks exactly the same. That's because black is already 100% dark and you can't get any darker than 100% dark, so it will look the same. So when you use multiply on black, it just stays black because black is already as dark as it comes. Okay, now let's see another example of multiply by using another image from the exercise files. I'll go to file and then down to place. In this time, I'll select this gray heart image. I'll click and drag to place this image. Okay. Before I change the blend mode, I want you to try to figure out what will happen. What will happen to the gray heart when we use multiply. And what will happen to the white that's surrounding the heart? Okay, you have your guess. Let's go ahead and change the blend mode and see what happens. Once again, the white background has been removed. And this time, the gray heart has become much darker because its darkness is being combined with the darkness of her hair. Hopefully, that wasn't too surprising for you, but now let me ask you a trickier question. What would happen if I moved the gray heart up here in this bright area the sky is so bright that it's actually pure white. And we've already learned that white has no darkness in it. So what will it do to the gray heart? Well, let's move the heart up here and see what happens. Tamura clearly see what's happening. We can jump back and forth between the normal and multiply blend mode. As you can see, the gray heart looks exactly the same as the original image. Remember, multiply will add the darkness from each of these layers together. Since the white sky has no darkness, zero is being added to the darkness of the gray heart. Anything plus zero will just return to whatever it was before. That's why the heart looks exactly the same. Now I have one final question for you. What will happen to this gray heart? If I move it on top of the black heart Remember, black is already 100% dark. What will happen if we add gray to it? Are you ready? Let's see what happens. And just like that, the gray heart is gone. I know that might look a little strange, but mathematically, it makes sense. If you add any amount of darkness to black, then it will still be black. Since the gray heart is having its darkness combined with the black, it's also become black, which is why you can't see it here, even though this layer is on top of the black heart, and to finish this video, I just want to mention that everything we've been learning about applies to color as well. To see this, I'll add a red fill layer. I'll go to layer, and then new fill layer. I'll change the color to red, and then I'll set its blend mode to multiply. Now the entire photo has become darker because the darkness from the red is being combined with the darkness of the original photo. But you'll notice that the black heart still looks the same. As we learned, that's because black is already 100% dark. So adding any darkness from the red color won't change it. Alright. And with that, you are now a master of the multiply blend mode. Nice job. I know that was a lot to take in, but don't worry. We'll see how to use multiply in some more practical situations throughout the course. But for now, we can go ahead and move on to the next video and learn about another important blend mode, the screen blend mode. 5. Screen : This video, we'll learn about the screen blend mode. Lucky for us, this should actually be pretty simple because screen is just the opposite of multiply. As we learned in the last video, multiply works by combining darkness from the base layer and the darkness in the blend layer. Screen is just the opposite of that. It will combine the brightness in your base layer with brightness that you add in the blend layer. And really, we could end the video here. Screen is exactly the same as multiply, but the opposite. So take everything we learned in the last video and just reverse it. Now, even though we could end the video, I want to show you a few examples of screen just to make sure everything is crystal clear. To begin, I'm going to place the Black heart that we worked on in the last video. So I'll go to File and then down to place. I'll just add this black heart by double clicking and then I'll click and drag to add it. Before I change the blend mode to screen, I want you to try to figure out what will happen. Remember, we just learned that screen is the opposite of multiply. Think back to what happened in the last video and then reverse it. Are you ready? Let's turn this into the screen blend mode. By using screen, the black heart is removed and the white background stays the same. Because remember, screen combines the brightness of the base layer and the blend layer. Since black has no brightness to it, it's completely removed when you use screen, and since white is 100% bright, it will just stay the same. Now let's see what happens when we place the gray heart We already know that white will stay the same. But what about gray? Well, let's turn on the screen blend mode to see what happens. All right. Interesting. By using screen, the gray heart combines with the brightness of the underlying photo. So if I place the heart over her dark shirt, can see it looks pretty much the same as when we placed it because her shirt doesn't have much light to add to the heart. But if I place it over her bright face, you can see the heart becomes much lighter and transparent as it combines with the brightness underneath it. Okay, now let's place one more image just to see how it works with screen. First, I'm going to delete both of these heart layers just to clean up our workspace. Then I'm going to place the image with the red dots. So I'll go to File Place, and I'll select this red dot image. Okay, before I turn on screen, let me just ask you a few questions to really test your understanding of screen. First, what will happen to the black background when we turn on screen? Okay, question two, what will happen to the circles that are on her shirt? Remember that her shirt is very dark, so it doesn't have much brightness to contribute to screen. Question number three, what will happen to the circle that's on the sky? Remember that the sky is so bright that it's actually pure white. And question number four, what will happen to all of the other circles? These circles are scattered throughout the image on areas that aren't quite white or black, but have different levels of brightness. If you want to take a minute to try and figure out the answer to each question, go ahead and pause the video here. Then after you have your answers, we can go ahead and continue with the video. All right, here's the moment of truth. Let's turn on the screen blend mode. And there you have it. That's what screen does to this photo. So let's take a minute to examine it and see the answer to each of the four questions. Question one was, what would happen to the black background? If you guessed that it would be removed, then you're correct. Black has no brightness, so it's removed when you use screen. Question number two is what would happen to the circles that are on her dark shirt? You can see that these circles look pretty much the same because the underlying photo doesn't have much brightness to add to the circles. Question number three was, what would happen to the circle that's up in the bright sky? You can see that the circle here is no longer visible because the sky was white. White is already 100% bright. Adding brightness from the circle doesn't make any difference. White is already at 100%, so white areas will just remain white. And finally, question four is what would happen to all of these other circles scattered throughout the image. As you can see, these circles have all blended with the brightness of the underlying photo. So in areas of the photo, where it's a little bit brighter, like the grass down here, you can see that the circles have become very light and transparent. And in darker areas of the photo, the circles have a little bit of light added to them, but they look pretty much the same as before we turned on screen. All right. And with that, we are done. You now have everything you need to work with the screen blend mode. We'll be practicing using this blend mode a lot throughout the course. But for now, we can go ahead and move on to the next video and learn about the overlay blend mode. 6. Overlay : Let's learn about the overlay blend mode. Overlay is an interesting blend mode because it can brighten or darken, depending on the situation. To see how this works, let's compare overlay to multiply and screen. To do this, I'm just going to add a new fill layer. And then I'm going to make this layer darker. A nice dark gray like that. Then we can go ahead and turn on the multiply blend mode. As we've already learned, multiply will combine the darknesses from both layers to create a darker image. Even if we make the fill layer brighter, it will still darken the image because even a light shade of gray has a little bit of darkness in it, and if we change the lend mode to screen, then the photo becomes very bright because it combines the brightness from both layers. And even if we make this layer darker, it will still brighten the image because even a dark shade of gray still has some brightness in it. But now, let's see how this compares to overlay. Overlay has made the image a lot darker because we're using a dark gray layer. But if I make this layer a light shade of gray, then it will brighten the image. But why is that? Why does overlay sometimes brighten the image and sometimes darken it? Well, to see why, let's take a look at these five squares which range from pure black to pure white. To understand how overlay works, you need to know what its goal is. The goal of overlay is to make your photo black or white. Overlay loves both of these extremes, and it's willing to push your photo towards either one of them, depending on whether you give it a dark or light layer to work with. So if you add a dark layer like a fill layer with 25% luminosity, then overlay will make your image darker. Since you added a dark layer, overlay assumes you want your overall image to be darker, so it pushes everything closer to black. But if you add a light layer like one with 75% luminosity, then overlay will make your image brighter. Since you added a bright layer, overlay assumes you want the overall image to be brighter, so it pushes everything closer to white. But what if you add a layer that's not bright or dark? What would overlay do to a layer that has 50% luminosity? 50% gray is actually a special color for overlay because overlay doesn't know what to do with it. It can't decide if you want to make the photo brighter or darker. So if you use overlay on 50% gray, then nothing will happen. So to summarize what we just learned, using overlay on a bright layer will make your photo brighter, while using overlay on a dark layer will make your photo darker. And if you use overlay on a neutral layer of 50% gray, then nothing will happen. Okay, now let's jump back into affinity to see how all of this works in practice. As we saw before, making this layer darker will darken the image, and making it lighter will brighten the image. But if we make it a neutral 50% gray, then you can see it has no effect with the overlay blend mode. That's all easy enough, but now I want to really test your understanding of overlay. First, I'm going to duplicate our photos layer by pressing Command J on a Mac or Control J on a PC. Okay. Now for your review question, I want you to figure out what will happen if we use overlay on this duplicate photo, will it make the overall image brighter, darker, do nothing? I'll give you a second to think about it. All right. Now let's go ahead and turn on overlay to see what happens. Now if I turn the layer on and off, you can see that our image is both brighter and darker. To see why this is, let's take a look at a couple of specific areas. First, let's look at her shirt. In the original photo, her shirt was already quite dark, definitely darker than 50% gray. On the duplicate photo, overlay applied a darkening effect to this area since overlay will use anything darker than 50% gray to darken the image. That's why this duplicate photo made her shirt even darker. Now to contrast that, the sky in this photo is very bright, much brighter than 50% gray. On the duplicate photo, overlay applied a brightening effect to this area since overlay will use anything brighter than 50% gray to brighten the image. In other words, the bright areas of the photo have become brighter and the dark areas of the photo have become darker or even more simply put. Overlay has increased the contrast of the image. That's why overlay isn't considered a brightening blend mode or a darkening blend mode, but it's actually considered a contrast blend mode. In fact, overlay is really useful for adding contrast because of another trait that it has. Overlay is a special blend mode because it will brighten highlights faster than it will brighten up the shadows in your image, and it will darken shadows faster than it will darken highlights in your image. This allows you to brighten your highlights without affecting your shadows too much or to darken your shadows without affecting your highlights too much. To see how this works, I'm going to delete this duplicate photo layer that we made earlier. And then I'm going to add a gradient to this fill layer. I'm just going to click and drag from one side to the other. I'm going to leave this color stop set to black, and I'm going to change this one to white. Now if you look at the right side of the photo, you can see that this black gradient is making the shadows much darker without affecting the highlights too much. So you can see the trees have become almost black, while the highlights in the sky are still nice and bright. And if you look over on the left side, you can see the opposite is true. The sky, the grass and her skin have all gotten much brighter. But this dark shadow in the trees is still very dark. That's why overlay is such a great blend mode for brightening or darkening a photo because most of the time you'll want to brighten up your highlights without affecting the shadows too much or darken your shadows without affecting the highlights too much. Okay, that's pretty much all you need to know. But before we finish this video, I want to mention one last thing. We've been using overlay throughout this video, but there's another blend mode that's very similar to overlay, and that's the soft light blend mode. All you need to know is that soft light is a less intense version of overlay. So it works the same as overlay, except it brightens highlights less quickly and darkens shadows less quickly, too. Some people like the extreme contrast that overlay makes, but other people prefer the softer appearance of soft light. Both of these blend modes are great, and depending on the photo, one of them might work better than the other. So feel free to try using both of them. And with that, we're done. Now you have everything you need to work with overlay and soft light. We'll practice these blend modes later on in the course. But for now, let's move on to the next video where I need to tell you a little secret about blend modes. 