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

Practical editing using color grading

Now, it is time to practice how to use gradients in an actual edit. In your downloads for this section, we have added a practice file, and I have edited the file using techniques we have discussed previously to a point we can explore gradients (see the Practical edit flower file in the downloads). I have included a screenshot of the image in the following figure:

Figure 10.14 – Editing the flower file – project breakdown

Figure 10.14 – Editing the flower file – project breakdown

Notice a few things before we get started:

  • (1): I edited the file with some existing edits. Here are some highlights:
    • I added exposure for the background and midground. A simple brush has been applied to the masks to make the adjustments visible in certain areas of the image (notice that the white thumbnails have black spots in them in item 1).
    • I applied an Unsharp mask to bring out the foreground and applied the foreground mask.
  • (2): I created selections for the Foreground...