Mastering Affinity Photo 17 Tips & Tricks

1. Intro: Hey guys, in this class I'm going to share with you 17 useful tips and tricks to enhance your workflow in affinity photo version two. Over the last three years, I've been posting hundreds of tutorials for affinitive photo. In this class I will condense that. I will take the best parts and put them into one online class. I have prepared a workbook for you, so there will be outboard for each trick. For each hack, I will ask you to download my files and practice with me. This way, you can try it straight away after you watch the video and you can memorize it in case you try it and something is not right. You can rewatch that video or even ask me a question straight away. All right? So that's the plan. You're going to download my files and then I will show you page by page how to use those hidden tools, interesting hacks. I will show you some common tools, but I will use them in different ways that people usually don't think about that kind of case. I will also show you which tools are cross compatible that you can borrow from affinity designer or maybe affinity photo as well. I hope at the end of this class it will be way better and work way faster with your affinity photo. Let's get started. 2. Workbook: Thank you for joining this class. As the name said, it will be full of useful hacks that will enhance your workflow. To make a most of your time, I have prepared this workbook. I split it into two chapters so it will be easier to open it up on the slower computers. We're going to start with the Chapter 1.8 Artboards in that chapter. There's also chapter two, then you need to switch to the second one. We move from Alport nine to the very end to tip number 17. All right? I will also include those files that I using during those videos, the one that I'm experimenting with, showing you those tricks. I will put them at the very end in case you want to reverse engineer on stab, you like to dig deeper. You can see my files as well, but the one you're going to download below this video, they are the blank one. I didn't do them yet because that will be your part. I will show you how to do those tricks and tips and you will practice them one by one on each artboard. We will do one artboard per video together. You can get ready by zooming in. I like to zoom in comment the way that you see the first art board or the Spacebar to drag, to pan the camera around like that. We are ready to start this class. Keep in mind the structure of this online class is a bit different. I try my best to design it in a way that you can jump into any lesson in any order. Very rarely we will build at the top of the knowledge from the previous class. Think about it as 17 independent mini lessons. Don't feel discouraged if you, for example, forget to study for a week or two, doesn't matter. You don't need to remember what happened in the previous artboard to do the next tip to learn about the next thing. All right, so feel free to jump in and out. Depends on your free time and let's get started. But before that, I'm going to do a quick recap of the interface in the next video. 3. Interface: Before we dive deeper in the first tip, let's just quickly recap on the interface. As you can see here I am on the desktop version of the program. I'm using Mac. But the Windows version I'm using Mac. But the Windows version is very similar. On the left, that's our tool panel, that's the most important place. Starting from the top, there is a move tool that allows us to move different objects around. Also allow you to make basic transformations like rotation. You can pull the stretch objects, you can also move them around. There's a little trick that I'm going to show you later as well, when you can just press command to make quick duplicates of objects. That's all. With the move to keep in mind, we can quickly delete them by pressing delete on your keyboard or by undoing. Undoing is a very essential shortcut in my opinion, because very often in graphic design we experiment, we try stuff out, and we are not happy with the result. Simply undo command or control controls that on windows to undo several times. And we are back here The next tool on the list that's color picker to I can pick colors. There's also style picker as well that will pick the style of the whole layer including special effects. If you pick the color, then the color will be active over here. Next time you draw a new shape, this will be in that color. If you've got shape selected already and then you use color pickle to you will recolor that selected shape. There is a crop tool here and selection brush tool, very important one. Why selecting your pixels in your images? Because most of the time we don't want to affect the whole image. We want to select only area that we want to change the color, remove the back drop or something else. Very often we need to do some kind of selection. We can use selection, brush tool. There's also flat selection, also called Magic one selection. We got the very basic rectangular market tool. Same for the oval and our little free hand to also called lasso selection when you select the area in the free hand mode. There's also bucket tool for filling the selections of colors, gradient too. And the brush tool as well. If you click and hold, you will see there's also color replacement brush under the pixel. Keep in mind the brush come with many controls at the top so we can change the size of it, opacity, flow, and even hardness. Over here we got paint mixer brush that will be important for people that are into digital art. You want to apply colors with the brush, mix them up. There also eraser tool, not many people use Erase the tool, but there's a special Alta function called background erase the brush. It's really powerful and you cannot see it very often during tutorials. I'm going to show you that in this class, this standard do clone under brush tool. We got a little blur here if you want to blur on the small areas in painting. Brush tool, that's very powerful tool that's in our healing selection over here. And there's also some small vector section including pen to no two. We got different premade shapes and the list is quite nice. There are many premade shapes. As you can see, I got ready small screen, so I need to click arrows here at the bottom to see more tools like text. We got Warp tool and Zoom tool. I don't like a zoom with the tool. I usually zoom using common minus common. Plus I press Space bar to move myself around. At the very top we got additional tools. The highlight picture of this software personas, we've got photo persona, that's the default, but we can switch to liquefy persona, develop persona, and tone mapping persona as well. There's a final one, the export persona personas are like little interfaces, so the interface will change if I move to export persona. As you can see, my tool selection are limited. I got additional options here on the right side when I can select how I want to export my layers, my artboards, which format. I can export multiple files at the same time. I can change the size. Why exporting? All of that is here. This whole work space was created for people that intend to export their artwork, The default photo persona. It's more like a very standard tool set that you may know from different programs like for example, Game or Photoshop. That's where we're going to work most of the time in the photo persona. But keep in mind some tools may be delegated to different personas. Like for example, there's a liquefied persona when you want to use the liquefied tools. As you can see at the top, I got my snapping options on my pixels. Try to snap when there's some geometric pattern. When I'm moving this one around, they look, it's trying to snap to the center of this page. That's because I turned on snapping by pressing this little magnet icon at the top. We got some alignment options here. Below that there is our color wheel. We can decide about colors below that area. It's your layer panel, Very important section because it's very common mistake when we try to apply some files, effects, use brushes. If you are on the wrong layer you will get a different result. And it's going to be really frustrating because very often program will not communicate any errors. Because we simply painting on the layer below, we cannot see anything. That's where people get angry on the software. Always double check which layer is currently active. Also, additional studios for channels, for brushes, for stock images. Keep in mind we can control that. You can pull studios out, close them, we can turn them on and off. If you go to window, you will see which studios are on the check mark and which studios you can turn on if you need from here. We can also reset your studios to the default settings. That's what I just did, It's all reset now. I still got my colors here, layers, but there's additional section, Navigator, and transform, and history as well. History can be very helpful when you want to undo multiple steps. Take a look, we can go back in the history. Nice. All right, that's the interface of the program. Now we are ready to learn more about very useful tips and tricks that should enhance your workflow, your speed y using affinity photo. 4. Project: Project is a very important part of a skill check class for us. We got this ongoing project in form of the workbook. So there's no like one big milestone project at the end of the class. We don't need to wait until the end. We can start practicing since video one. We're going to practice page by page. As I mentioned, and as your final project, just send to me a screenshot showing your workbook, showing your work, your practice approach to this task. All right, so to do that, you can snap a screenshot of the whole chapter of your workbook. To do it on Mac, for example, I will need to press comment shift number three. I snap a screenshot. That's the shortcut for Mac Windows is even easier as a print screen button on your keyboard. Or if you are fan of one of those, like Tip for example, you really like the fact that we can use in painting, feel this was surprising and useful for you. You can share only that artboard. If you like to do that, select the artboard, be sure you completed the task correctly. In my example, I already we removed several balloons from this image. As you may remember, I'm done with this task and I'm ready to share that with community with me and other students. To do that, click file, then you can search for export option. You can export only that one artboard that you're proud of and send that as your project. Keep in mind we got ongoing project here in form of the workbook and that's what you can send at the very end in the project section. Please don't forget, keep doing. Keep working on your workbook in between videos or with video playing in the backdrop. And at the very end, send me the workbook. And this way we can close this class nicely with this practice. All right, so let's get started. 