7. The Blend Mode Secret : In this video, I want to tell you a little secret about blend modes. When I first started planning this course, my goal was to cover every blend mode and affinity photo. There aren't a lot of tutorials for each blend mode, so I thought it would be useful to explain what they all do. But I soon realized why there aren't a lot of tutorials for every blend mode, which brings me to the secret about blend modes. The honest truth is that 99% of the time, there are only three blend modes that you need multiply, screen, and overlay. These are by far the most common blend modes, and you can pretty much ignore the rest of them. So instead of bombarding you with information on blend modes that you'll never use, I decided to focus this course on the things that will actually help you. So to start this course, we took an in depth look at the three most important blend modes. And now for the rest of the course, we're going to take that knowledge and learn how to apply it. That way, you'll be totally prepared to use your blend mode skills after you finish this course. But before we dive into the practical application of blend modes, I just have one quick tip for you in the next video, which will help us to work a little more efficiently throughout the rest of the course. 8. Place Image Tool : This video we'll learn how to use the Place Image tool. The Place Image tool allows you to quickly place images into your document, which we'll be doing a lot throughout this course. If you've worked in Affinity Photo for a while, you might be thinking, Wait a second. Affinity Photo doesn't have a Place Image tool, Affinity designer and publisher do, but Affinity Photo doesn't well, that might seem true at first, but it actually does have a Place Image tool. You just need to know where to find it. Go ahead and go to the top of your screen to view and then go down to where it says, customized tools. This is a list of every tool in affinity photo, not just the ones that are visible by default. Most of the time, the default tools are all that you need, but the Place Image tool can be quite useful too. So we can go ahead and take the Place Image tool right here, and we can place this wherever we want in our tool bar by clicking and dragging it into place. You can also remove tools that you don't use if you want to clean up your list. I'm just going to remove the mesh Warp tool. If you ever want your tools to go back to the way they were, you can just click Reset right here. I'm going to close this. Now we can try out the Place Image tool. Go ahead and click on it, and now we can quickly add any image that we want to our photo. This is the exact same as going up to the top of your screen to file and then down to place, but it's just a little bit faster to have a tool that you can quickly pull out, select an image, and open up. Now that you have the Place Image tool, we're ready to jump into the next chapter and learn about some practical applications for blend modes. 9. Adding Birds : In this chapter, we'll learn useful ways to apply our new knowledge of blunt modes, starting with how to add birds to a photo. To see how this works, we'll be working with this photo from the courses exercise files. With this open, we can go ahead and add our bird photo using the Place Image tool. As a reminder, if you don't have this Place Image tool, you can just go back to the previous video where we learned how to put this tool into our toolbar. Okay, now that we have this bird image, we need to decide which blend mode we should use. We want to keep these dark birds, but we want to remove the sky. The sky is pretty much white, so that should help us decide on our blend mode. In the last chapter, we learned that multiply will keep the dark parts of a layer, and it will remove the white parts of a layer. So that's the blend mode that we should use. Now we can go ahead and zoom in and see that this is almost perfect. It's so close. You can still see some lines right here on the edges, and that's because while the sky was almost white, it wasn't pure white. Multiply only can remove pure white, but even very light shades of gray will still have some darkness to them that gets left behind. So to fix this, we need to make sure that the birds sky is pure white. Then it will be totally removed. To make this easier to see, I'm just going to select this layer and then change it back to the normal blend mode. Then I'm going to add a curved adjustment to brighten up the sky. I only want this curves adjustment to affect the bird photo. So I'll click and drag it on top of the bird photo so that it becomes a child layer. That way, it only affects the birds. Now, to brighten up the sky, all we need to do is bring over this white point slider. This makes things closer and closer to white as you drag it over. And you can see this. If you drag it over too much, even the birds will start to turn white. So I'm just going to drag it over a little bit. Now the background should be pure white. With that done, I'll just close out of this. I'll select the bird photo and I'll set it back to multiply. Now we can go ahead and see that those lines are gone and our birds are perfectly blenting into the sky. Now that the birds are in place, there's a few bonus tips I can show you. First, if you want less birds, all you need to do is apply a mask to this layer. With it selected, just click on the mask icon. Now we have a white mask applied here. All we need to do is grab the paint brush. And then paint in black paint on this white mask to remove any of the birds that you don't want. And if you want more birds, all you need to do is duplicate this bird photo to duplicate press Command or Control J. Now using the move tool, you can go ahead and move this to add more birds into the photo. You can do this as many times as you want, and you can also continue to mask off areas if the birds are overlapping in strange ways. And that's it. That's how you can add birds into a photo. In the next video, we'll learn how to add texture to a photo. 10. Adding Texture : Let's learn how to add texture to an image. To begin, let's add our texture by using the Place Image tool. And if you want to do this a little faster, you can double click on your image to automatically load it into your cursor. I'll click and drag to add this. But as you can see, it's facing the wrong direction for our photo. So I'm going to click and drag on this little knob up here. And while holding Shift, we can lock it in, so it's perfectly aligned. Then we can just stretch this like that. So it's covering the whole photo. Now it's time to blend this texture into our photo. To blend this in, I want to make sure that we keep the light areas and dark areas of this texture. In other words, I want the bright areas to make our base layer brighter, and I want the dark areas to make the base layer darker. So should we use multiply, screen or overlay? If you answered overlay, then you're correct. And this is what it looks like. Very nice. Here's the before and after. You can leave your photo like this if you want, or you can do some masking. Maybe you want most of the photo to have a texture applied to it, but you might think it would look better if the subject of the photo wasn't affected. If that's the case, you can add a mask. Then you can grab the paint brush and paint in black paint to remove the texture over the flower. So I'm just going to paint over the flour to remove that texture. I have a very harsh edge on my paintbrush right now, so I'm just going to lower the hardness down to zero, and then I'll continue painting. Now, if you do still want some texture on the flower, you can always duplicate this texture layer with Command or Control J. Now the texture is very intense on the outer edges, but it's still not on our flower. So as a little trick, you can select the mask, and then you can invert it with Command or Control I. You can see on our mask here that this is now applying the texture only on the flower, not on the background. Now you can go ahead and select the main layer and lower the opacity so that the flower has a little bit of texture applied to it. So now you know how to add texture to a photo. But before we finish this video, I want to give you some tips on how to find textures for your photos. To find textures, I recommend you use pixabUnsplash, or Pexels. All of these websites have millions of free photos, including free textures. You can find links to all of these websites in the PDF that's included in the course exercise files. This PDF has links to all of the resources that we'll be using throughout the course. So we'll be using this in a lot of the upcoming lessons. After you go to one of the free photo websites, you want to find a texture that's a similar color to the photo that you're working on. So for the flower photo that we edited in this video, you might want to search for something like green texture or green abstract. So I'll just type that in and then press Enter. Then you just need to scroll down to look through these textures to try to find one that you like after you find a texture that you like, you can go ahead and click on it and then download it for free, and that's it. Now you know how to use free textures to add an artistic effect to your photos. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to use blend modes to sharpen your images. 