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

Utilizing a clipping mask – vector

As covered in Chapter 1, the world of digital art is divided up into two distinct categories, pixel (or raster) based art and vector (or math-based) art. So far in this chapter, we have dealt 100% with pixel-based art, that is, painting on mask layers using pixel-based brushes in colors of black and white.

However, another type of masking is utilized involving vector-based art, and the most common term for this style of mask is called a clipping mask. So, why is it called a clipping mask? Simply put, it clips the image to only the shape you want to see.

There are two types of clipping masks:

  • Shape-based clipping masks
  • Curve-based clipping masks

Shape-based clipping masks

Shape-based clipping masks use shapes, such as squares, triangles, hexagons, and so on to create the clipping mask, and only the part of the image inside the clipping mask is shown. For an example of this, take a look at the following screenshot...