Technique PHOTO-EDITING MASTERCLASS
The Affinity Photo 2 interface can look pretty daunting to newbies, so Rod Lawton explains how to get to grips with these key image-editing tools
Even if you’re used to Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or other photo editors, Affinity Photo’s way of working may leave you confused – so here’s our guide to making everyday adjustments in Affinity Photo, using the full power of its non-destructive editing workflow and explaining how layer masks work along the way.
All this work is done in Affinity Photo’s Photo Persona, which is where you find the bulk of its image-editing tools. If you open a raw file, it will pass through the Develop module first and then arrive here in the Photo Persona for any further editing.
There are four buttons on the top toolbar: Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colours and Auto White Balance. These act directly on the image layer, so it’s much harder to backtrack and change what you’ve done. We won’t use these. Instead, we’ll use Affinity Photo’s Adjustment layers, which are created using the pop-up menu at the bottom of the Layers panel on the right.
It’s very useful to have all these nondestructive, re-editable adjustments, but this does rely on saving your photo using the bespoke Affinity Photo file format. This happens automatically when you use the Save or Save As options – Affinity Photo will create a new image file alongside your original in its own file format.
However, the Affinity Photo format won’t be readable by anything else, so if you want to share your edited photo, you will need to Export it as a regular JPEG or TIFF file using File>Export. Your exported image will have all your adjustments baked in for good, so if you want to change anything later you’ll need to go back to the Affinity Photo file, not the exported version.
So that’s a quick tour of Affinity Photo adjustments, how to combine them and how to use masks to choose the areas they apply to.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH SERIF
AFTER
Top tip
Affinity Photo’s Adjustment panels have four buttons across the top. Here’s what they do. If you think you might want to use an adjustment again in the future you can click the Add Preset button, and it will appear in the Adjustment panel. The Merge button applies the adjustment permanently to the image layer itself. The Delete button gets rid of the Adjustment layer altogether, while the Reset button keeps the panel open but resets your settings so that you can try a different approach. Your changes are applied ‘live’ as you work, and to get rid of the panel you can click on the Close gadget or simply click anywhere else
