AFFINITY PHOTO
James Paterson shows you how to use the Develop Persona’s powerful features in Affinity Photo to enhance your RAW portraits
When it comes to editing portraits, a few simple techniques can take your image in all kinds of interesting directions. In this project we’ll explore a range of edits you can make in Affinity Photo. Most of these are carried out in the Develop Persona, which is the workspace for RAW editing. This is the place to process and enhance your raw photos before – if necessary – taking them into the main Photo Persona for further editing.
Straight out-of-camera RAW files tend to look a little flat and dull. But this is because RAWs are meant to give you the best possible starting point for editing. RAWs contain greater dynamic range and colour data than JPEGs, and we can use the tools in the Affinity Photo Develop Persona to harness all this extra data. This is why, as a rule of thumb, it’s best to take a RAW image as far as we can using RAW the development tools, and only then open it into the Photo Persona for further editing if necessary. While the
RAW tools in the Develop Persona lack the depth of features in the Photo Persona, there are still several powerful features like Curves and Overlays. We can use these to enhance our portrait, make local adjustments and to boost the colours.
We’ve supplied a portrait for you to try out but better to use your own, and it needn’t even be a RAW file. You can edit JPEGs or TIFF files in the Develop Persona too, just click the icon at top left to open any image into Affinity Photo’s RAW workspace.
STEP BY STEP RAW TRICKS FOR PORTRAITS
Boost portrait colours, add a vignette and enhance the eyes with simple edits
01 CLASSIC S-CURVE
Go to the Develop Persona. Go to the Curves panel and plot an S-shaped curve to boost contrast and saturation. Sometimes it’s worth reducing the contrast using the Contrast slider, then adding it with an S-curve instead. This gives you a finer degree of control over shadows and highlights.
02 BOOST THE EYES
The Overlay tools allow you to paint over areas to make local adjustments. A subtle boost to the eyes can be very effective. Go to the Overlay panel and click on the brush then paint over the iris. Go to the Basic Panel and increase saturation and contrast. Repeat to lighten the whites of the eyes slightly.
03 EXPERIMENT WITH CURVES
You can get all kinds of creative colour effects by experimenting with the curves channels. Go to the Curves Panel and change the dropdown from Master to Red, G