11. Sharpening : This video, I'll show you my favorite method for sharpening a photo. To begin, let's apply the high pass filter. When you add this filter, it will cover your entire photo with 50% gray. We'll be using the overlay blend mode on this as we learned earlier in the course, overlay has no effect on anything that's 50% gray. If we used overlay right now, this filter wouldn't do anything. But as I bring the radius up, you can see that it will change from this 50% gray. Now the filter has become dark in dark areas of the photo and lighter in light areas of the photo. To make this even easier to see, I'm going to turn on monochrome, which will remove any colors that are bleeding through. So now you can really see that all this is is varying shades of gray. And just to make this even clearer, you can see that the dark and light areas on this filter match up perfectly to our photo. If I use the overlay blend mode right now, what will happen to this gray layer? If you remember back to the overlay lesson from earlier in the course, I think you already know the answer to this. But let's take a look. Now that this is set to overlay, the dark areas in the filter have made those parts of the photo darker, while the light areas of the filter have made the photo lighter. Here's the before and after of that before, after. And really, that's all sharpening is. It just makes dark areas darker and bright areas brighter. But sharpening is special because it doesn't darken all dark areas, and it doesn't brighten all bright areas. Instead, it looks for edges. Edges are parts of the photo that transition from dark to light or light to dark. For example, think of someone with a dark shirt in front of a light background. The area that transitions between the dark shirt and the light background is an edge that the sharpening will add contrast to. So the shirt would become darker and the background would become brighter. But when sharpening, you usually want to sharpen something with small edges. For example, a common thing to sharpen would be dark eyelashes. On the edge of an eyelash, there's a transition between light and dark. When sharpening, that's an edge that would have some extra contrast added to it. And the best part of sharpening is that you get to decide how big the edges should be. Using a large radius we look for large areas of light and dark like different colored stripes in the tiger's fur, but using a small radius will add contrast to small edges in a photo like tiny eyelashes or individual pieces of fur. Usually, it's best to use a small radius, like something around one to three pixels. Okay, now let's come back into affinity to see how this works in practice. First, I'm going to turn the blend mode back to normal. Then I'm going to make the radius smaller. Now we can only see the faint edges of the tiger's fur. Most of the filter is still 50% gray. What you can see really is just the smallest of differences between dark areas and lighter areas. As an example, let's look at this area right here. We have a light fur and then a dark spot right next to it. You can see if I turn the filter off that this perfectly corresponds with the photos light and dark areas. Now, if we turn on overlay, you'll be able to see that that area becomes lighter and darker along the edge. So here's the before and after adding more sharpness and contrast to that small area. And now we can go ahead and zoom out and see the before and after. It can be hard to see zoomed out like this. So if you do want a stronger effect, you can go ahead and duplicate the high pass filter a few times until you get the look that you want. I'll just hold Shift to select all of these layers, so we can see a complete before and after you might be wondering why you would duplicate the filter instead of just using a larger radius. And that's a really good question. When we duplicate the small radius filter, the small areas get sharper. This tends to make the details of the photo look really nice. In this case, I duplicated it a little bit too much, just so it's easy to see in the video. But you can see that the individual pieces of fur are nicely defined here. Now, if we raise the radius really high instead, then the large areas would get sharpened, something like this. This definitely has added more contrast into our photo, but the fur is not well defined. It looks a little bit strange when you compare it to how nice the photo looked with defined fur. So that's why I suggest you keep the radius nice and low and then just duplicate it over and over until you have the sharpness that you want. Okay. Now let's see another example of sharpening. This time, we'll do it on a portrait photo. To start, we can go ahead and apply the high pass filter. Then as a first step, I always like to turn on monochrome just so that the colors don't have weird contrast being added to them. And then we can go ahead and raise the radius. You can see that only the small details in this photo, the small pieces of her hair, and details around her eyes will have contrast added to them. This time, instead of overlay, I'm going to use soft light. I actually prefer the softer appearance of soft light when I'm doing sharpening. So I tend to use soft light instead of overlay, but feel free to try either one. Alright. With that done, I'm just going to duplicate this filter a few times. And now we can go ahead and zoom in and take a look at the difference. I'll hold Shift to select all of these layers. And now we can see the before and after. I think this filter looks really nice to give her eyes more detail, but I don't really like how her skin and hair look. This is a really easy fix, so let's go ahead and do that. First, with all of these still selected, I'm going to click and drag them above our photo layer. Then I'll press Command or Control G to group them. With all of these filters in a group, I'm going to add a mask to the whole group. That way we can paint the filter just over the areas where we want it. Right now the filters are still being applied to our whole photo. I'm going to invert this with Command or Control I now the filters aren't being applied to the photo at all, and we can just grab the paint brush and paint in white paint to reveal the sharpness just over the areas where we want it. So I'll just grab some white paint. I'll lower my flow so I can softly paint this on. And then we can go ahead and paint this over her eyebrows and her eyes. Although I tend to avoid the whites of her eyes, you can see that's created some strange speckling. So I'm just going to grab some black paint to remove it from those areas. Now, right now, I think the filter is a little bit too strong, but it is helping me to see where I'm painting, so I'll lower it later. So now that it's painted over her eyes and her eyebrows, I think this does give them some nice pop, and you can see the before and after. But I think I'll select the whole group and lower its opacity to make this less intense. Or we could always just delete a few of these high pass filters. Either way, it's the same thing. Sometimes you want to sharpen a whole photo like with the tiger photo and other times you might just want to sharpen a specific part of the photo like someone's eyes. Now you know how to sharpen a photo. In the next video, we're going to learn about a really fun technique called dodge and burn. 12. Dodge & Burn : In this video, we're going to learn how to dodge and burn a photo. For those who don't know, dodge and burn is just a fancy term that photographers use for brightening and darkening a photo. Dodging a photo means you're brightening it, and burning a photo means you're darkening it like burning a piece of toast. But don't worry. This technique is actually really easy, and it's one of my favorite ways to enhance the lighting of an image. To start with this technique, add a new pixel layer to your image. Just to see how this works, I'm going to start by making some extreme edits. Go ahead and grab the paintbrush tool. Then you can go ahead and paint with white and black paint to brighten or darken different areas. I'm just going to paint over the waterfall. Then using black paint, I'll darken all around it. Now that we've done our painting, we can set our pixel layer to the overlay blend mode to blend this white and black paint into our image. Now this is pretty extreme so we can lower the opacity. And now with the before and after, you can see how this has shaped the light of the image, drawing more attention to the bright waterfall by darkening everything around it. Now, we should probably be a little more precise with our paint job if we want to do this for real. So I'm just going to delete this pixel layer and I'll add a new one. And we can begin by already having this pixel layer set to overlay. So as we're painting, we can just see this a little bit better. And I also like to paint with a lower flow. That way, all of this light that we're painting on our photo can be nice and subtle. I'm also going to use X on my keyboard to switch between black and white paint. So if you push X, you can see those colors switch and press it again to switch them back. That way, we can just quickly paint this on. So again, I'm going to brighten up the waterfall, and I think I'll also brighten up our subject by painting white over our subject. Then I'll press X to switch to black so I can darken around the waterfall. Can even add more darkness to the waterfall. By painting where you see little dark spots. All right. Now with all of that painting done, you can see the before and after. Dodging and burning is so fun. Feel free to play around with it on this photo and your own photos. I really love this technique for enhancing the lighting, and now that you know how to dodge and burn, we can go ahead and move on to the next video where we'll learn how to create a vintage effect. 13. Vintage Effect : Let's learn how to add a vintage effect to any photo. To create this effect, we're going to use some free overlays from online. To find these overlays, open the free resources PDF that's included in the course exercise files. Then you can click on the Vintage Overlays Link. This link will take you to this page. From here, scroll down a little ways until you find a big button that says, download my free vintage photo texture overlays. Go ahead and click on that button. This will pop up asking if you want to download all of the free resources, say, no, thanks, and now you should have a folder downloading. Okay, that took a little while, but once it finishes downloading, just unzip the file. And now you should have a folder full of these beautiful vintage overlays. After you've done all that, go ahead and come back to Affinity Photo. Now we can go ahead and download one of those vintage overlays to this photo. So I'll just use the Place Image tool. And I'm going to use the first one for this effect. I'll click and drag to add this to the image. And you can go ahead and feel free to adjust this however you want. You can also squish this a little bit if you want to keep the edges in this. And with that all set up, now we can go ahead and use the overlay blend mode, just like adding the texture in a previous video, Olay works perfect for textures. Now, obviously this needs a little bit of adjustment to make this look more vintage. So let's start by removing the color. I'll go to our adjustments and I'll apply an HSL adjustment. I'll lower the saturation all the way. That looks pretty good. Now to add a little bit of yellow tinting, we can use the white balance adjustment. I'm just going to increase this slider a little bit to add that vintage look. That looks great. Now that the colors are better, I don't really like how dark this overlay blend mode is making the temple look. So I'm going to click on our vintage layer, and I'm going to add a mask to it. Then I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool and I'm going to paint in black paint with a low flow just to remove a little bit of the texture on the temple. That way, it doesn't look quite so dark. Okay, this already looks better. Here's the before and after, brightening up a few areas. And now that I've seen the temple looking brighter, I think I want the whole thing to be brighter. I'm going to click on our top layer, and I'm just going to add a curves adjustment to brighten everything up. I'll click and drag on the center of the curve to bring that up. Then I'm just going to invert this layer with command or Control I, that's being applied to nothing. Then I can grab white paint and paint this only over the temple to brighten it up. Now, I'm painting with a pretty low flow. You can always raise this to speed up the process. As I was painting, I accidentally brightened this area and now it looks too bright. I'll just take black paint and paint over that to darken it again. Now you can see the before and after of brightening up the temple. As one last finishing touch, old photos usually have less contrast because they're a little bit faded. To create that effect, we can use the curves adjustment again. This time, I'm going to lower the white point right here, bringing this down. This will make the highlights darker. And I'll also raise this side, making the shadows lighter. I don't want the shadows to become too light. I'm going to click about here and I'll bring this down a little bit. But you can see how this has faded our photo quite a bit. Here's the before and after of that. Now I'll just hold Shift and click to select all of our layers so that we can see the complete before and after. This effect is so cool. I think this looks amazing. Now that you know how to create a vintage effect in the next video, we'll explore the soft glow effect. 14. Soft Glow Effect : In this video, we'll learn how to create a soft glow effect. This effect is really pretty. I'm excited to show it to you. The first step to creating this effect is duplicating your layer. So go ahead and press Command or Control J. Photos with a soft glow are very bright. So to make this effect, we can combine the brightness from both copies of the photo. To do that, I'll use the screen blend mode on this duplicate layer. Here's the before and after. But to make this the soft glow effect, we can't just make the photo brighter. We also need to make it look a little bit fuzzy. So to do this, we need to blur this brightening layer. Go ahead and go down to the filters and then select the Gaussian blur filter, which is the one at the top. From here, go ahead and raise the radius. This is a little too strong. Maybe something around here. That looks pretty good. I'll close out of this. And now we can see the before and after of blurring that layer. This looks really good so far. Now, adding a soft glow might make your shadows look a little too bright. So to fix this, we can go ahead and add another layer. I'll just go to our adjustments and I'll apply a curves adjustment to fix the shadows, all we need to do is darken the black point by bringing this over. So you can see what that's doing. If you want, we can brighten the whole thing a little bit just to make sure everything stays nice and bright. I think that helped our shadows quite a bit. Here's the before and after. And now I can just select both of these layers, so we can see the complete before and after of the soft glow effect. As a tip for you when you're creating this effect, I find that this looks great on photos that are taken outside on a sunny day. If your photo already has nice bright spots like this, I think it really helps to sell the effect. All right, with that finished, we can go ahead and move on to the next video where we'll learn about the double exposure effect. 