5. Artboards: When you open our workbook for the first time, you may be a bit surprised to see multiple artboards by default. You may see them all, just like that, you will have to zoom in a bit so you can see only one artboard at the time. Because we're going to do one by one in each video lesson. Each artboard is a one useful tip and the artboard is the place for you to practice with me. Let's zoom in via an ipad. That's really easy. You simply pinch your fingers on desktop version, I like to use popular shortcut command or control to zoom in. Command or control minus to zoom out. Keep in mind if after you zoom in you don't need to zoom out. Every time we can pan around. There's this little hand tool, call a view tool. We can just move around the camera, you could say. But I like to simply press and hold space bar, it will jump to that panto and you can drag yourself around the workspace. Be sure you zoom in to see only one outboard at the time. Announce the question, how I even managed to create multiple artboards in affinity photo. This tool, this feature is still missing in version 2.3 The trick was I initially create multiple artboards using different software from affinity family. I use the blue one affinity designer and create myself document with multiple pages. Then I save it and open in affinity photo. That's one of the way you can achieve this effect. If you plan to use affinity photo for more like a graphic design task, when you need multiple pages, you need to export your document as PDF of multiple pages, for example. That's the way to do it. You can simply create your project in designer first and then you can reopen that in affinity photo because the version two programs are very well compatible across the family. That's nice. What if you don't own the software right after you designer, you're just looking at the example of the file created there. By owning this workbook, you will be always able to copy and paste my artboard. Take a look, the artboard is nothing more. That's a glorify shape. We can duplicate the whole artboard as well. Let's try to do that in the layer panel, I will just try to copy and paste the whole artboard. Take a look, you got a new artboard over there, you can copy them to different documents as well or even add to your assets panel. After you've got the first artboard, it's really easy to create the next one and the next one because you can copy and paste them. You don't need to refer to affinity designer all the time. That's the trick number one. You can actually create documents with multiple pages, multiple artboards in affinity photo by using artboards from affinity designer or by using the documents that previously got artboards like this one, we can simply copy and paste them. And then you can resize them as you want because the size will be shown here in the transfer panel. Take a look at the bottom right. This is a 42907210 in millimeters. You can change that here to get a new size for your artboard. You can l have multiple artboards with multiple sizes in one document as well. All right. So keep in mind, this document is built with multiple artboards. One artboard for each trick. And you can do a similar document in affinity photo two simply start in designer and then reopen it in affinity photo to have a document with multiple pages. All right, that was our tip number one. Easy, right? Let's move to tip number two. This one will be about a background erase brush. How we see you in the next video. 6. Background Erase Brush: My second tip is on a bit undiscovered tool. Whatever you search for tutorials or the ways to erase backdrops, you will always find out a way with selection and then refining selection and stuff like that. But there's another tool that we can use. Most of curses tutorials, classes skip this tool because it's a distractive tool. The instructors usually make assumptions. I should show a better way, but we shouldn't forget about this very powerful, easy to use tool, especially for quick fixes. It's called background eraser brush. It's in front of the brush, that's why it's so accessible here. I got the image on my second artboard. I'm going to select this brush, go for the eraser tool over here. By default it's called Eras brush tool and it should erase everything that is touch. All right. Take a look. I create a big hole in my image. Below my image there's a white, white artboard. So that's what we can see below. That's not what we need. Let's I can under comment. All right, let's click and hold on this eraser tool and select the second option here, Background eraser brush tool. Good thing about erasing background is we can do it with this brush, so we can control the size of it, hardness of the brush, and all of the other properties of the regular brush tool. We don't need wet edges, for example. All right, now I got this Erase the brush tool. Let's zoom in a bit by comment. If I want to erase the backdrop around here, I simply be sure that most of the brush is pointing to the backdrop. All right, so take a look. Even though my brush is touching the bird, it's not erase. Because the brush will check where is the center of the brush? The center of the brush should touch the backdrop and not the object. We want to keep this way Very quickly, I managed to remove the color around this very detailed small object, and then I can use the larger size. And to change the size, as you can see, I can use the slider or I can use square brackets on my keyboard as well. Square brackets. Then you can keep erasing stuff with this brush. Or what I suggest is to simply use this brush where you are at the edge, close to those objects. You want to keep like that, nice, we got the bird in. But when you want to erase a simple backdrop, go back to a regular eraser brush. As I mentioned before, keep in mind this is destructive way of getting rid of the backdrop. We cannot get the backdrop back. That's why I suggest to actually make some copy of the original image below on the layer panel in case you need it. All right, so take a look, We erase the backdrop around here. Let's continue. Again, I want you to learn about this background erase brush. This special brush allow us to erase backdrop around objects without need for precise selection. That's the goal here. To save time is not the most precise way, but it's really fast way, very easy for beginners as well. Sometimes we just need to remove a bit of sky or something like that or cloud and this will be a perfect thing. We can maintain important objects like those birds and still erase the backdrop between Why is a hidden tip? Because nowadays most people totally ignore. Erase a tool that's like destructive, not proper way of editing. But I still think that we should know about this little tools can be really time saver sometimes. All right, for the second artboard. That's our practice here. Try your best to remove the backdrop around those birds without deleting birds. You will need to use backdrop erased brush as I show. And also I recommend you to zoom in Use Common Plus you can zoom in really close. Try your best practice with this second artboard and when you are ready, you can move to the next tip. 7. New Brush: All right, let's move to the artboard number three. A good brush can enhance your editing experience in any photo editing software. Whether you just want to draw a quick cloud on the sky or you want to some deep graphic project, right, like fly or poster. The good brush can be everything to create a brush. Usually we need to go this long way by creating a new artboard, cleaning up the backdrop, and then extracting this one image as the PND. To create a brush, usually we need to go the long way. Create a new document, put the image in it, you raise the backdrop. Export as PNG. Then import back this PNG as a brush, set up the brush, and then we can finally use it. Luckily there's a quick way call new brush from selection. If you are halfway through your project and you look at the object like this flower and decide, oh, I will turn this into a brush so I can draw a few more flowers like this. You can do it from within the program without actually creating a brush during this whole process, as I mentioned. But first, let's check the brush panel. It should be on the right side here. Brushes, they are divided into several groups. We already got multiple brushes, different textures, different media style brushes are here. Let's go to the basic group. Our task for this third outboard will be to turn part of the image into a new brush. If you cannot see a brush panel, you can always head to your window and check that the brush panel is turned on. Need to have the check mark next to it. All right, what we need to do is we need to select the flower. Let's use a very easy selection tool. Call a selection brush tool. Over here, as you can see, it's a brush, so I can just paint over the flower. What we've got here today is what we can consider a easy selection. There's high contrast between the flower and the backdrop and there's also very low focus on the backdrop. The backdrop is blurry. Let's make it way easier to select. Let's zoom in a bit for greater detail. Zoom in comment, plus. All right, let's make this brush a bit smaller. We can select those details. We can use this slider to make it smaller or we can use square brackets. Take a look. Square brackets will also resize the brush. All right, with the smaller brush, I can select some details. Don't want to be too precise here. I just want to rough quick brush from selection. If you notice that you select too much, like in this case, take a look. I select part of the backdrop. Change the mode from add to subtract. This way we can remove from selection. Nice, same