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

Basics of masking and making your first mask

In this introductory section, we will learn the basics of masking, starting first with the principles because while techniques frequently change, principles never do. If you understand the principles and come to terms with the idea that there is no one perfect way to mask, then we can move on to the most basic type of mask you can make, a brush-on mask.

We will cover the steps needed to get you up and running immediately using a brush-on-mask approach, no selection is needed, and no advanced techniques are required, just a simple immediate repeatable solution, so let’s get started.

Masking principles

When I teach masking, I find it best to break it down into three fundamental principles because principles never fail; only techniques do:

  • Principle #1: Masking is simply a way of saying what we are hiding and what we are showing.

When you mask an object, you hide part of it, obscuring some of it from view. So...