15. Double Exposure : This video, we'll learn how to create the double exposure effect. This effect uses blend modes to combine multiple images. I'll just grab the Place Image tool so we can add our second image on top of our first one. Now, back in the olden days, double exposures were made on film cameras. The photographer would take a photo and then instead of advancing to the next frame of film, they would take another photo on the same frame. This would combine the light from both images onto a single frame of film, allowing multiple photos to be combined together. Now in affinity, we can create this effect by using blend modes to combine the light from two images and to combine light from multiple layers. We already know what blend mode to use screen. So with this top layer selected, I'll change its blend mode to screen. Now only the light parts of this image are being revealed on top of our photo, so we can see our subject through it. And with that all set up, now we can go ahead and adjust this however we'd like. I think that looks pretty good. Now you can see the before and after of this double exposure Now I want to share a little tip with you. You can actually change how these layers blend together by using a curves adjustment on the blend layer, just like how we did with the birds earlier in the course. So to change the lighting, I'm going to add a curves adjustment, and then I'll click and drag this on top of our blend layer to make it a child layer. Now this is only affecting our top layer. Because only the light parts of this top image are being revealed, if we make this layer darker, then even less of it will be revealed. So you can see, as I drag this down, you can see our model even more clearly before she had more of a haze on top of her, but as I lower this down, you can see more of our model's face. And you can darken other parts of the image, too. If you want to darken the black point, this will also affect the image, making less of it visible. And you can also darken the white point. This makes the highlights darker, which is pretty nice if you want this to be very subtle. So now we can see the before and after of that curves adjustment. We can see a lot more of our model, but it's still a very nice double exposure. Okay, so now that you know how to adjust your top layer, I want to share a few tips with you on how to pick the right photo for double exposures. So to see this better, I'm just going to turn off curves, and I'll change this back to the normal blend mode. When you're doing double exposure, it's important to remember that only the bright areas of your blend photo will be kept while dark areas will become less visible. This will allow your base layer to be seen. So in this photo, only the bright areas of this plant and this table and this sheet will be kept. While the dark background will be removed. And when we turned on curves, that background became so dark that the model became much more visible. So when picking a photo for double exposure, it's important to look for photos that have interesting light areas, but also have a lot of dark areas where your subject can show through. Now that you know how to do this double exposure effect, we're ready to move on to the next video where we'll learn how to add film grain into your photos. 16. Film Grain : This video, I'll show you how to add film grain to a photo. To do this, we're going to use some free overlays from online. To find the overlays, you can open up the free resources PDF that's included in the course exercise files. Then you can just click on the film grain ink. The link will take you to this page from here, go ahead and scroll down a little ways and then click on this Google Drive Link. Then click the Download button. After it finishes downloading, remember to unzip the file, and then you'll have a folder of free overlays, which we'll be using to add film grain. Okay, so after you've done all that, go ahead and come back to Affinity Photo. Now that we've downloaded the overlays, we can add one to this photo. I'm going to use texture nine, this one right here, and then I'll place it on top of our image. Now, we need to decide which blend mode we want to use. I want to take advantage of the light and the dark areas. So I'm going to use the overlay blend mode. That actually seems a little bit strong. So maybe we should try soft light. I think this gentler appearance looks a lot better for this photo. Here's the before and after. And we can add more than one film grain overlay. So I'm going to go back to the Place Image tool, and I'm going to add the first one For this overlay, I want to keep the white speckles that are on here, but I want to get rid of all of the dark areas. This time, I'm going to use the screen blend mode. Alright, that looks really good. So now you can see the before and after of adding those speckles. And I'll just hold Shift to select both of these so that you can see the complete before and after. Adding film grain overlays is a really fun way to make your photos look a little more interesting and old. In the next video, we're going to do another fun effect called a light leak. 17. Light Leaks : Let's learn how to add light leaks. Light leaks are originally from the days of film photography, and they happened when the film was unintentionally exposed to light. But nowadays, they're just a fun way to add extra color and light in your photos. To begin, let's download some free light leak overlays. You can find a link to this page in the free resources PDF that's included in the course exercise files. From here, you just need to scroll down a little ways. And then click on the button that says download my free Light leaks photo overlays. This will download a zip file onto your computer and after you've unzipped it, you can come back in to Affinity Photo. Now that we've downloaded the Light leaks, we can add one into this photo. I'll use the Place Image tool, and I'm just going to select the first one. Then we can go ahead and place this on top of our image. I want to remove the black background from this overlay and combine the light from the light leak. So to do this, I'm going to use the screen blend mode. Alright, that looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. And we can go ahead and add as many of these light leaks as we want. So I'm going to add one more. This time, I'll use this one right here. And then I'll just place it on the bottom so that the bottom has a little bit of color as well. And then I'll change this to the screen blend mode. That the left side is fully covered in this color. I think this looks really nice. Here's the before and after. This looks pretty good, but light leaks look much better when you add other adjustment layers to help sell the effect. Since light leaks are originally from film photography, let's try to make this photo look older. It looks like it was taken on a film camera. First, I'm going to decrease the photos contrast, which is typical for photos as they age. To do that, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. Then I'm going to darken the white point, which will make all of the highlights a little darker and then I'll lighten the black point to make the shadows more gray. Then I think I'm just going to add a little bit of brightness overall like that. That way, the photo still looks nice. Now, this curve can be placed above or below the light leaks depending on what you like. Another thing that can happen over time is discoloration. The white balance adjustment is a great way to add subtle tints of color. So for this one, I'm going to add a little bit of yellow orange and a little bit of green. And here is the before and after of that discoloration. And another fun thing we can do is we can actually add some texture. We can use film grain, as we learned about in the last video. For the film grain, I'm going to use number seven right here. Then I'll click and drag to apply this to the whole photo. Now I want to remove the white background and keep the dark speckles. This time, I need to use multiply. With that, now I'll just select all of our layers so we can see a complete before and after. This photo looks so cool. I really like how this effect turned out. Now in the next video, we'll learn about how to add even more light to our photos by adding fireworks. So 18. Fireworks : This video, we'll learn how to add fireworks to any photo. To begin, let's download some free firework overlays. You can find a link to this page in the free resources PDF that's included in the courses exercise files. From here, all you need to do is click Free Download. This will download a zip file to your computer. After you've unzipped it, you can go ahead and come back to Affinity Photo. Now that we've downloaded the firework overlays, we can add some to this photo. I'll select the Place Image tool, and then I'm going to select three different fireworks. I'll choose number eight. Then I'll hold Command or Control, so I can click on number 18 as well. Then I'll go down to 35. Command or Control and click. All three of those should now be selected, and we can go ahead and open them up. Now I'll just click and drag to add these into our image. So for each of these fireworks, we want to keep the bright colorful firework, but remove the black background. So screen is the blend mode that we want to use. I'll hold Shift to select all three fireworks, and then I'll change the blend mode to screen. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now I'm just going to adjust where they're placed. This is looking pretty good so far, but the fireworks look like they're a little bit too in focus. They should be a little bit farther away. So let's blur them. In the soft glow effect video, we blurred a photo using the Gaussian blur filter, and that's a totally fine way to blur photos. But I just want to show you another way. I'm going to select all of these again by holding Shift and clicking. Then I'm going to click down here where it says FX. Now we can affect all of these layers at the same time by adding a Gaussian blur. I'll just check that on and then I'll increase the radius. Now you can see the before and after of that blur effect. Using layer effects is so nice because you can affect all of these layers at the same time. Another thing we need to fix about this photo is that the fireworks are overlapping with the gas station, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So we need to add masks to remove them from the gas station. I think this pinkish red one is fine, but let's go ahead and add a mask to this copper colored one. Then I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll paint in black paint to remove these parts that are overlapping. I think I'll increase my flow just to make this faster. Okay. With that looking better, I'll do the green one next. So I'll select its layer. I'll add a mask, and then I'll paint in black paint to remove it. Okay. Now let's add just a few finishing touches. First, I want the fireworks to look even brighter. I'm going to select all of their layers and then I'll press Command or Control G to group them. Then I'm going to duplicate the entire group with Command or Control J. They look a lot brighter now. We can go ahead and lower the opacity a little just so they don't look too bright. But you can see how this has brightened them up and they look a lot more bold. Another thing we can do to make this look more realistic is we can add some light reflecting on the surface down here from the fireworks. To do this, I'm going to add a new pixel layer to our image. Then I'm going to sample and paint the colors of the fireworks down here. To sample these colors, I'm just going to make my paint brush a little bit smaller. Then I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll click to sample one of the colors. With a larger brush, I'm just going to paint this down here. And then I'll do the same thing with the other fireworks using a smaller brush, holding Alt or option and clicking to get the color. And then with a larger brush, I'll just paint that color in down here. With those colors in place, now we can go ahead and blur the colors with the layer effects. I'll click here and I'm just going to add a Gaussian blur again. As I bring this up, you can see that does blur the colors, but not enough. I'm going to click in the box and then type in 500. I'm also going to check on preserve Alpha so that the colors keep going all the way to the edge. There we go. To help this painting blend in better with our background, maybe changing the blend mode would help. Because I want to keep the light from these colors, I'll change the blend mode to screen. That didn't do much. That's because the original photo is pure black screen doesn't look any different than having no blend mode applied. Screen would normally work for this, keeping the bright colors and blending it into the layer below. But when working with a pure black area, we really just need to lower the opacity. And now you can see the before and after of adding those colors. All right. And with that, we are done with our fireworks. Here's the complete before and after. Now, you know how to add fireworks to any image. In the next video, we'll learn how to add snow to any image. 