here, subtracting this part. All right, let's try to turn this into a brush. After we apply the selection, we head to the brush panel. And then on the right side, click the menu and search for new brush from selection. As you can see, it's right now, gray out means we need to rasterize this layer. This layer is an image. We can right click on it and we can rasterize it. Now it's a simple pixel layer, and we can use the selection on that layer to create a new brush from selection Here take a look, a new brush appears. That's the image brush that may contain all of the colors. We can double tap on the brush and we can even modify some properties of it. I like spacing. For example, flow of the brush rotation. We can use dynamic options like that. We can scatter this around. With this new brush all set up, we are ready to use it. Let's try to use it. I'll dielect command D to dielect. Then by selecting the brush tool on the left, I'm going to use my new brush all around. And that will be your practice task. Try your best to select the flower on the third artboard, turn it into a brush, and then paint with this new brush all around. Just like that. A messy out pot with our custom brush. All right, so good luck with this tip. 8. Vectors: When Affinity Designer was first released, there was a huge deal that there is a pixel persona built in in a vector software. There is something like a vector persona built in affinity photo even though it's not a separate persona on the list. There are many vector tools are available for us in this rust editing software. The vector graphics is the one that is made of curves and shapes like this little Mogi. Here the advantage is it can be scaled up and down without losing quality. And we can quickly recolor those vector shapes as we want. Let's try to lock this layer first in the layer Pal. I will click this padlock. All right, now we cannot select this, we cannot move it. Our task for this artboard number four would be to use some vector tools to recreate this shape, to show you that it's totally fine and possible to create simple vector combinations. In this rust editing software, we got our shape tool here and take a look that are so many ready to use shapes for us from stars that we can modify even further by changing some points and also by pulling those orange points around, Take a totally different shape made of star very quickly. There are many shapes that we can modify even further. But there is also a proper penolokI, Click and hold. Click, hold to adjust the curve. The pentol is really powerful tool that I was to draw. Any custom shape in this case is block. We can modify those nodes with this wide node tool, not the black selection tool. This is the one that move the whole shape. The white one is the one that move, move the node. You can also press and hold the penol to see the node tool just below. All right, we can draw custom shapes and we can modify those nodes with the node tool later on. Today we're going to try a primate shapes. Then we will customize them using something called geometry operations. All right, I'm going to start with this rectangle. Draw the rectangle first. We are doing some vector graphics right now in affinity photo. Now I will go to round those corners. Let's change the corner style to round it and make it really, really round it, almost like a circle. All right, 40% Now we need to create those eyes. How can we do that? We can just simply draw our O right. There's ellipse tool, normally it's oval, but if you hold shift, you will go to one to one proportion. That's nice. You don't need to be too precise with that. We don't need to have exactly the same size of ice. All right, I got one and now I can just simply copy and paste. To do that, I will hold command and drag it out and I got a copy. All right, hold shift to select both position like that and now it's cool part. Let's select all three shapes. I can click on the first one, holding Shift, click on the last one in the layer panel like that. Or you can simply click and select them all here in the art board. Now by right clicking. Let's for section called Geometry Geometry. We've got some options to combine vector shapes like add, subtract, intersect, divine, and combine. Let's start from subtract. By doing that, I cut out a hole in that shape at the top. Take a look, that's nice. What else? Now we're going to use segment tool, that's another shape tool on the list. Just click and hold to see all of the shapes segment tool like that. Let's rotate all the way. Use the orange control point. We can scale it up a bit. If you like place here, select them both. And again, right click, such for geometry. And we can subtract again. And we end up with our own emogy here. That's nice, that's your task. Create your own little emogy by combining vector shapes. But while we are still here, I'm going to show you all four actions. All right, let me just move a bit here. Okay, let me draw a rectangle ellipse, we can see all four operations. Now I'm going to copy this four times. I can come and see command V. I can also click right click here in the layer section, and then I can duplicate that. All right, if I select two or more shapes, right click on them. There's a geometry that I can add in. That option will add those two shapes together to create a new one. The second option, as I already showed you, is to subtract, In this case, the top shape. The key shape will make a hole in the bottom shape. Next one will allow us to intersect, only this intersecting part will be left. The final one will allow you to divide. And that's opposite of that. We cut in little pieces, take a look. Every little piece of that composition is now separated. Keep in mind, even though Affinity Photo is a rust editing software for doing some photo editing and a bit of graphic design, there's still a proper vector persona. You could say there's a pen tool shapes. And we can also apply actions operations between those shapes. Unite, subtract, intersect, and divide. All right, your task is to make this little MOG using vector tools. I will see you in the next artboard. 9. Tools: You may notice that my tools on the left are a bit different. They're in two column, not in one. This way I can see all of them. Even though I'm using laptop now, a bit smaller screen. How can you customize your tools? To speed up, that's our tip number five. We had to view and search for customized tools. Click on it. Now you will see all of the available tools, why there are so many here. Because very often under one tool there is another hiding. But if you use that tool, often you can drag it out and say it as a separate tool. That's what I did with the node tool. Normally, the node tool is hidden below the penol, but I drag it out, I can say it as a separate tool. All right. So you can do that. What else can you do? You can, of course, change. How many columns do you need? Take a look. If I got only one column, I cannot see all of my tools on my laptop screen. It's not big enough. So I change to two columns. You can try three if you like. All right, so I will stick with two columns. And you can see also I got this wide line separating selection tools from other tools. This line is over here and this is the separator. You can create your own sections in the toolbar and separate them using this handy line. Take a look, There are more tools than you may think because some of them are groups of tools. For example, remember there's the whole group of shapes. But if there's a shape that you use very often, for some reason, you can drag out this certain shape. You can drag out, let's say, this clout shape. If you are doing some comic like design, you can put it here, you can click close and then you'll have a quick access to that certain tool. All right, as the tip number five, you will have to customize your toolbar. Check that there are some tools that you want to have in your tool bar, you can reorder them. Maybe there is a software that used before. Maybe you are coming to Affinity Photo from different programs. Now it's time to adjust this tool panel on the left, so it's going to be more similar to what you already know. All right, play around and if you feel like you messed up, click reset and you are back into the default one. What I did, in my case, I switched from one column to two. I drag out the span tool to the bottom next to the zoom tool. I also drag out this No tool to be at the top. So I got a black one for moving the whole object. And I got the wide one node for moving only nodes because I use a lot of vector elements in my designs. All right, that's how I customize my tools. You can customize this area as you want, then click close and then we are ready to move forward. All right, your turn. 10. Blur: If you are affinity photo user, you probably know all about blur filters but there is one that is a bit undiscovered. Under appreciated. Depth of field blur, that's the one I'm talking about. There are two ways we can apply blurs to our pictures or areas of the image. We click on the image or we select the area first. And then we can use this menu here in the layer section directly he is, we got some handy blurs. Or we can refer to the top menu called filters. From here we can select a different filters that are group in different categories. The very first one is for blurring. That's blur such for the depth of field blur. After that, you will get this nice circular shape that we can adjust to blur the part of our image. In my case, I got multiple artboards, so the filter freak out a bit. Let me just reposition and let's scale it down a bit to blur only this one certain image on our artboard. Six, most of the time we work on one hardboard. So that will be just fine in our case, because we break some rules here. We need to reposition this guy here. Okay, take a look. Also, I need to be sure that this blur is on the correct artboard. As I mentioned, that's something that you need to be worried about only if you are breaking those rules and you are working with multiple artboards in affinity photo. What you need to do, you need to first add a radius to it and see that the layer below will respond. In my case, everything is fine because the correct layer was selected before I apply the blur, right? Take a look. First one is the radius that will blur around the second rim. The second circle, the