This is just a collection of things I have picked up on which I realize are very useful and important for just general usage of Affinity Photo and related suite of tools.
Olivio Sarikas has an excellent intro to Affinity Photo which would cover a lot of the same things as I do here: FIX MidJourney AI Artworks - Affinity Photo Ultimate Beginners Guide
Also worth knowing that you can get full overview of all the Affinity Photo UI and tools on the Affinity Web site: Get answers fast.
Adding and Removing Panels
You know all the little panels on the right side with for layers, color, swatches, histogram, transform, and brushes? Ever accidentally remove one of those, and now you cannot get back one you used? They are all listed under the Windows
submenu to the right of the Help
menu entry. You can toggle them on there.
The Click-Drag Trick
Several tools in Affinity work in a bit unusual way. They require you to click and hold. For instance, to do color sampling from the color panel by clicking and holding the mouse on the little round color well. A color is picked when you release the button.
The Info panel towards the bottom of your stack of panels (together with History, Transform, and Navigator palette windows) has similar behavior for picking reference colors. You can click on the crosshairs and hold while moving it to an area of the image you want to use as a reference point.
I am pointing this out because I constantly forget that this is a way many tools work in Affinity. I usually think I can click on the tool once, and it becomes selected, and I perform a second click somewhere. No, some tools such as color picker and reference color picker require click and drag.
While the Info palette and these reference color selectors may look pointless, they are very useful. For instance, when doing curves adjustments, you could use this functionality to pick colors in two locations. One of the picked colors is used as reference, while the other is the color you want to change. You can then adjust curves until you see the modified color matches the RGB values of the reference color.
But, of course, the ability to compare two colors as you do any kind of operation affecting colors in different areas is useful.
Hotkeys for Using Tools
Some operations are done so frequently that you really need to learn the hotkeys to work effectively with them. For instance, when erasing or drawing, you usually want to make the brush smaller and bigger frequently. Use [
and ]
keys for that purpose. Many operations involve painting in black or white. For instance, adjustment layers are such that white means maximum effect while black means minimal. Swapping between black and white quickly is thus useful. Use the X
key to toggle between foreground and background color.
Furthermore, learn the hotkeys for very frequently used tools. For instance, the eraser tool is E
and the brush tool is B
.
Option
click (holding option key) while using the pain brush, samples the color under your mouse cursor. That is very handy when doing retouching of, for instance, skin and want to toggle between selecting various skin tones from the image you are modifying.
I use Shift
key a lot when resizing things, as it allows you to decide whether you want to retain the aspect ratio or not.
Duplicating things is different in Affinity from the rest of the Mac. Usually Command-D
duplicates on the Mac, but on Affinity it deselects a selection. Instead, you use Command-J
to duplicate things. You can use this to duplicate layers, objects and many other things.
Summary:
[
and]
adjusts brush size. Can also useCtrl+Alt
and click and drag mouse to adjust.X
toggles between foreground and background color (e.g., black and white)Option
click while using Brush tool samples color under mouse cursorOption click has different effect for different tools. For selection, it can be used to subtract from selection, for instance.
Shift
is useful in numerous instances, such as retaining aspect ratio when resizing or drawing a box or circleCommand-D
for deselect andCommand-J
for duplicating an object
Non-Destructive Editing
After listening to Olivio Sarikas, I realize I have been using Affinity wrong in many ways. I have used the clone tool, in-painting brush and similar in a destructive manner. Meaning, I have modified a layer directly. Instead, several tools (not all) have in their context dependent area the ability to select that the tool should use layers below. If you are using a regular paint brush, that isn't needed as you don't need to interact with other layers, but the clone tool picks colors from a layer to allow painting. However, you would rather not paint in the same layer as you are picking colors. That is why you select the option current layer & below.
I thought it was supposed to be in the context-free toolbar. However, this drop-down is tool-specific, since it doesn't make sense for the regular Paint Brush tool (B).