19. Snow : Let's learn how to add snow to a photo. To begin, let's download some free snow overlays. You can find a link to this page in the free resources PDF from here, go ahead and scroll down and then click on where it says Free Download. This button will download a zip file to your computer. After you've unzipped it, go ahead and come back into Affinity Photo. Now that we've downloaded the Snow overlays, we can add one to this photo. I'll use the Place Image tool, and this folder comes with so many beautiful snow photos. But for this one, I decided to go with number 21. I'll just click and drag to fit this to the image. We're going to make more snow in a minute. But for now, let's just keep it sized to the width of the photo. Because I want to keep the white snow but remove the black background, I'm going to use the screen blend mode. This already looks really good, but there's a few things we can do to refine our snow. First, I'm going to blur the snow just so it looks a little softer. I'll go to the FX. I'll click on Gaussian blur and I'll raise the radius. It's a good idea to blur the snow because right now in this picture, the house and the people are in focus, it makes sense for the snow to be out of focus. And now that our snow looks nice and soft, we can go ahead and duplicate it to cover the whole document. I'll just press Command or Control J to duplicate it, and then we can go ahead and move this around. I'll start by raising this copy up like this. Then I'm going to press Command or Control J again. Now, duplicating a layer that you just duplicated and moved will move your next layer that you duplicate. It's a funny feature of affinity that is sometimes useful. But if your layer jumps, just know that's why it did it. I'm just going to place this one down here. And now we have snow covering the entire photo. Now that we have a beautiful base layer of snow, I actually want to add a little bit more snow. So I'll select the Place Image tool. And this time, I'm going to select number seven. I'm going to make this one a little bit larger, so our snow has a variation in size. These bigger clumps of snow will look more like they're closer to the camera. I'm just going to set this to the screen blend mode. Then to make this look like it's falling snow, I'm going to use a blur. Let's go to our filters, and this time, I'm going to select the motion blur filter. This will add a unique blur to make the snow look like it's moving. I'm just going to raise the radius. And then I'm going to change the rotation just so it looks like it's falling downward. And now you can see what a difference this has made, adding that motion blur. Here's the before and after. I'm just going to select this layer and I'll duplicate it with Command or Control J, just so the bottom part of our photo can have some snow as well. And now I'm just going to select all of our snow layers by holding shift and clicking. I'm going to group these with Command or Control G. We can go ahead and select the entire group and move it around as we'd like. Maybe the snow is covering the people in a bad way, so you want to clear some space for their heads. But if moving it around isn't solving the problem, we can always add a mask to this group to remove the snow off of the people. So I'll just add a mask. Then I'll select the paint brush, and I'm going to increase the flow to 100%. With snow, it looks better to fully remove it. If you only partially remove it, it can look a little strange. So I'm just going to paint this off of our people. It's okay if the people have some snow on them. I just want to make sure that they look fully clear in this picture. Alright, this looks so nice. With all of that finished, now we can go ahead and see the complete before and after. Adding snow just makes this picture look so magical. Now that we know how to add snow in the next video, we're going to learn how to add stars to the sky. 20. Stars : This video, we'll learn how to add stars to a photo. To practice, this time, we're going to use a photo that's included in the courses exercise files. Let's go ahead and use the Place Image tool to select the star photo. Then we can go ahead and place the stars into our photo. For the stars, we want to keep the bright white spots but remove their dark background. I'm going to use the screen blend mode. This already looks so good, but we need to do a little bit of cleanup. First, let's remove the stars that are overlapping with the mountain. I'll add a mask. Then using the paint brush, I'm just going to paint to remove these stars. Another thing we can do to clean up the photo is removing the color from the star photo. The star photo has a little blue spot over here, as well as just adding some other colors into the photo. In order to keep the original color of the sky, all we need to do is add an HSL adjustment make this a child layer to the stars and then lower the saturation, and that's it. Easy as that. Now, you can see the before and after, just so we can keep the original color of our sky. Another thing we can do is we can add more stars into the sky to do this. Let's just select our star photo and then press Command or Control J to duplicate it. By duplicating these stars, they look so much brighter. If that's the look you want, then you can just duplicate it. But I actually don't want the stars to overlap like this. I'm actually going to use the move tool, all right click and then go down to transform, flip horizontal. This will flip the stars. Now you can see they're not overlapping the same way. Now that I flipped this, you can see some stars are overlapping with our mountain again. I'm actually just going to delete this mask. And I'll add a new one. That way we can make sure all of the stars are fully removed. I'll just quickly grab the paint brush and I'll paint in black to remove these stars. It looks like I painted a little bit too much right here because you can't see any of these misty stars. I'm just going to switch my color to white to add that back in. With that, you can see what it looks like now that we've doubled the amount of stars. So pretty. Now I'll just select both of these layers. You can see the complete before and after. In some of these star photos, you might want to make a selection of the sky and completely replace it with a different one. But by keeping the original sky and just adding to it, we can keep the photo looking a little bit more realistic than a full sky replacement. And now you know how to add stars to a photo. In the next video, we'll learn about adding fog. 21. Fog : This video, we'll learn how to add fog to a photo. To begin, we'll download some free fog overlays. You can find the link to this page in the free resources PDF that's included in the course exercise files. From here, just click on Download now. Then you can go ahead and click Proceed to checkout. Here, you'll just need to enter your name and your email address, and then you can click Place Order. Even though this is totally free, the website will still send you a purchase email, and I know these freebies are a little annoying to download compared to the other freebies in the course, but these ones are the best fog overlays that I could find. I think it's worth it. Just so you know, this website will try to send you marketing emails after you make an account, but there's an unsubscribed button at the bottom of their emails, so it's really not a huge issue. Okay, now let's come back into Affinity Photo. Now that we have the fog overlays, we can add one into our image. I'll press the Place Image tool, and then I'm going to use number 19. You can probably guess which blend mode we're going to use because we want to keep the bright fog but remove the black background. So let's go ahead and apply screen. And just like that, we've added some beautiful fog. Let's go ahead and add a little bit more with the Place Image tool. I'm going to scroll down, and I'm going to select number 214 Once again, I'll change the blend mode to screen. And now you can see this looks a lot stronger, but it's sort of a different type of fog. So I thought it would be fun to have two types of fog. So because this is a little bit strong, I want to show you a little trick you can use to reduce how strong the fog is. I want to keep some strong fog at the bottom of the photo, but have less at the top, where you can see our bird's head. So I'm going to add a mask. Then I'm going to grab the gradient tool, and since I want the fog to stay on the top, I'm going to click from the bottom up. Where the mask is white, the fog is still fully visible and where it's black, the fog is removed. Now we can see the before and after of this additional fog. I think this looks really nice, but I'm going to lower the opacity of our first fog just to make it look more realistic. To finish, I want to really sell this effect by lowering the photos highlights since a foggy morning like this would have dull highlights. I'm going to select our background layer and I'll place a curves adjustment on top of that. Then I'm just going to lower this so the highlights get darker. I'm going to bring this back up to meet the curve line. Now you can see the before and after. It's made our bird a little bit more dull and I think it fits the picture better. Another thing we can add is a little bit of blue because this is a cooler foggy morning. I'm going to add a white balance adjustment. Then I'm going to lower this slider to add some blue. You can place this where it is, or you can bring it to the top if you want the whole photo to become more blue. I think this looks pretty nice. Here's the before and after. And now I'll just select all of our layers so that we can see a complete before and after. What a beautiful, mystical, foggy picture. Now that we know how to do this, in the next video, we'll learn how to add light rays to a photo. 22. Light Rays : Let's learn how to add light rays to a photo. To begin, let's download some free light rays. You can find a link to this page in the free resources PDF. Once you're here, go ahead and scroll down a little ways, and then you can go ahead and click here on this first download link. This will download a zip file onto your computer after you've unzipped it. Go ahead and come back into Affinity Photo. Now that we've downloaded the light rays, let's add one to this photo. I'll go to the Place Image tool and I'm going to choose number ten. I'll just place this into our image. Then we can change the blend mode and you guessed it, we're going to use scream. All right. Now it's time to adjust these light rays in the original photo. You can see we have a light source over here. It's very bright and it's going in this direction. For these light rays, I need to flip them around. A quick way to do this is just to right click and then go down to transform, flip horizontal. Now the light is streaming in the right direction, but I think I want to tilt it a little bit by rotating it. There we go. Now that angle looks right. Now, the light wouldn't be overlapping with this tree right here because this tree is more in the foreground. I'm going to add a mask to the light ray layer. Then I'm going to grab the paint brush and we can go ahead and paint away this light from the tree trunk. I want it fully removed, so I'm just going to paint carefully right along the edge to remove it. That's much better. Next, I want to recolor the light rays. The original light in this photo had a more golden hue. So to fix the light rays and make them more golden, I'm going to use the recolor adjustment. I'll make this a child layer to the light rays. Now you can see it's only affecting the light rays. I'm just going to change the hue to a more golden color. Beautiful, and then I'll lower the saturation so it's not so bright. This looks really pretty. Here's the before and after of that adjustment. So much better. Now, to really sell the effect, we can also make some parts of the photo darker. For example, if light is coming from behind this tree, then this tree should look a lot darker. I'm going to add a curves adjustment. I'll make sure it's not a child's layer. There we go. Then I'm just going to darken this. To make this so it's only applied to the tree. I'm going to invert this layer with Command or Control I. Then using the paintbrush, I'll paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal this darkness over the tree. You can also add a little bit on this side if you'd like. I think that looks pretty nice. For some extra fun, we can add a little bit of fog to this photo. I'll go to the Place Image tool and we can go ahead and select one of the fogs. I'm going to use number eight to apply fog just to the bottom of our picture. Then I'm going to change the blend mode to screen. And I'll go ahead and lower the opacity, so this is a very subtle effect. Now, right now, this fog is white, but I wanted to have the same yellow color that we just gave our light rays. So I'll go into the fog group. I'll select this recolor adjustment, and I'll duplicate it with Command or Control J then I'm going to take this free color adjustment and make it a child layer to the fog. The fog has more of a golden color. As just one finishing touch, I'm going to add a curves adjustment, and I'm going to make the shadows deeper overall. With all of this added light, the shadows are getting pretty light, but by darkening this, you can add some much needed contrast to the photo. I'm darkening the shadows and then bringing the highlights back up to meet the curve. I think this looks really nice. So now you can see the before and after of those darker shadows, and I'm just going to select all of our layers. So you can see a complete before and after. We took this nice normal forest photo and made it super magical. I think this looks great. In the next video, we're going to learn how to make sun bursts, which sounds similar to light rays, but it's actually even easier and it's just a different effect. I'll see you in the next video. 