thing at the center, will stay focus and the stuff outside or around the second rim will be blurred. That's can be really handyful portraits. When you want to avoid precise selection, we can change the vibrant. Take a look. The green color is pops. We can even add clarity to it even though it's blur is look a bit sharper. All right, This is a perfect filter. If you've got this one object you want to focus on, keep that object in this first circle. Then you've got this area that is gradually blurring. Then you got your blurred backdrop. The advantage of using this filter is you don't need to make any precise selection. We did not select the lady at first. We just adjust the position of this blur indicator normally, when you apply the blur, there's nothing like this ellipse. This deep field blur is really nice because we got this full control. Take a look, I can move this around now the lady is blur, put it back here and she's focused. All right, very interesting filter because you can avoid slow, precise selections by using it. Let's click Apply. Here is we apply the blur to the image that was easy. All right, that was our tip number six. Try to do the very same thing. Apply the blur, keep the lady in focus, and blur the back group a bit. 11. Power Duplicate: Let's move to the artboard number seven. This one is all about power duplicate trick. You may already be familiar with duplication. That's when we create a copy of the existing object, whether it is a pixel selection or a vector object. Let me just quickly draw a simple vector object for this demonstration. All right, we got this hard shape here. There are several ways of duplicating that. Let's just go very quickly through basics. We can just come Common V, copy and paste. We can right click in the layer section and duplicate from here. There's a very handy one when we press command down on the keyboard and then move the object out. But instead of moving the object, the original one stays there and you make a duplication. That's when you hold your command or control key on the keyboard. But there's also something called power duplicate. What's the difference in power duplicate? You not only make a copy of the object, but also the last transformation. For example, if I press command and duplicate this here. Now I head up there and I want to duplicate this again. I can use something called power duplicate. All right, in layer section search for duplicate selection and shortcut is J or control J on the keyboard. If I click that, take a look, not only have a copy but the copies moved to the right. Exactly same distance If I use the keyboard shortcut command J. Here's another one on the right side. This way we can very quickly create multiple copies, but also maintain the same transformation. If I draw narrow rectangle like this, then I move it here, I simply place J and J come and J. I got so many copies and the distance between them is exactly the same. That's really handy. It would be exactly the same result with a pixel based selection, like some P and G elements. All right. There's also another way of doing that. Let me show you the new way, very recently added to the software, going to draw this triangle. All right? I want the stroke, the line around it to be a bit thicker like that. Now you don't even need to do the initial transformation. You can click on the object and hit Enter or return on your keyboard. And you will have this very new pop up box move duplicate. From here, you can make some movements. You can move this object exactly 10 millimeters to the right. If you put minus ten, you will move it to the left. But the best part is we can also use this for duplication. Just turn on the duplicate over here. Now we can decide how many copies do you need? We can not only move objects around, but we can actually change there and go add some rotation to it. If we got a rotation on it, take a look. We are duplicating this all around multiple times. I managed to create over 40 copies here using this very quick dialog box. Very handy way of making power duplicates. Keep in mind power duplicate is when we not only copy the object but also copy the last transformation. Try yourself make some power duplicates on this board number seven, using the shortcut command J or control J on Windows. 12. Refine Selection: My tip number eight is refined selection button. With the tip number eight is to use refined selection button. Whatever you use selection tool, it's extra option for us to do fine last improvements on our selection before we commit to it. You cannot see this button with any tool. If I pick a regular brush tool or maybe patch tool, I cannot see it. You need to select a selection tool, like for example, the free selection tool. Then you see the refined button over here at the top. All right, when you make a selection, you are able to click this button, it will give you this pop, a box refined selection, where we can make some adjustments on that selection. As you can see, my selection is terrible right now because it was so unprecise. Let's just zooming a bit. Everything that is marked with the red color will be the one that is not selected. Everything in full color will be selected. We can use adjustment brush to mark the background. Let's switch to background and try to tell the program that actually this is also the backdrop. We don't need this part. As you can see, it's getting marked as red. We already improve the quality of the selection just by doing that. Even though you end up with not very precise selection, you can still improve on that a little bit just before the end by using that refined selection button. Take a look that was nice. Let's zoom in even further. It's very challenging topic for selection, a dog like that. All right, maybe a bit here, a bit Here I'm changing the size of this brush using brackets on my keyboard. I make super bad selection at first, but by using the refined option, we managed to fix it a bit. It's way better. I think it's not perfect, but it's better. How about here? All right, then we can also use slides. We mark the background. If you are in the opposite situation, you may consider marking the foreground. If something is read but it shouldn't be, then you can use that to show the program. That's not right, that's not a backdrop. I want to keep that in my selection by using the foreground option and then touching what's supposed to be in selection, we can adjust the border with a bit. That's the area when the program try to smartly detect what should be selection, what should be not by, by detecting the contrasting the focus. Not very useful right now. With my rough selection we can smooth the selection a bit. We can feather that to blur the distinction between selection and the main object. We can ramp it, move it away from the object or closer to the object. Now I'm moving this away by moving to the right, take a look less red, and then move it closer to the object with the minus values. That's actually will do. I think finally we can decide what will be the output of the selection on mask. A new layer, new layer with the mask. The last option is the safest one. Let's go with that. Okay, at first, it seems like nothing changed here because there is still a layer of the original picture somewhere here. Let's just switch off the visibility of this layer by clicking the door over here, gone. Now we got a layer with the mask that's the result of our refined selection. From here, we can see there are some dirty areas here. How can we clean it? Right now? What can we do is we can click on the mask itself. Mask is a special layer that is black and white. We can use black and white color, uncover and cover areas here. And take a look. I got my flower brush still active. If you are in the same situation, just go to your brushes and let's switch to something round and soft that will do round and soft. And be sure we're using a black color and not the images selected by the mask mask itself. All right, let's click on the mask. With this black brush, we can cover those areas as well. The black brush will cover stuff in the mask and the opposite, the white brush, when uncover the part of the back drop, we can still get our backdrop back if you hide too much using the selection, that's also important to know that it's undistractive. We can still get stuff back if we need. All right, even I create this terrible selection for this demonstration, we managed to save ourselves by using the feature care, refined selection. Keep in mind to see the refined button, you need to have any selection tool active in that very moment. All right. So try your best to select this dog using the refined selection option. Help yourself with the selection using the refined dialogue box as I did. All right, this was our eight tip. We are almost halfway through. You could say we are past the half way because we got 17 tips and few extras. But in the next lesson, we will check what we have already learned. You got any missing outboards in this section 1-8 You may take time to catch up and be sure that everything is finished here before you listen to the little halfway through summary in the next video. 