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

Working with layer effects

Off and on through previous chapters, we have touched on various layers such as Pixel layers, Mask layers, Adjustment layers, and so on. However, there is another aspect of layers we need to talk about if we are discussing special effects and fancy brushes, and this is the idea of layer effects. Layer effects are found at the bottom of the Layers panel, displayed by small FX symbol (see Figure 15.7):

Figure 15.7 – The FX tab location

Figure 15.7 – The FX tab location

Layer effects are more of a factor in Affinity Designer, as we apply them primarily to vector-based objects. In Affinity Photo, there are live filter layers for several layer effects (such as blurring an image). So, you may not use them as much as an illustrator would, but it is essential when discussing specialty brushes. While we will not go through all of them, I will give you the most frequently used by me in my work relating to advanced brushes and photo editing.

Applying layer effects...