23. Making Sunbursts : This video we'll learn how to make sunbursts. Now, unlike the light rays in the last video, we can actually make sunbursts completely affinity photo. No overlays needed. To make a sunburst, let's go ahead and start by selecting the Ellipse tool. If you don't see it here, just click on this little gray triangle and then you can go ahead and select it. I'll hold Shift as I click and drag to create a perfect circle. Now to get the colors of the sun but right, I'm going to select the gradient tool and I'm going to go to the center of the circle and click outward. Then we can go ahead and change the colors. So I want it to be white in the center and go out to an orange color. So with this black color stop selected, I'm just going to change this color to orange. Also, I want the orange to go all the way around the circle, not just in one direction. We can go ahead and go up here to type and change this to radio. Perfect. With that all setup, we can go ahead and change the blend mode to screen. Now you can see this ball of light is brightening everything that's underneath it. To blend this even better with our photo, we can blur this ball of light. You can go ahead and go to FX, or you can go to the filters and apply a Gaussian blur. Either way works just fine. But I'm just going to click on the FX for this one. Then I'll click on Gaussian Blur, and we can go ahead and increase this. This is pretty good, but not quite enough. So I'll click in this box and type in 500 pixels, and then I'll press Enter. And you can see now this is much fuzzier, and I think this looks really good. So now we can close out of this and select the move tool. We need to decide where to place this ball of light in this photo, it's hard to tell where the sun is coming from. But if you look at the picture, we know the light is coming from this top left area because the sun is shining on that side of her body. I think this building is just in the way of the sun. We can go ahead and place this ball of light right up here in the corner. I can resize it while holding Shift to make it a little larger. There we go. And now we have a nice ball of light up there. Now, this is just phase one. If you really want to enhance this golden glow, you can duplicate this sunburst circle a few times to cover the whole photo. With this layer selected, I'll duplicate it with Command or Control J. Then while holding Shift, I'm just going to make this a lot larger to cover up more of the photo. Then I'm just going to lower the opacity to make this one more subtle and we can go ahead and do that one more time. Command or Control J. I power duplicated to cover the whole photo, and that's actually what I wanted. I'll just place it so it's really covering the whole thing, and then I'll lower the opacity even more. All right. And with that, now we can go ahead and see the before and after of our sun bursts. After adding in all of that light, our photo is starting to look a little bit faded and washed out. So as one final step, I'm just going to add a curves adjustment so that I can add a little S curve to add contrast back in. Raise the highlights, lower the shadows. I think this looks really nice. Now we can go ahead and see the complete before and after. And now you know how to create your very own sun verse to create this beautiful golden light effect. In the next video, we're going to do the final effect of this chapter as we learn how to create a neon light effect. 24. Neon Light Effect : In this video, I'll show you how to make the neon light effect. Just like in the last video, we don't need any special overlays. We're going to create our neon just by using the shape tools. To begin, let's make a circle that we can use. So I'll just select the Ellipse tool. And then I'm going to click and drag out a flat circle like this. For this circle, I want it to have a white stroke going around it and no fill. So I'm going to click right here to make the fill, none, and then I'll click on the stroke color, and I'll make it white. Then we can go ahead and increase the stroke up here in the Context tool bar. With that all set, we can go ahead and add some layer effects to this circle. I'll go down here and click on FX. Then we can go ahead and add two different effects. First, I'm going to add an outer glow to create some fuzzy lighting around this neon circle. Let's go ahead and increase the radius to create that fuzzy lighting. I think this looks good, but I'm going to increase this to 250 and then I'll press Enter to make it extra fuzzy. Then I'm going to change the color. Here's where we get to choose what color the neon will be. Looking at this picture, I can see we have a lot of orange colors in the background and her skin has orange tones in it. To contrast that, I'm going to look at our color wheel and go to the color orange and then go straight across from that to choose the neon color. You can use the color wheel in this way, going to the opposite colors anytime you want to add extra contrast. I'm just going to drag this around to create that blue color. Luckily for us, by default, the outer glow effect uses the screen blend mode, which looks really good for brightening everything up in this outer glow. The second layer effect I want to add is just a little bit of blurring. The circle looks very sharp right now, but if we blur it just a little bit, I think it will look more fuzzy and natural. Okay, with that finished, we can go ahead and use the move tool to adjust how our circle is positioned. I'm going to tilt mine just to make it a little fun and I'll bring it up a little bit. Okay, now that we have our circle all set up, we can go ahead and mask the circle right here to remove it from overlapping her head. I'll just click on the mask button, and then we can go ahead and paint to remove this. I'm going to change my color to black, and then we can go ahead and zoom in and paint. Right now, my flow is a little low. I'm just going to increase that all the way. And with the edges looking good, I'll just use a larger brush to remove the rest. Now that the neon circle is looking great, it's time to add some light reflected onto our model. But before we carefully paint on light and color, I want to see what blend mode we should use. So just to experiment, I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to choose a blue paint color. And I'll just roughly paint this over her face. Now we can take a look at the different blend modes to see which one we should use. If we use multiply, that looks way too dark. It's not reflecting some nice bright light, so that one doesn't work. If we use screen, it is reflecting a lot of light, but we're losing a lot of her features underneath. Overlay is probably the best so far, but it still looks pretty dark. So I think I'm actually going to use soft light. You can see that this has the blue light on her face, but we can still see some brightness and we can see her orange skin tone coming through. So now that we have that setup, I'm just going to delete this pixel layer and I'll add a new one, and then I'll set it to soft light. So now, as I paint, we'll add blue color onto her face, and I'm just going to lower the flow. That way, I can gradually add this color. So first, I'll just do an even wash of this color over her face. Then with a smaller brush, I'm just going to add extra onto one side. Then I'm going to add this onto her shirt as well with a larger brush and then with a smaller brush, I'm just going to add this to some of the lighter areas. By adding this color, especially to the lighter areas, I think this just makes it look really nice. Now that she has the right colors, it's time to add a little bit more light to our model. I'm going to add a curves adjustment, and I'm going to brighten this up. I'll just invert this layer with Command or Control I and then using white paint, I'm going to add this brightness onto our model. So first, I'm just going to take a larger brush to add a little bit more light to our model in general. Remember to use a low flow for this. We don't want her to become really, really bright, but just a little added brightness will look good. And then with a smaller brush, I'm going to enhance some of the highlights that our model naturally has. She naturally has more light on this part of her face. So while adjusting my brush as I go, I'm just going to brighten those areas of her face. Then I'm going to do the same for her shirt. So we already painted on these wrinkles. Now we're going to paint light on these wrinkles. So any light areas you see, just add a little extra light to them. And now that we've done that, we can see the before and after of adding this lighting. And I forgot to show you, but here's the before and after of the color. These have both made such a big difference to make it look like she's really in this picture with the neon around her. So to finish this effect, I actually want to darken everything around our model to make her stand out even more. So I'm just going to add a curves adjustment, and I'll make this nice and dark. I'll invert this with Command or Control I. And then I'm going to use a larger brush to paint this around the edges of our photo. And now here's the photo with that darker ambience. I think this looks really nice. I'm just going to select all of these layers so we can see the final before and after of this effect. And now you know how to create the Non Light effect. Great work with this video and with this chapter. In the next one, we're going to learn about how to use blend modes for graphic design. 25. Creative Text Ideas : This chapter, we'll learn how to use blend modes in graphic design and to start things off. We're going to learn some fun ways to enhance text with blend modes. So just to start off, I'm going to grab the artistic Text tool, and I'll click and drag to make some text. Then I'll just grab the move tool so that we can change the font. I'll change it to RL black, so it's nice and bold. Then I'll just center this in our document. Now we can change the color of our text. I'm going to use the color picker to do this. As a tip, as you click and drag on this color picker, you can actually pick any color you want. I'm going to go up here and use the magnet icon for this color red. Then I'll click here to apply it to our word. That's just a random tip. If you see a color on this screen you like, go ahead and use the color picker to capture that color. Now that we have our text, I'm going to add a rectangle to it. I'll click and drag it, so it's overlapping with half of our text, and then I'm going to change the color of this rectangle to a nice contrasting color. To make this rectangle blending with our text, we can use different blend modes for this. But what blend mode should we use? When working on photos, we used multiply, screen, and overlay. But is it still the same for graphic design? Well, yes and no. These blend modes are still very important in graphic design. But when it comes to art, things are a little bit more flexible. For a design like this, you can just scroll through these blend modes until you find one that you like. And if you want to quickly do this, there's actually a keyboard shortcut you can use. If you hold Shift and then click on the plus or the minus keys, you'll be able to quickly go through different blend modes to see which one you like. Okay, so this is one way to design your text, but we can go ahead and see another example by holding Shift to click both of these layers. Then I'm going to duplicate them with Command or Control J. I'll just move these out of the way and we can go ahead and work on this one again. Another way to play with blend modes is to make your shape a child layer to your text. Then you can go ahead and play around with this rectangle. Maybe you only want some of the letters to have this or maybe you want to fully cover a few letters like this. From here, you can go ahead and change the blend mode however you'd like. Okay. Let's do one more example. I'm just going to select this group and I'll press Command or Control J, and then I'll bring this to the bottom. Let's keep working in the center just so it's easier. With this group, I'm actually going to open it up and delete this rectangle. Then I'm going to duplicate this text with Command or Control J. For this duplicate copy, I'm going to change the color to that nice blue color. Then I'm going to change the blend mode. I think linear Bron looks pretty good for this effect. Now to play up the effect, all we need to do is press the down arrow key on our keyboard 20 times. Then we need to move it to the right 20 times. But if you want to do this faster, you can hold down Shift and then press the right arrow key to move it ten pixels at a time. All right. And now you can see what that looks like. Since we used blend modes, we can change the color of any of our layers to play up how these combinations look. So just to show you, I'm going to change the color of this one, and you can see how this changes our letters. I'll do it to this one, too, so we can see what this looks like. And now you know a few ways that you can use blend modes for text designs. In the next video, I'm going to show you great ways to add texture to your graphic designs. 