James Paterson shows you how to transform your photos into stunning Christmas cards with Affinity Photo layers
BEFORE
VIEW THE VIDEO
What better way to send season’s greetings to friends and family than with a homemade Christmas card? In this project we’ll show you how to craft a vibrant festive effect in Affinity Photo, bringing together snowflakes, colourful bokeh and eye-catching sparkles with simple layer skills, before capping it off with a Christmas message. To speed up the process, we’ve supplied a range of images amongst the project files that we can bring together with simple layer skills. We’ve also included our furry friend for you to practise on, but of course the idea here is to use your own festive portrait. Try shooting a person or pet in a Christmas hat or carrying a present, then follow the steps to transform it into a merry masterpiece.
We’ll begin here by cutting out the subject, which is a simple task if we use a combination of Affinity Photo’s Selection Brush and the Refine command. After removing the original background we can add a new one of bold green. From here, we can blend our bokeh photos and sparkles to add depth and colour to the effect. Then comes the snow. Thanks to a handy brush tool setting, we can paint a blizzard of snow in seconds. There’s an ‘Ink Spatter’ brush tip that handily looks like flurries of snowflakes, especially if we blur it slightly with the Motion Blur filter. Finally, we can add a line of text using Affinity Photo’s text tools. These might be little-used by photographers, but they create a surprisingly powerful addition.
1 Remove background
You need to cut the background. Open the image into Affinity Photo. Grab the Selection Brush, check ‘Snap to edges’ in the options and paint the subject to select it. Click the Refine button at the top, increase Border Width then choose Output: Mask and hit Apply.
4 Paint the snow
Grab the brush tool then go to the Brush panel (Window > Brushes). Click the dropdown and choose the Sprays and Spatters set, then select the ‘Ink Spatter Tilting’ brush. Paint with white over the image. Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur to blur the snow slightly. Duplicate the layer and enlarge it to create a few larger blobs.
2 Add some colour
Make a new pixel layer and drag it below the other layer, then go to Edit > Fill. Choose a colour (we used #439a3e). Next grab the Dodge tool. Set Tonal Range: Midtones then use a large soft brush to lighten the centre of the background to create a vignette effect.
3 Blend the bokeh
Open the supplied bokeh images. Hit Cmd/Ctrl+C to copy then go back to the main image and hit Cmd/Ctrl+V to paste it in. Go to the Layers panel and change the blend mode fr
