Affinity Photo 2 for iPad Quickstart Guide

Upon opening Affinity Photo, you’re greeted with its Home screen. Use the icons on the left to create, open or manage documents.

Tap New and then New Document to create a blank document. When editing a document, return to the Home screen by tapping the button in the workspace’s top-left corner.

Return to documents you’ve created or opened but not closed by tapping Live Docs. Simply tap one’s thumbnail to continue working on it. You can also save and close documents from here.

If you’ve closed a document, tap Open and then Open Document to navigate to and reopen it. Tap Templates to use an existing document as the starting point for a new one.

You can also explore professional Samples and get further Help with your app’s features from the Home screen.

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

Photo 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 core tools
• The menus at top left: Personas, Document, Edit, Selection
• The context toolbar at the top adjacent to the menus
• Panels on the right, including the Colour, Layers, Brushes, Adjustments and more

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 Push Forward Tool and Push Left 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.

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 can be non-destructive and are loaded as a RAW layer. Being non-destructive, you can redevelop at any time.

To do so, ensure to set your layer as RAW Embedded or Linked, which can be done via the option on the context toolbar.

Tone Mapping Persona

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
• switched on or off according to their state

Masking using pixel selections

For image cutouts

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

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 tapping on the + symbol, then selecting Empty Mask Layer on the Layers Panel. This lets you mask the previously selected target layer by painting on the mask in levels of greyscale to reveal or hide content (white to fully reveal, black to completely 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.

The types of layers that can be created are:

• Pixel Layer
• Fill Layer
• Pattern Layer
• Pattern Layer from Selection
• Mask Layer
• Empty Mask Layer
• Compound Mask Layer
• Hue Live Mask Layer
• Luminosity Live Mask Layer
• Bandpass Live Mask Layer
• Empty Group

Opacity

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

Blend Modes

There is a comprehensive number of blend modes available in Affinity Photo and they are a powerful feature to control how pixel colour and tone are blended together across layers.

You can access blend modes directly on the Layers Panel, adjacent to the Opacity setting. As you cycle through them, 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 range options by tapping Layer Options (ellipsis) on the Layers Panel. The blend range graphs are then accessible at the bottom of the panel.

Affinity Photo comes packed with a multitude of brushes in the Brushes Panel. Additionally, custom brushes can be imported, 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 modified by swiping left on a brush entry on the panel.

As you paint brush strokes, alter brush width and hardness on the fly by dragging outwards from the Command Controller’s centre button to the space between the ⌃ and ⌥ buttons. The buttons will highlight in blue when you do so. Whilst having them pressed, drag up/down to change on-screen the hardness of your selected brush or left/right to modify its width.

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 or Levels are used, while colour adjustments like HSL and Recolour are popular; the Black and White adjustment can be used creatively.

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

Adjustments can be accessed from the Adjustments Panel; they are also available on various other panels within 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.

By default, you will be presented with all filters available via the Filters Panel. To include live filters, toggle Add Live Filters on the top right.

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 them into one by going to the Home screen, choosing New, then selecting 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.

On Affinity’s Home screen, tap New and then 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.

On Affinity’s Home screen, tap New and then New HDR Merge.

To export your project, select Export from the Document menu. The dialog that appears 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.