26. Adding Texture : This video, I'll show you how to use texture to enhance your designs. To begin, let's download some free textures. You can find the link to this page in the free resources PDF that's included in the courses exercise files. From here, just scroll down a little ways and then click on the Download button. This button will download a zip file onto your computer and after you've unzipped it, you can go ahead and come back into Affinity Photo. Now that we've downloaded our textures, we can add one to this design. I'll go to the Place Image tool, and then I'm going to select number one I'll click and drag to add this, and I can see it's going the wrong direction. I'll hold Shift as I rotate it, and now we can go ahead and cover the whole design with this. Because I want to keep the white speckles but remove the black background, I'm going to change the blend mode to screen. I like how this texture makes our design look, but now the design is a little bit brighter than I wanted. I'm just going to go to the adjustments and apply a curves adjustment. Then I'll just darken this to make it look as dark as it originally was. All right. There we go. And now we can go ahead and see the before and after of adding texture to this design. I think adding texture is such a great way to make designs look even more interesting. Let's see another example of using texture. I'm going to select our texture layer, and then I'll press Command or Control C to copy it. I'll go to our other exercise file, and I'll press Command or Control V to paste it. Now I'm just going to rotate this, so it fits our document. So I'll hold Shift to lock it in place like that. Because this was copied from our other document, this layer is still set to the screen blend mode. I'm just going to make this a child layer to our text like this. And then I'm going to duplicate this to make the effect even stronger. So Command or Control J a couple of times. And now you can see what that looks like. To get extra fancy with our text, we can combine this with one of the techniques that we learned in the last video. I'm going to add a rectangle to this text, and I'm going to make sure this is a child layer. And then I'm just going to change the color. From here, we can go ahead and adjust where this is positioned and we can change the blend mode of this rectangle. There are some really cool ones in here. I think I'm going to go with screen this time. And now that we've chosen our blend mode, I think I'm just going to make my color a little bit more dull so you can see the text a little bit better, something like that. So that's one technique of how you can use texture with text, but I have one more texture technique that I want to show you. I'm going to press Command or Control Z until we can get back to the beginning of what our text looked like. To start this technique, I'm going to add a fill layer to our entire document. I'll go to the top of the screen to layer new fill layer. I'm going to place this layer underneath our text, and then I'm going to sample this red color and I'll apply it to our fill layer. Then I'm going to paste the texture that we had just used. It should still be in our clipboard. Press Command or Control V. Now we can go ahead and rotate and reposition this texture. As you can see, this creates kind of a cool effect where the texture is only applied to the background, so our text still stands out. Now, if you want the text to stand out a little bit better so it's easier to read, you can always change the color of our text. But what if you wanted to add the texture to the text? Well, we can go ahead and duplicate this texture layer with Command or Control J. And then we can make it a child layer to our text. But as you can see, nothing is happening. Here's the before and after, and that's because this white texture is not going to show up on white text. Instead, we can go ahead and use the multiply blend mode, and now you can see the texture. But if you want your letters to stay white, this doesn't really work. So instead, we can actually invert this layer with command or control I so now you can see the letters stay white, but the texture becomes black. That's just a little workaround if you want texture on white text like this. Now that you know a few techniques for playing with text and you know how to add texture, we're ready to start one of our final projects in the next video. 27. Project: Cool Party : Let's make an invitation for a cool party. This will be a fun way to practice blend modes and a ton of other great affinity skills. As part of the invitation, we're going to use these smoke textures from resourceboy.com. And like all of the other freebies we've used, the link to this page is in the free Resources PDF. Go ahead and download these textures, and then I'll meet you in Affinity Photo. To begin this project, I've made a document that's 2,700 pixels wide by 4,000 pixels tall. You can use whatever size document you want, but I just thought I'd tell you that's what I'll be using. To begin, let's create a really beautiful dynamic background. To start, let's add some color. I'm going to go to the top of the screen to select layer, and then I'll go down to New Fill Layer. Automatically, the gradient tool will be selected. With this, go ahead and click and drag from the top to the bottom. I'm going to leave the bottom black. I'm just going to click on this top white color stop so that I can change its color to a purple color. All right, so now we have our color set. So let's add some textures. First, I'm going to go to the Place Image tool, and I'm going to choose number 34. I mostly want the smoke to be in the purple area of our document. So I'll click and drag like this. Then to remove the black background, I'm just going to change the blend mode to screen. This already looks so nice. But I want this to be a little bit more subtle. That way the text that we add later will be very readable to help blend this into its background. First, I'm going to change the color of the smoke to a purple color. I'll go to our adjustments and I'll apply a recolor adjustment. I'll click and drag this on top of the smoke layer so that it's a child layer. Then I'll change the hue to a purple color. With that finished, next, I want to add a blur to our smoke layer. I'll make sure to have that layer selected and then I'll click on the FX. I'm just going to add a blur to this smoke, something like this. Then I'll close out of this. This is a really good start to our poster, but I think I want to add a little more texture. I'll go back to the Place Image tool. This time, I'm going to choose number 19. I'm going to add this smoke, it covers this corner up here in smoke. I'll just click and drag until there's smoke in that area. Then I'll change the blend mode to screen. Then we can go ahead and add some effects to this to make it blended. To start, let's add another recolor adjustment to this one. I'll make it a child layer to the smoke and then I'll change the hue. Next, I want to blur this smoke. And as a really fun trick, I just want to show you that you can click and drag on any layers effects and add them to another layer. Now this smoke is just as blurred as our other smoke. Okay, I just have one more texture I want to add, and that's a film grain texture. I'm going to use the first film grain texture, and then I'll press Open and I'll just add this into our document. Right now, it's being placed as a child layer to our other smoke layer. I'll just click and drag this on top of everything, and now we can adjust how this looks. Because this has a black background and I want to keep the white speckles, I'm going to change the blend mode to screen. I really like how the texture looks at the top of the design, but toward the bottom, it looks a little intense on this black background. To make this more subtle, I'm going to add a mask to this layer. Then I'm going to grab the gradient tool, and I'll just click from the top to the bottom. This has made it, so our mask is white at the top, so it's fully revealing that film grain and black at the bottom. So the film grain fully disappears. But I actually don't want it to be fully removed down here. Instead, I'm going to make sure this color stop is selected, and I'm going to change it from black to 50% gray. That way, we can see some of the film grain down here. It's just not quite as intense as it originally was. Here's the before and after of adding that gradient mask. We've come really far in our project so far. Now it's time to add some text into our document. I'm going to grab the artistic Text tool, and I'll begin by adding a little bit of text up here at the top. I'm going to type out Affinity revolution. Then with the move tool selected, I'm going to make sure we have a nice bold font. It's actually already set to the font I wanted, REL black. Then I'm just going to make this text white. And I'll make it a bit smaller. Now, these letters look pretty close together, and I'd like to fix that. An easy shortcut to fix spacing of letters is to have the move tool selected and then hold down Alt or option and then use the arrow keys to decrease or increase the spacing of the letters. All right. This looks really nice. So I'm just going to make sure this is centered in our document, and then we can go ahead and begin with our next line of text. I'll press Command or Control J to duplicate this text. Then I'll drag it down. To edit this text, I'll triple click on it, and I'm just going to type present. Then I'll select the moveTol and I'm just going to change the font to a simpler font. And I'll make sure this is nice and centered in our document. Okay, we're done with the top. So now let's add some text to the bottom. I'll duplicate this with Command or Control J, and I'll drag this toward the bottom. I'll triple click to edit the text, and I'll just type in a date for our party. Then I'll make this larger. This looks good to me in this font. I'm just going to grab the move tool and I'll press Command or Control J to duplicate this text. I'll drag it down. I'll triple click and we can just type in some more information about the party. For this text, I'm just going to grab the move tool and I'm going to unbold it just to create a little variation between the text. All right. I have one more line of text four down here. I'll press Command or Control J to duplicate this, and I'll drag it down. I'll triple click, and then I'll type in a little bit more text. I'm just going to shrink this down, so it's nice and small. And I'll place this at the bottom. All right. This all looks pretty nice. I just want to add one more detail down here. I want to add a little line going from here to here to divide these two pieces of text. We can do that using the Pen tool. So I'll select that. I'll hover right here, so it lines up with the edge of this text, and then I'll click to lay down the first point. I'll hold Shift to keep this a perfectly straight line, and I'll line it up with the end of this line of text. Over in the color panel, I'm just going to change this to white. And then we can adjust the width of our stroke in the context tool bar. With this all finished, I'm just going to grab the move tool so I can make sure everything is centered in our document. You can see this green line keeps appearing right here saying that it's centered, but this is not the center of our document. I'm wondering if it's trying to line up with some of our backgrounds down here. I'm going to hold Shift to select all of these and then I'll group them with Command or Control G. Then I'll lock them so I can't move them. Now let's see if that helped. There we go. Now it's lining up with the center of the document. Okay, I just wanted to take a little bit of time to clean up the positioning of all of the text, and now we're ready for the main event. I'm going to add the title of the party to the center of our document. I want the font of this large text to be big and bold. I'm going to use this font that we used for the beginning of our text. I'll press Command or Control J to duplicate this and I'll drag it down here. Then I'll triple click and we