13. Half way: Nicely done. We are halfway through this online class and we already learned about eight different tips that can enhance our workflow in affinity photo. Let's review them. Let's not wait until the end of this online class. Let's just review what we have learned so far halfway through. I hope you already get a great value and you can already use that in your current and future projects. The first thing I mentioned was that you can actually borrow some tools from designers. We actually borrow all of those art boards here. We create a document in designer and that's the one we are looking at right now. By default you've got only one artboard in affinity photo. But if you create document in designer first you can have multiple artboards. That's a nice little hack. Second one is the background erase brush. Not many teachers, online classes, not many tutorials about this hidden gem. There's actually a brush that can help you to erase the backdrop and maintain those objects in the foreground. That was really handy. Then I show you how we can create a brush from the selection. Really quick method. Just make a selection, turn it into a brush. Be sure rasterize your layer need to be a pixel based layer. There are some powerful vector tools in affinity photo, not many people mentioned that. But you can literally make a nice vector illustration like this little mog within the program. You don't need any third party software for that. You can customize your tool bar. I did, I customized mine. I got two columns. As you can see, it's way better this way On my small screen, on my little laptop. I hope you took some time to customize your own toolbar. Then I show you how you can blur the backdrop, but still keep a focus on the part of the image without making a precise selection, without wasting your time. That's called depth of field blur. That's a special option here in filters at the top as you may remember. All right, then I show you how we can power duplicate. The duplicate is not a simple copy, the power duplicate also copy the last transformation, that's going to be really handy. And then I make the super terrible selection. But we managed to fix that using the refined selection button. Congratulations, you reach half of this class already. Trust me, maybe around 30 to 40% people that enroll reach this point. Seriously, I'm not joking. Very often people buy the class, do one or two lessons, and then they decide, oh yeah, I will continue tomorrow, I will continue next week. When I got more time, they never find time to come back. You're already heading to be at top of this class just by being here. Don't give up and continue. You're already halfway through it. I hope you got great value already. Let's continue in the next section, there's a next file for you to download with nine more tips. All right. So I will see you in the next section after you finish this little quiz coming next. 14. History: We already finished tips 1-8 Now it's time for our second document where you will see your tips 9-17 Open the second document and let's dive in. I'm going to zoom in a bed. We can see only one hardboard at the time board number nine, the tip is you can save your history. The history are all of the changes we are making to the document. Keep in mind it's a local state. It's there for you. You can do, you can go into history panel and undo multiple steps. But after you close the program, the history is gone by default. When you reopen a file that you save, you cannot see the history from the previous session. You cannot undo anything you're starting new, you could say. But you can change that easily. If you click File at the top and click Save History Document, they will ask you for confirmation. Yes. From now on your history will be saved within document and even you close it and open or open in another device, on another computer. It will be still, therefore you can do, you can see changes from the past in that design. Why it's off by default, two reasons. One, it will make a file a bit larger. And the second, sometimes we don't want to pass our history to someone else. Right? We don't want to show our process. We don't want the history to be there in the document. If you're going to work for a long period of time on the same document, it's may be a good idea to save the history of the document. Even though you close it and reopen it's still there for you to use. All right. So that's really easy tip to apply just to your files. Save the history of this document and you are done with art board number nine. 15. AI?: Ai enhanced tools can be a great time savers in any graphic software. People have a misconception. They saw like somebody just typing a prompt and AI generated a whole image and it's like creepy how it may replace an artisan, whatever. I'm not talking about this AI generating engines, I'm talking more about tools that use AI in the back end to improve our experience. Something that we can do in Photoshop. Currently, when you simply can use the selection tool and pig option select Sky, select the person, the program can analyze the image so the program knows what's in the picture. And we don't need to do like manual selection, manual masking, or we can say replace the sky or clean up the grass. We remove the trash for you because the program analyze what's actually in the picture. They are like very helpful tools that are nonexistent right now in a definitive photo in version 2.3 that I'm running right now, there are no AI enhanced tools. Ai tools are not announced for the software just yet. More than that, we got a bit mixed messaging from the company. We get posts about that they are not planning to do any AI image generated. That's something that you can just prompt something and it's generated, they're not working on something like that. But then we got some direct information from developers that are looking into hence selection and hence masking with some AI. That's what I'm talking about. Not just the generator for images generating is fine for extending backdrops and erasing unwanted objects. But I would like to see some enhanced tools, especially for the selection. Right now, there are no AI tools in affinity photo. If they're going to add some, don't worry. I'll update this online class and you will see this just after this video. There will be extra art board with my update on AI tools. Okay, I will keep it fresh. If they're going to add AI tools, don't worry, it will be all here. Don't forget to recheck with this online class in the future. But for now, for now, we can still use third party AI tools. I will just show you what I'm using. I'm not saying that's the best thing. If you want to speed up some processes, boring things. You don't need to use only affinitive photo. I know this class is supposed to be about affinitive photo, but right now, right now, we need some workarounds for AI. In my case, I've been using the aluminum near for some AI features. So we can replace sky as you can see here. We can select sky and make a sky replacement, Here it is. We can also make some adjustments on that clarity with AI that will control that we are not over burning any part of the image as well. That's one thing we can do. There are multiple other tools we can smart era. We got some painting in affinity photo, so don't worry about that. We can do similar stuff but the difference is with AI. Ai, try to not only use what we got around the object we are raising, but also try to generate a new content based on that. Try to remix this a little bit. That's why the smart AI erase. It's a bit better than understand that in painting, but don't worry, there is in painting. I'm going to show you that as one of our tricks. All right. As you can see, there are some helpful AI features. If you ask me, my favorite one is to simply be able to select certain objects. For example, in this case I was recoloring the car quickly. This was like very quick mock up. I don't, I don't want to really select the car manually. So what I did simply when you apply any of those like adjustment layers, right? We got adjustment layers in affinity photo, but we need to always mask them manually ourselves or we've used of some magic tools that can be used to some extent that's true, but whatever you use like Any of those, like adjustment things, take a look to adjust some properties of the color saturation. There's also a masking option when you can use AI mask. And that's what I really need right now. That's my most used AI feature this year. Ai masking, where I don't need to manually select staff, I want to save time on this one and I really, really hope it's coming. Take a look, detect several things in my image and then I can select transport and that will be a car and the car is masked out for me. All right. I'm hoping this AI masking analyzing image coming to affinity Photocon Alumina. Nia is the one I use. Meanwhile, this one is a paid software and there's also a free one that you can use, Photop. Photopy also got some AI tools added recently. Just keep in mind you can use Photop for free of art. You've got art on the right side taking your screen and also whatever you use AI tools, there will be some pop up art as well. So that's something that will bother you all the time, but that's what it is when you use a free software. Guess we got some third party options. Ai is also now integrated with a casual software. If you ever use Canva or a Express the casual design software, both of those programs now got some form of AI integration. When we can tell the program what to do, what to generate for us, how to change the layout as well. Ai is coming, and I hope it's coming, to affinity photo as well. For now we are using some third party programs. That's all right, to boost your workflow with some third party programs. But if this change, as I mentioned, I will put an update right here in this online class so you will see it. All right? You don't need to do anything for this hardboard else than just understanding that AI enhance tools are important, not currently available here, but feel free to use any other third party software that can improve your specific workflow. All right, you are not locked into affinity photo right now. Also little programs, plug ins that can help you out if you're working on something very often. For example, if you recoloring pictures like black and white pictures in affinity photo just like the website. That can help you out with that, Just use that stuff. All right? Don't feel like it's cheating. It's part of the process right now. Don't be shy about AI tools. All right, that was artboard number ten. More talking than doing, but I think we need to talk about this important topic. All right, let's move to the next tip. That would be the next artboard, artboard 11, about very, very interesting feature call frequency separation. 