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

Tools to set exposure (levels of light and dark)

Brightness and darkness (what I am referring to when I say exposure) are part of all my workflows. In the workflow that I presented earlier in this chapter, adjusting these values was the second step. We do this early since the brightness of certain areas of the image will affect the colors, focus, and so on. While there are an infinite number of ways to adjust this, I typically use three tools over and over again – they are all Adjustment layers, and they are as follows:

  • Exposure Adjustment
  • Levels Adjustment
  • Curves

These are ranked in terms of complexity, with the top one (Exposure Adjustment) being the easiest, and Curves being the hardest. So, if you are new to editing, please start with the easiest to keep the momentum going.

To minimize variation, we will be working with the same file for all the different adjustment types (the cat on the wall that’s present in Figure 7.3). this way, you can...