can go ahead and type our text. I'll grab the move tool, and I'll make this quite a bit larger. Now, this text is still spaced the way we spaced the letters up here. I actually want to fix this. So I'm going to hold Alt or option, and I'll use the left arrow key to make the text closer again. All right. This looks pretty good. I'll just duplicate this with Command or Control J. I'll drag this down here, I'll triple click, and I'll just change this so it says party. I'll use the move tool. And for this second word, I'm going to shrink it down so it fits in the width of the word cool. Alright. Now I'm going to change how the text looks. I want this to look really cool and bold. So there's a few things I want to change. First, I'm going to add a gradient to each one of these words. So I'll select the gradient tool, and I'm going to click from the top to the bottom. I'm going to keep the top white, but I'll change the bottom to a nice purple color. And I'll make it a little bit lighter. Then I'm going to do the exact same thing for this text, so I'll select its layer. And with the gradient tool, I'll go from top to bottom, changing the bottom color stop to this light purple color. It's actually been stored over here, so I can just click that now our words have the exact same gradient. Next, I'm going to hold Shift to select both of the words at the same time. Then I'm going to get out a shape tool so that I can access the stroke option up here in the Context tool bar. I'm going to change the stroke, so I'll just make this a little bit larger like that. Then I'm going to change the stroke color right here and I'll make it a little bit lighter. This stroke looks really nice on these letters. To finish off these effects, I'm going to click on the FX down here so that we can continue to make these words pop. First, I'm going to add an outer glow to these letters. I'll increase the radius. I really like that glow. Maybe I'll just make it a little bit bigger by typing a larger number and then pressing Enter. Then I'm going to change the color to purple. I don't want it to look white like this, so I'm just going to change it to a similar purple color. And I'll make it lighter. Okay, this looks a little too intense. I'm going to lower the intensity slider and the opacity slider. Okay, I think that's the look I was going for. Here's the before and after of that effect. Next, I want to add an outer shadow to our letters. Outer shadow can help separate our text from the background. So to do this, I'm just going to increase our radius. I'll raise the offset. And I'll raise the intensity. Now you can see this is more separate from the background. Here's the before and after. I think this has made the letters a lot more easy to read. Okay. And with that, we can go ahead and adjust how anything is positioned if we'd like. You can hold Shift to select multiple layers in your document and move them around. And I think this looks really great. As a finishing touch, if you click on the very top layer of your document, you can always add an HSL adjustment to the very top. Then you can change the colors however you want using the hue slider. Very nice. Here's the before and after of that change. And with that, we're done with this project. Blend modes are so great for creating dynamic and beautiful backgrounds. And with all of the textures and overlays that we've collected throughout the course, there's definitely plenty of options to find a background that works with your projects. In the next video, we're going to work on the final project of this course to make a beautiful flower shop flyer. 28. Project: Grand Opening : This video we'll make a flyer for the grand opening of a flower shop. And since we used blend modes for a cool design in the last video, I thought we'd mix it up this time and do the project in a vintage style. And for this project, we'll use these textures from resourceboy.com. Just like all of the other freebies we've used throughout this course, there's a link to this page in the free Resources PDF. Go ahead and download these textures. To begin the flyer, I've made a document that's 4,000 pixels wide by 2,700 pixels tall. You can use whatever size document you want, but that's what I'm going to use. To begin, let's work on the background of our design. I'm going to use the Place Image tool. Then I'm going to select number 16. I'll open that. I'll just zoom out so I can click and drag to add this. Then I'm going to rotate this while holding Shift. I'll line it up in one corner and I'm actually going to stretch this to fit our document like this. This is a really good base for our design. But next, I'm going to add another overlay to make this look even more vintage. If you remember from earlier in the course, we had a whole video to make a photo look vintage and we can use these same effects on this flyer. I'm going to use number four. And then I'll just click and drag to add this to our document. I'll stretch to fit this one as well because I want to keep all of the detail that we have here. Then I'm going to change the blend mode. I want to keep the dark and light parts visible. So I'm going to change this to overlay. This looks really cool, but it might be a little bit distracting for our text that we'll add later. So I'm just going to lower the opacity of this vintage overlay to make it a little softer. But you can still see some of that interesting detail coming through. Here's the before and after. All right. Now that our backgrounds all set, I want to add a few other graphic elements. This will be a flyer for a new flower shop. So I want to add some flowers to this flyer. I included the flowers that we'll be using in the course exercise files, but I also want to show you how I found the flowers. To find these flowers, I used pixabay.com. All you need to do is search for flowers, then press Enter. But you can see, as I scroll down, these are all photos. I don't actually want photos. So up here in our filters, I'm going to change it from all images to illustrations. I'm also going to change the color. I want all of these to have a transparent background, so I'll check that on and then I'll press Apply. Now as I scroll down, you can see all of these flowers have transparent backgrounds and they're only illustrations, which makes it a lot easier to find the flowers that we want. Here it is. These are the flowers that I decided to use for this project. All you need to do once you find it is click on it, and then you can download it for free. So now that we have our flowers, I'm just going to go to the Place Image tool and I'm going to select the flowers and open them up. And I'll just place them right here in our document. I want this to blend into the background. I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. Not only is it showing the background more, but it looks like it's golden and I think that looks so pretty. Now that we have that graphic detail, I want to add one more by adding a frame to this flyer. I included the frame in the exercise files, but here's how I found it. Once again, I went to pixabay.com and I just typed in Vintage frame, then press Enter. Again, make sure you change it from all images to illustrations and then change the color to have a transparent background. Now you can just scroll down to see all these beautiful vintage frames. I scrolled for quite a while until I found this frame. This is the one we ended up using, so I just clicked on it and downloaded it. So now that we know how to find the frame, we can go ahead and place it in our document. I'll just use the Place Image tool and I'll select it. Then I'll click and drag this out. I'm going to rotate this while holding Shift, so it stays nice and straight. Then I'll line it up with one corner and I'll stretch it so it fits the rest of our document. Now, this looks okay, but it's really close to the edge. I'm just going to make this smaller. Then I'm going to center it in our document. I think this spacing looks a lot nicer. Now that we have even spacing on all sides, we can go ahead and blend our frame into the background. So let's go ahead and choose a blend mode for this. Here's multiply. That looks okay. We could try screen. That definitely doesn't look good and maybe overlay. Because this design is yellow, I think the colors are making this look strange, but I did think multiply looked best, so I'll click on that one. To remove some of this strange yellow color, I'm going to add an HSL adjustment I'll make it a child layer to the frame and then we can remove the yellow color. With the yellow color removed, that's better, but now there's no color at all. To fix this, I'm going to select our frame, and I'm going to change the blend mode. Instead of multiply, I'm going to use color burn. Color burn is very similar to multiply. It just makes colors more intense. It's not as common as multiply, but in this case, I think it looks pretty nice. With that all set, I'm just going to lower the opacity of this layer until it looks similar to the flowers that we have. Okay, that looks so good. Those both look really pretty. Now it's time to add text into our document. Also like the text tool, and then I'll click and drag so we can add our first word, which is grand. With the move tool selected, I'm going to change the font to something old timey. You can use whatever font you want. Once you find your font, we can go ahead and adjust the size of this and place it then I'm just going to duplicate this with Command or Control J. I'll drag this down. I'll triple click in here and we can change this to say opening. I'm just going to shrink the size down so it matches the width of the word grand. I think that looks pretty nice. Also like the move tool and duplicate this word with Command or Control J. Then I'll move this down. I'll triple click in here and now we can type the date of the event. Also like the move tool, and this time, we can choose a simpler font. I still want it to be old timey and sort of look like a typewriter. There we go. I think this looks pretty nice. I'm just going to shrink this down. And then we can go ahead and duplicate this with Command or Control J. I'm just going to continue to do this to add a few more lines of text. And each time, I'm going to shrink it down to match the width of the line before it. Okay. With all that typed up, I'm going to select the move tool just to make sure everything's spaced out nicely. To divide this text, I'm going to add a line right here. I'll grab the pen tool. Then I'm going to line it up with the edge of the text here. I'll click, I'll hold Shift and line it up to the end of this text here. And now we have a little line to separate our text. For this line, I'll go up to adjust our stroke and I'll make this wider. Then I'm going to change it from a solid line to a dashed line. I'll come down here to change the settings. For the dash in the line, I'm going to make it a little smaller by typing 0.5, then I'll press Enter. And then I'm going to make this space of our line bigger by typing two and then pressing Enter. This looks pretty nice. I think I'm just going to increase the width a little bit more. Very nice. Alright. With all of our text added, it's time for some finishing touches. I'm just going to group all of these text layers that we just made by holding Shift and clicking on the last one. Then I'll press Command or Control G to group them. Using the Move tool, we can go ahead and move the position of this to line it up nicely. I want this space over here to be similar to the space over here. So I'll just click to select this flower and I'll move it over a little. I think that spacing looks really nice. To finish, we just need to adjust the colors. So I'll select the text group, and then we can change the color of our text. I want this to be a light brown color. I'm actually going to sample the color of our flowers. This is hard because there's a lot of colors in here. So just try your best to find a nice color for this, and we can always adjust it more. I'll click that to apply it, and then I'll make it a little darker. Okay, that looks pretty good. This text is also fully solid right now. To blend it better with the background, I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply. So now you can see the texture through the text. You can also lower the opacity to make this even more obvious. Okay, you might have noticed as I recolored our text that this line didn't get recolored. I'm just going to double click to select it. So we actually changed the fill color of everything, but the line has a stroke and no fill. So I'm just going to click on this arrow to flip the colors, and now you can see the line is the right color. To finish everything off, I'm going to select our top layer and I'm going to add a curves adjustment on top of everything. I'm going to make a little S curve to make everything pop better, and now I think we're done. Here's the before and after of that S curve. Great job on this final project. I think this turned out so cute. I'm really excited to go to this grand opening. Great job on this final project. 29. Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I know that was a lot to learn, but now you're a blend mode master. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.