16. Separation: It's finally time for tip number 11. This is a good one. It's about frequency separation. It's a built in feature infiniti photo, Not like different programs that lead to some special plug ins or some extra updates. We got this right here straight from the filters panels. If you click on the raster image, you can go to your filters and apply frequency separation. But what is it? Let's imagine for a moment that you try to modify your picture. When you try to modify the color aspect of it, you try to adjust colors. You always worry about the texture of it. You worry that if you make the sky brighter, it will mess up the texture of the cloud. It will be too bright and lose details or other way around. Whether you try to adjust the texture of it, might try to make a part of the image sharper or denoise that part, change the texture. You worry about colors that you will mess up colors. This frequency separation is like splitting the image into two separate images. One is only the texture from the image and one is just the color of it. Without sharpness of it, we don't need to worry about messing up the texture right? Take a look, I got two parts here. On the left, I got high frequency, that's our texture. On the right, we got low frequency, That's the color aspect of the image. Just by splitting the raster image into those two frequencies, we can use all of our available tools. All right, the program will act exactly the same, but we can modify it separately. If I'm making changes here to colors on the low frequency, I still getting the texture from the skin because that's on the high frequency right now because we split this image one side, right side in my case, that's the color left side, that's the texture of it. That's really interesting and give us more flexibility with editing tools. No special editing tools, we keep using the very same tools. If you want to modify the texture of the skin without changing the color of the skin, you work in this side high frequency. All right. We can now go for tools like blemish removal tool. All right, we've got two layers here, take a look. High and low frequency, they are like separate layers that blending together. Now we're focusing on the texture, right? We can use this tool over here if we want to modify the texture of the skin without touching the color, the low frequency. In our case, we can go even further in painting brush, we want to get rid of some details, make it rinky. All right, we are dealing with our high frequency. If you turn on the visibility here, take a look. Even now, I'm removing some details from my high frequency, from the texture layer, and the colors are untouched. That's open up more retouching techniques. It's very useful especially for phase phase retouching and modern glamopictures like that. Okay, take a look. I'm getting rid of those darker points from forehead without destroying the texture. Right. The color is original. One, I just modify the texture just a little bit and it's still feel natural. From other hand, we can move to the low frequency. Now we can do something crazy about that as well. In the low frequency, we can modify colors without worrying about the texture of it. The texture is on the high frequency layer. You could say simplify words, right? In the simplified way we got high frequency. I'll make this image sharp, low frequency, give us colors. If, if colors on the low frequency layer I will not affect those details from the high frequency. We don't need to be that worried about losing details and similar problems that can end up when using the adjustment layers, right? So we can put adjustment. All right, so we put some adjustment layer, you can see it in the layer panel. And this adjustment layer, right now, it's below high frequency. The high frequency is above it, so it's not affected by the adjustment layer. This one only affecting our colors, and on the top of that we still got the original texture. This way this adjustment is way safer, way smarter to put it in between those two layers here. Take a look. Even though we bump the contrast were details are still here. They didn't this appear because of the over, over contrast. Like you've got too much dark or bright color. Sometimes this can kill your details by separating the frequency of the image. You can save that. It's really just a tip 11 just to let you know this feature is here. It's for you to explore and we could make the whole to our long class chat about frequency separation and how we can use that photo editing. But in general, keep in mind you can split your texture, your details from the color. You can split high frequency, that's our high frequency. We can see all of those details from low frequency, seems like blur image, just colors of the image. Then we can apply any editing tool that we learned about before to modify that certain layer separately from each other. At the end of the day, they will blend together, giving us back the original image with our improvements. That's your frequency separation, very powerful tool that needs some exploring. But keep in mind if you're trying to edit your image, you're changing some colors but it's ruin the texture or you're changing some texture. By changing the colors, you can split that. You can separation and edit that on two separate layers. And that's our tip number 11. Your task is to split this image by clicking on the original one. Had to filters and turn on the frequency separation. Create two layers with the high and low frequency and try to play with it a bit before you move to the next artboard. 17. View: If you like to work on big screen, big monitor, or maybe multiple screens, you can consider float view mode. Right now we got this standard view mode where all of the studios snaps to the position. If you customize stuff like I did before, let's move colors over here, layers to the left. I can customize those studio panels. I can snap them around. You can always click on Window Studio and Reset Studio to go back to the default settings, But we can also change the whole view mode. Let's open Window menu at the top and the option for float view. What happened? As you can see, now my artboard is also floating around. It will give me a chance to customize it by placing that, let's say on the separate monitor, opening the same document multiple times. So I can look at the same project with different level of zoom. So we can float the main artboard stage here. I can drag it out to my second monitor. You cannot see it right now, but it's on my second monitor now. All right, that's a nice addition. We've got our floating main window. We can move it all around to different monitors. That's nice. I know this tip is useful only for people with multiple screens. But everybody can customize the work space by moving around studios. Keep in mind some of those studios are switched off by default. If you are in the Window menu, you can see that some of them are switched off. If the studio is currently turned on, you got this check mark. If it's off, there's nothing next to it. So for example, if you use your quick effects, lay effects very often you can turn it on. And now we got a new studio here on the right side, but you can also drag it out. I just drag it out to my second screen as well. It's also totally possible we can drag around those elements to different screens. If you click View and then new view, you will open the very same document for the second time. Now I can place that on the second monitor and I can adjust the zoom level. Here I'm looking at the very same document twice. Take a look, move this element. I can see it on my left window when I zoom into just one artboard, but I can also see it in my second view window that I see the whole document. I see all of the artboards there and I can move this around and changes appears in lifetime. All right. So very handy if you are somebody with multiple screens. Keep in mind you can use your ipad as the secondary screen as well. You can float your windows, your studios are around, and customize your work experience. I hope this little tip is useful for you, and I will see you on the next artboard. 18. Develop Persona: Tip number 13, developed persona. Wait a moment, That's not a tip. Any useful trick that simply a interface design of affinity apps, signature thing for them to divide and group our tools in two separate personas. You probably already know about existing of developed persona. If you head to the top, yes, you can see I'm now in photo persona. That's the default state. Liquefy persona and then develop persona. Let's click on that. As you can see, we cannot turn it on without image selected by default. Developed persona is the tool for us to develop raw images, but not only if you select any image that's already existing in the design, even the screenshot, that is not a raw image at all, you can switch to develop persona. Take a look. All right, now I just need to rasterize it, right? Click on the image layer, I'm going to rasterize it. That will allow me to enter the developed persona. No problem. Here I am. Even though I do not develop a brand new raw image. That's the tip is you can use developed persona on any pixel based layer, any raster layer, not only on raw images. I assuming most of us know about developing raw images in developed persona as the default persona if you load the raw into affinity photo, but you can also open this persona with any raster image. As you can see, I got access to all of the developed persona tools. I can change exposure and modify all of those adjustments here on the right side, even turn on stuff like temperature for the light balance, all of that. We've got lens corrections, details, tones, overlays, everything is here. We can analyze our meta data. We can even change it from here. All right, and then on the left we've got this limited tool panel for developed persona. When you hit develop, all of your changes will apply and you will back to photo persona. All right, so let's take a look. Let's zoom in back to our Arbour 13 then you can see that my pixel layer now it's change the tone, the exposure is a bit different and the color is a bit different as well. The tip number 13 is not that there is developed persona for us, but if you've got a raster based layer, the pixel based layer you can just right click and rasterize any layer you want. It is rasterize. Then you can switch to develop persona and use those developed persona tool if you are already proficiently developed persona. That's something that you can use even with Jpeg or PNG's, not only raw files. That was our tip number 13. And your task is to simply rasterize this layer with the screenshot. Had to develop persona and try to change the color a little bit. 19. Inpainting: Next step is a bit forgotten feature called in painting feel. I'm not talking about in painting brush, I think most people know about the brush, but there's also something called in painting feel that works very similar. But instead of using the brush and be limited to the brush tool options, we can do