Book Image

Professional Image Editing Made Easy with Affinity Photo

By : Jeremy Hazel
Book Image

Professional Image Editing Made Easy with Affinity Photo

By: Jeremy Hazel

Overview of this book

In this book, you’ll explore the Affinity Photo program through practice-based learning as you make popular photo edits, learning the tools and techniques in conjunction with the workflow concept. Instead of comprehensive description of the tools, you’ll learn through practical application and understand why they work, not just how they work. This is neither a technical manual nor a workbook but a project-based hybrid approach that provides a deeper understanding of how to use each tool to achieve your goal. Starting with the fundamentals of navigating the interface, understanding layers, and making your first edit, this Affinity Photo book gradually increases the complexity of projects. You’ll go from single-layer edits, composites, and RAW development to putting together a complex composition using the tools that you've learned along the way. Additionally, you’ll learn the best practices used by expert photo editors for a flawless finish. By the end of this book, you’ll have a good body of work, be able to evaluate the edits you want to make, and achieve desired results with Affinity Photo.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundational and Navigation Basics for Affinity Photo
7
Part 2: Fundamental Concepts Used to Create a Simple Edit
13
Part 3 : The Practical Applications of Affinity Photo
19
Part 4: Finishing Your Edit and Building Your Own Artistic Palette

Professional tips, tricks, and important points

As we close, I want to give you some guidance on common blend modes for common tasks. I do want to note, however, that there is no perfect rule or perfect blend mode for every task. There have been many times in my edits where I shaded using Darken instead of Multiply, and many more subtle blend modes can be achieved by using a more aggressive mode and then reducing the opacity. So, the following list is a starting point, but not the end. These are common blend modes for common tasks:

  • Shading and darkening: Multiply
  • Adding overlay textures: Overlay
  • Heavy lightening: Screen
  • Dynamic darkening: Linear burn
  • Dynamic lightening: Color dodge

Tips to make your work more dynamic

Lastly, as a professional, some of my most dynamic edits have been when I combined a layer blend mode with an Adjustment layer blend mode; that interaction adds a ton of interest and value and defines your personal style. The following...