Affinity Photo 2 (Desktop) Quickstart Guide

When first launching the app, you’ll be presented with a New Document dialog. Here you can select from many presets to set up your document easily, specify your own and even create a category for your projects.

What you can set is:

• The type of a document (for print, press ready, photo, web, and more)
• Page size and orientation
• Layout, colour and margin settings

This approach is perfect for digital artists with a composite project in mind, where photography can be merged with creative design.

Personas are Affinity’s unique approach to digital image manipulation workflow. Think of Personas as different digital workspaces where different aspects of photo editing are addressed.

For the most part, Affinity users spend most of their time in the Photo Persona where the bulk of your core photo-editing tools and features can be accessed.

Develop Persona is launched by default when opening a raw file. Here, you’re invited to develop the unprocessed raw image before manipulating it further in the Photo Persona.

Any changes applied through the Persona are non-destructive and are loaded as a RAW layer if the Persona’s RAW Layer (Embedded) or RAW Layer (Linked) output option is selected on the context toolbar. Being non-destructive, you can get back to the Develop Persona by double-clicking on the RAW layer’s thumbnail.

You can load any valid pixel layer into Develop Persona at any time by swapping to the Persona.

Here, you’ll find the core photo-editing tools including access to adjustments, layers, brushes, filters as well as other functionality.

The user interface can be perceptually divided into the following main sections:

• The centre area with the main image opened and ready for editing
• The left area hosting the Tools
• The Toolbar at the top
• Up to 10 essential panels at right, including the Colour, Histogram and Layers panels

Liquify Persona focuses on the warping of images. It can be used for subtle face and body reshaping in portrait retouch work or for more extreme image distortions. It offers a studio environment containing a host of warping-specific tools and panels.

Apart from the most commonly used Liquify Push Forward Tool and the Liquify Twirl Tool for warping, you can also find the Freeze Tool here to isolate particular areas for editing. The Thaw Tool, on the other hand, will remove isolated areas once you have finished editing them.

Dedicated primarily for 32-bit HDR files, the Tone Mapping Persona is typically used to manipulate either a number of images taken with bracketed exposures or a single image.

This Persona is selected to work on high dynamic range images so they can be shown on a display that has a lower dynamic range.

The Inpainting Brush Tool is frequently used by portrait photographers to remove skin blemishes or by landscape photographers to clear unwanted objects such as power lines.

The tool is non-destructive—you can remove content by painting with it on a separate layer that targets the unaltered image layer below. To do so, select Current Layer & Below on the tool’s context toolbar before inpainting.

Masking

For compositing work, masking allows you to make visible only a part of an image, pixel layer or adjustment. You can create masks from pixel selections or by painting in/out content on a mask layer using greyscale raster brushes.

Masks can also be:

• created from channels
• created from luminosity
• created as live masks to target hue, luminosity or frequency (band-pass)
• compound masks (multiple masks combined using Boolean operations such as Add and Subtract)
• inverted
• grouped
• isolated

Masking using pixel selections

For image cutouts

Making selections can be one of the most demanding parts of image editing. However, using the Selection Brush Tool or Flood Select Tool, you’ll be able to precisely cut out a subject from its background.

To mask, click Mask Layer on the Layers Panel.

For separating complex edges (e.g., hair, fur) from backgrounds you can refine the selection.

For applying adjustment/filters to specific image areas

After making your pixel selection and applying an adjustment or filter to it, you immediately restrict its effect to just that selection area.

Mask layers for painting in/out image areas

A classic compositing technique is to paint a placed composite image back into a scene by using a mask layer.

You can create a new Empty Mask layer by clicking Mask Layer whilst pressing ⌥ (on Mac) or Alt (on Windows) on the Layers Panel. By dragging the empty mask layer onto the target layer’s thumbnail, you can mask just that target layer by painting on the mask in levels of greyscale to reveal or hide content (white to reveal, black to conceal).

Layers

The Layers Panel lets you arrange content into separate layers in a layer stack. In doing so you can selectively control content visibility, group content, apply adjustments and filters, as well as apply layer properties such as opacity, blend modes and blend ranges.

Opacity

The Opacity setting on the Layers Panel lets you adjust how visible the layer is.

The opacity level can be also controlled with keyboard shortcuts using the numeric keys 1 to 9. These are set in 10% increments, from 10% to 90%.

Blend modes

There is a comprehensive number of blend modes available in Affinity Photo (the example shows the most commonly used) and they are a powerful feature to control how pixel colour and tone are blended together across layers.

You can access blend modes via a pop-up menu at the top of the Layers Panel. As you cycle through the menu items, they preview in realtime, giving you an instant feedback on what the current layer looks like with them applied.

Blend ranges

Blend ranges are Affinity Photo’s version of Adobe’s Blend If set of tools. They give you full tonal control over blending using two graphs that define how the current source layer’s tones blend with those of underlying layers.

You can access blend ranges by clicking the cog-shaped Blend Options icon on the Layers Panel.

Affinity Photo comes packed with a multitude of brushes in a number of categories. Additionally, custom brushes can be imported and created and saved for future use. The Affinity apps have a native .afbrushes brush format but will also import .abr brush files including those with dynamics.

Each brush can be edited by double-clicking on a brush in the Brushes Panel. A quick and powerful way to work with brushes is to use keyboard shortcuts combined with either a mouse, trackpad or stylus gestures as they allow for a speedy and arguably more comfortable workflow.

Try the following to alter brush width and hardness on the fly:

• On Mac, use the Ctrl+⌥ keys with clicking and dragging up/down or left/right respectively.
• On Windows, the modifier is Ctrl+Alt with clicking and dragging up/down or left/right respectively.

Adjustments can be applied non-destructively to your photo for creative or corrective purposes. They are independent non-destructive layers, meaning you can modify their settings at any time without affecting your layer content.

Typically, tonal adjustments such as Brightness/Contrast, Curves (below) or Levels are used, while colour adjustments like HSL and Recolour are popular; the Black and White adjustment (below) can be used creatively.

Any adjustment layer has self-masking properties, meaning that pixel selections are converted to masks on adjustment layer creation or you can paint in greyscale directly on the adjustment layer.

Adjustments can be accessed from your Layers Panel or via the Adjustments Panel (if switched on via the Window menu); they are also available on various panels in the Develop Persona.

Live Filters include blur, sharpen, distortion, noise and edge filters for more creative photo editing. Like adjustment layers, all filter layers are independent non-destructive layers that have self-masking properties.

Incredibly sharp looking outcomes are often produced by taking a series of photos of different focal points within the scene, then merged together into one. After developing and preparing your raw files in the Develop Persona and saving them, you can combine the images into one by going to File>New Focus Merge.

The rendered file will be combined into one final and sharper photo.

Affinity Photo’s built-in panorama stitching feature comes packed with powerful options to merge photos seamlessly and create a wider scene.

Go to File>New Panorama to select images for stitching.

Like panoramas, you can merge images shot at different exposure levels taking into account shadows, midtones and highlights. The combined output will produce an HDR image with an extensive tonal range which would otherwise be impossible due to the limits of a digital camera.

To merge images into a HDR output, use File>New HDR Merge.

There are various ways to export your documents and a multitude of formats available to choose from. The easiest way to export is by using File>Export, where the dialog lets you export:

• The whole document
• Selection area (all layers within the selection bounding box)
• Selection only (the current layer within its selection bounding box, including any transparent regions)

Alternatively, you can use the Export Persona, which takes a slice-based approach to the simultaneous mass export of drawn slices or selected layers. The former is possible by using the Slice Tool which allows you to export any drawn rectangular area and is great for banners, on-the-fly crops, and more.