selection using any selection tool you want and then fill that selection with in painting. Let me just remind you with the brush first, when you've got an image and you want to remove something, if the background around is simple enough, you should be able to simply paint over it in painting feature and it will generate a new feel for that little gap. What we don't want to do is we don't want to remove that area. Remember what will happen if you remove something. You use eraser. Then if you remove something you can see this white color below. That's not nice. Let's undo. All right. We can use a special brush for that and it's called in painting brush, it's in healing tools category. You must search for your healing tools, this clone brush tool here. Let's go here. I got my healing tools over here. Any of these tools can be like the first two healing brush maybe patch tool, just click and hold until you see all of them. And then select in painting brush tool. With this brush you can brush over the object you want to remove, then the program, try to generate a new backdrop in that area that matched the original one. It's superhndy feature really quick, it works well with the simple backdrop. Black, sky, water, grass, all right. But there's also another way of doing that. In some situations, the brush is not good fit. What we can do is we can do a selection. There's so many selection tools. Let's start with the simple one, lasso. If you select the area first, you can still use in painting on that whole area. Simply had to eat it feel. Then we can click in Painting Feel as you can see. Now the program fill this area with the surrounding backdrop. It's a little glitch here because he Duplicate this whole balloon. Look fake right now, but that's fine. Let's click Apply. Now let's try different selection method. Now we can select this area, click in it. Now we can click Fill. It will be in painting by default. Now advantage of this is we can see the preview. I didn't even click Apply just yet, but we see the preview of the in painting. It's fine. I can click Apply. The biggest point with this is we can use any selection tool we want. That's the difference between using in painting brush and selecting the area first and then filling this area with in painting. All right, it's your turn. Try to use both in painting brush and then a selection. And in painting, this is really handy option for us because in painting feel works with any selection tool, there's no need for brushing and playing with the brush. Now it's your turn and I will see you on the next outboard. 20. Brush Shortcuts: We are in art board number 15. This one is about brush shortcuts. There's a separate video later in the summary all about keyboard shortcuts. But I want to list up brush shortcuts here as tip number 15 because I think they are very crucial to good workflow. Why is that? Because when you select the brush tool and then in the brush panel on the right, you select your brush. In my case, I'm selecting the one we made in this online class, the flower brush. As you may remember, you want to use the tool. You don't want to change all of the brush properties using the slides at the top all the time. You can use keyboards. So your left hand is on keyboard and the right hand is controlling your pen or your mouse. With the brush, that's where the keyboard shortcuts really shine. Take a look. By default, I got my brush here. If I want to change the size, I don't need to go all the way up. I can simply use brackets on my keyboard make my brush larger or smaller. And that's not all. I can use arrows on my keyboard, right arrow or left arrow to rotate my brush on the fly. The best part is you are still using the brush and you can see the live preview of the brush. That's what I really like about designer, that's what I really like about affinity photo that we got this slide preview. We don't need to click first and we don't like the result. We must undo the affinity apps, always give you live preview. That's really nice. I'm controlling the size and rotation of the brush using my keyboard, I can keep using my brush in my right hand. What else can we do here from the keyboard, We can very easily change the opacity. When I click number one on the keyboard, I got 10% Number two, that's 20. Number three, 30% 45678, 80% nine, 90% and zero will jump back to 100% opacity. You can control size, rotation, and opacity very quickly from the keyboard without need for messing up. Here at the top, I think while we are already here talking about the brush tool, I want to show you one thing that many people will actually tell it is not here, that's not in the program. Forget about it. When you are using the brush, you can actually turn on something called symmetry. If you check for like symmetry tool, the way it's in procreate, it's not really here. But the brush got a special symmetry mode. It's not like the symmetry thing, but it's quite close with symmetry. You will be able to create a line. All right? And this will allow us to draw symmetrical. Right now I got multiple artboards. Let me just readjust the line to be on artboard 15. Let's take a look one more time. Now I got two axis, vertical and horizontal one. And drawing in the symmetrical mode, as you can see, it is totally possible just turn on symmetry here. You can even adjust the number of lines you need for your image. Then you can drag the line. You can even rotate that line. Take a look, the Rhine is rotated. There's no asymmetrical mode for the whole artboard, but you can turn on symmetry y using the brush. That's a little addition, all right? This tip number 15 is all about brush. Try out those shortcuts. Try to use the brush and change the size of the rotation of the opacity of it from the keyboard. All right, you are not allowed to use the settings here. You must use only the keyboard shortcuts for that, then don't forget to check the symmetry. Make this artboard messy. Try different brushes. Use the symmetry. Try to control it from the keyboard so we can make it larger. We can make it really tiny. Now make this one messy artboard. So I can see that you practice with the brush. All right, focus on your shortcuts. And also you can check out the symmetry option as well. That's our tip number 15. 21. Embedded Document: Can you use smart objects in affinitive photo? The short answer is no. We cannot turn the layer into smart object like in Photoshop, but we can embed another document within affinitive photo document. It's exactly the same thing, but instead of turning a certain layer into smart object, a placeholder, when you can have a document in the document, very common used as a mockup design. We can do it here as well. But instead of just one button, we need to drag and drop another document within the interface of affinity photo. So take a look, I make this very simple mop of some kind of business card. I'm going to close it. You can download this Mokup if you like, from this lesson files or you can use any other document that you got on your computer that you create yourself before. That will be fine as well. All right. I close that. I save it on my drive and now I will drag, drop this whole document to this document. All right. So we embed one document inside, another document, let me show you here is I just drag and drop this document and as you can see we got a new layer, the icon for the layer type that's embedded document icon. All right, you may notice this. Before each layer got this little icon, we can hover our mouse on it and it will take tell us what's the name of the type of the layer? This is text, for example. Rectangle. This one over here, the new one is embedded document. What's the advantage of it? It's like a placeholder. It's like a variable. We can change what is inside a document without destroying what we've got here. If for example, when I set some mockup here. All right, so I place it here and then I will put a mask on it. The mask will be similar to that wide area. Let's switch off the visibility for a moment. All right, now I want to select the white area from this original picture. We can do it with this quick selection brush. Let's make it a bit larger. Remember the brush shortcuts, We can use brackets. All right, we select the white area. Now I go back to this embedded document and use the Quick mask option to mask it out like that. Nice, this is like the mock up thing, but we can always double click on that embedded layer. And we open this another document. Take a look, I got another document. We got a change in e mail that we need to change this logo to be yellow. All right, we make a change here. I can save and close this document, take a look at the change appear in the mock up as well, embedding documents. It's exactly the same process as smart layers, smart objects in Adobe Photoshop. It's got different names, but very similar functionalities. Try to embed a document on this artboard. You need to drag and drop another affinity photo document. Then try to change it a bit, see that it will respond. All right, that's really powerful feature. Don't forget, you can drag one document into another and this will help you out with more ups and similar design when you have like two sources. One is the one I want to show your client and one is the original design that you have created somewhere else. All right, now we are ready for the very last tip. Let's watch the next video. 