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 application of shapes – making a YouTube thumbnail

In this project, we will use the following techniques:

  • The generation and adjustment of shapes
  • The generation and adjustment of the artistic text
  • Using shapes as a clipping mask

I have also included the following in the downloads for this section (see the YouTube thumbnail project folder for both the V1 and V2 versions):

  • The image we will be using
  • A template with the elements already placed
  • The completed file so you can reverse-engineer it

Setting up the project

Follow these steps to set up the project:

  1. Create a 1920x1080 project at 72 DPI.
  2. Generate a rectangle and stretch it to cover the entire surface – make the fill color black.
  3. Generate another rectangle and rotate it (see Figure 16.13 and rotate it changing the fill to a Linear gradient using the A27C00 hex code and then fading to black).
  4. Create a circle in the upper right-hand corner...