22. Affinity Family: Here we are. Tip number 17 is to utilize the whole affinity family. If you own affinity designer, the blue program and affinity publisher, the orange one, that you are the owner of. The whole affinity family designer, that's a vector editing software. Our affinity photo, that's a rust editing program. And the publisher is for multipage publications like magazines or books. All right, but very often they adding a feature that can be used across the whole affinity family. But maybe this feature is very important for designers. They're going to promote that new feature in the context of affinity designer. They will never ever tell you that actually it's the very same feature added to Photo and Publisher as well. We need to be proactive whenever they make updates for other software. Sometimes those updates also affect our program, our affinity photo. Let me just give you a few examples what I mean by that. For example, they add a very handy, a quick grid option for designer. You can use it here in your affinity photo, so take a look. When I want to draw a star, I can actually just press arrow to the right arrow. Down this way I can draw several shapes, same time. I can even press and hold the arrow to add spacing to it. This feature is called Quick Grid. It was on the feature list for affinity designer, even though as you can see we can use it here in affinity photo before we already borrow some tools from designer. Remember this whole artboard thing going on that we got multiple artboards, take a look, we got multiple artboards, that's not a native feature for affinity photo. I create this document first in designer and then reopen in affinity photo. If you need a table in your affinity photo document, you can borrow that from publisher. There's no table tool here, but if you open your affinity publisher and add a table, you can copy and paste that here. That's really great. What I want you to do is to be aware that multiple features from affinity designer or publisher, they're also affecting our software. Our affinity photo as I just showed you, the quick grid can be used here as well. Next time you see an update for affinity designer, go and check. Maybe some of those features can be also used here in our affinity photo. All right, tip number 17 is to be aware of new features and tips and tricks for the whole family because many of them are cross compatible. All right, so that's our last trick and there's also a whole summary section when I'm going to show you three more tricks for affinity ipad versions. So we're going to learn how we can speed up the workflow in ipad version of affinity photo. And also I will give you some solid keyboard shortcut for desktop version. Just a moment, just a few more videos. We almost there you are already in top 30% of the class. Only 30% of the students reach this point. All right, you are doing great. Just few more videos and we are done. So see you in the summary section. 23. Shortcuts: All of those hacks and tricks can be great to enhance your workflow. But we cannot forget about the very basic hack that is building into the software. We can trigger different tools and features to our keyboard shortcuts. Keep in mind command on Mac equals control on Windows. If you ever watch Tutorial recorded on Mac and you see the command, you should press control other way around. If someone is recording on Windows and you are on Mac, just press command instead. All right, I got ten essential keyboard shortcuts in this video. You can also download this PDF. You can see right now in case you want to keep it somewhere else, you wallpaper, you can print it out if you like. Just keep in your notes. You can click and download the PDF as well. Let's dive into first section about navigation. We got common plus to zoom in common minus to zoom out and hold the space back to pan around. Let's try this out. Common plus I'm zooming in common minus I'm zooming out. If you press and hip holding the space by you can pan the camera around the artboard. There's one more I didn't mention here. You can also press command zero to get the optimal level of zoom for your artboard. I mentioned that before in the previous videos. All right, that's the basic for navigation. You can use left hand. I'm guessing you holding the pen or mouse in your right hand and using the left hand to just indicate those shortcut without switching from the current active tool. That's great. All right, what's next? A very basic one, command for undo. And if you press the shift as well to command shift z, you will redo. If I move this stuff around, that was a mistake. I can press Z to undo, That's helpful below. I got some selection shortcuts. We can command A to select. Now I got the selection marker across this whole artboard that's useful Even more, we can disselect from the shortcuts to come. And D, I mentioned that before. Disselection is important. Why? Because with active selection, let's say I got active selection here. With active selection like that, my tool set is limited to that area. Even I grab a brush and try to paint outside, nothing's happening, plus there's no error message or anything. If you are a beginner or even you are more advanced, but you just forget about the selection. Somewhere you go up there, you cannot even see that selection and try to paint. Nothing's happening. You can get angry, right? And take a look. I can paint inside the selection, I cannot outside and that's the case. Always select unwanted selection. Command is the fastest way if you've got several objects. And when I keep together, you can also group them. If I select those two text boxes and I press command G. Now that's in the one group. Keep in mind if you forget about the shortcut, you can always group stuff on the right side from the layer panel as well. You can group them here again, if you presses with shift shift, you will group. And that's a common pattern as you can see. Com shift Z, redo negative action, common group, command shift G group. All right, the last section here for more hidden shortcuts, we got common J for power duplicate. Remember that that's really helpful. Whatever you got a shape, or text, or any element really, you can power duplicate. That power duplicate is not only making copy, but also making the last transformation duplicate. But I also move it to the right. If I press command J, it's not only make a copy, but also make the last transformation. We call this process power duplicate. That's command J. Command J to power duplicate. But there's also a trigger use multiple times I mentioned that, but I want to keep it on this list as well. You can simply press down Command on Mac or Control on Windows while using the move tool. This way you can drag the object around, not moving the original one, but making duplicates. In addition, you can also hit Enter or Return while the object is selected for this pop up window. If you plan to just type it from Keyboards may be also a good idea. This way we can type it in if you've got a very specific geometric pattern you want to create. All right, here are just ten, but in my opinion, essential shortcuts to have a better workflow. Please try to lend those ten first and then you can build on the top of that. Keep in mind every tool on the tool panel comes with a shortcut. If there's a tool you use often, I will investigate what's the shortcut. If I hover my mouth on the move tool, I can see the letter V. That's the shortcut for move tool. If you use a selection brush tool, that's if I use that tool often I should memorize. If I press W, I will pick smart selection tools, right? So keep that in mind. Each tool on the list, each group come with the shortcut. You can use that as well. All right, as I mentioned, a PDF. From these videos, you can download the ten essential keyboard shortcuts as PDF as well. We almost see you on the summary. 24. iPad: How about the ipad version? On ipad, usually we will not work with the mouse and keyboard, but actually you can. If you simply connect with Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, you will get back some of those desktop features. Like some of the keyboard shortcut we work. But by default we will use this right Apple pencil if you ever follow any tutorial for affinitive photo and it was recorded on the desktop version and then you struggle to follow an ipad. It also includes some of my tips from this class. The best approach is to toggle on the special virtual buttons. Let's head to the hamburger menu at the top and search for command control. We want to turn this on. It will appear as this semi transparent circle. If you press on it, you will notice familiar buttons. So I can press and hold to turn on shift I got now virtual shift press in. If somebody used Shift on the workflow, you can mimic that even without the keyboard on ipad as well. Let's test it out on one of the tip I already share with you. I mentioned that if you got a shape, let's draw that shape. Here we got a shape. I mentioned that if you use the move to, by default we are moving the shape around. But if you press and hold command, you will be able to duplicate the shape. Let's try to use the virtual command. Now the command is press, take a look, we got a duplicate. Actually, even you are using your ipad version of the software. Many of those tips and tricks will apply as well. I recommend highly to turn on those virtual buttons because that will be a great asset for you. If you are like me, I use my desktop, my laptop version, for like 90% 85% of time, and only really I use this ipad version. And in that case, I always mix up those gestures and forgetting them. But I remember all of the keyboard shortcuts from my laptop. So this way I can still use shift command option and control buttons to indicate some of those important shortcuts and speed up my workflow, also on ipad. 25. Summary: Nicely done. We have reached the end of this online class. You have learned 17 useful tips and tricks to enhance your workflow. In affinity photo. We've been using this digital workbook all the way to practice each hack your task. Your project is to share the workbook with us. Show us your practice workbook. In the project section, you can pick that you want to show the chapter one or chapter two. Then simply snub a screenshot of your artboards. That's the easiest way for you to share the whole chapter of the workbook with us. This way we can see how you play with those tricks, how you practice with them, how you remix what we have learned together. And that's your final step to complete this class. Please don't forget to post a screenshot of your workbook. You can select chapter one or chapter two, doesn't matter that much, Just simply snap a screenshot and send it in the project section to us so we can all see each other work and congratulate each other on completing this class. And by the way, trust me, only around 30% of viewers reach the very end of the class, You at top of this class already. If you like this learning style of those like mini independent hacks and lessons, Keep in mind I got very similar learning experience prepared for affinity designer as well here on skillshare. So you can dive into 17 tips and tricks for affinity designer next. All right, thank you for learning with me and I will see you next time by.