Touchup Tools such as Blemish Removal and In-painting
Initially, I used the blemish tool for all sorts of touchup work. You click on a spot you want to remove and then move your cursor to a spot which contains pixels to replace with. You get a live update, so you can easily determine when you have found an area which fits perfectly.
I used it as my goto tool for any touchup, but it is really quite a specialized tool. The In-painting tool is far more practical and useful in most cases. You use it to paint over an area you want removed, and it uses surroundings to calculate how to remove the things you painted over. Basically, it can recognize texture around the abnormality you are painting over.
It is useful to not limit yourself to only one touchup method. Often touchup is done better with non-touchup tools. For instance, sometimes I just copy an area and place it over an object or blemish I want removed. Then I just use the eraser with a soft tip to blend in the copied part with the surroundings.
Another useful tool is the clone tool. A frequent mistake I see here with both myself and others is using too small a brush. You don't need to be that precise with the clone tool. As long as you work in a separate layer you can always fix-up things afterward with the eraser. Using a larger clone tool brush with a soft tip allows you to blend things together better without introducing very obvious patterns.
Parent Child Relations with Layers
For pixel layers, the effect of making a layer child of another is quite apparent. Whenever you move the parent layer, the content of the child layer moves with it. But what happens when a Mask or Adjustment layer is a child? The effect they create is applied to the parent layer. This may be a bit counterintuitive because normally the effects of an adjustment layer are applied to all layers below it in the layer stack. However, you don't always want an effect such as contrast or hue change to apply to all layers below, but to only a specific layer or a subset of layers. You can limit the effect to one layer by making the adjustment layer a child of the layer you want to apply the effect. If you would like to apply the effect to multiple layers, you group those layers and place the adjustment layer inside the group. Since the adjustment layer is a child of the group, it will apply to the whole group.
In the example above, the recoloring adjustment layer has been made a child of the head layer. That is why we only see the head being recolored to purple. You may also notice the hair is not being recolored. That is because there is a mask layer as well, which had been used to limit the pixels which are affected by the adjustment layers.
Working with Masks and Selections
Selections are really bread and butter because they allow you to limit the area painting operations are applied. They also allow you to copy specific areas.
Converting Selections to Masks
But selections are difficult to preserve or reuse. That is why masks are useful. Masks are like persisted selections.
Converting a Selection to a Mask in Affinity Photo
I am covering this here because I always mix up how masks work and are used in photo applications. It is worth knowing that in Affinity, whenever you create any kind of layer that uses a mask, Affinity will use your current selection as the mask for that layer. For instance, if you create an adjustment layer for setting contrast and brightness and already have a selection, then the mask will be created for that adjustment layer so that contrast and brightness is only changed for the area you have selected.
So, selecting Layer > New Mask Layer
from the menu while you got a selection will turn that selection into a mask. Usually, you would click buttons under the layers box for this, but it is easier for me to reference the menu bar when writing about this.
Once you got a Mask layer (of any kind) you can edit it by Option clicking it (hold down Option/Alt key while clicking mask layer).
This is important to know, as it isn't easy to discover this functionality otherwise. I was hunting around the UI to find a way to edit or view the mask I had created, but couldn't find anything. I only learned in the linked videos that you can use Option click. In fact, it is a good habit to try option click with all sorts of stuff because it frequently does useful stuff you need to know about.
Editing a Mask
Once you got a mask, you can edit it just like any layer after you option-click. Use white, black, and gray tones to edit the mask. You use gray tones to only partially mask something.
Masks as handy compared to selections because you can name them, move them around, duplicate them and keep several of them around.
Useful tip: You can use the eraser tool (E) as if it was a brush tool (B) with black color selected. A benefit in doing that is that you create a smaller mental leap in switching between erasing pixels in a layer and "erasing" using a mask.
Convert a Mask to a Selection
Occasionally, we need a selection. No problem, you can turn a Mask layer back into a selection. You select Select > Selection from Layer
from the menu while your Mask layer is selected.
Converting a Mask to a Selection in Affinity Photo
Grouping Layers with a Mask
A technique I find handy is to group numerous layers and then place a Mask in that group. Why is that useful? Because often you create adjustment layers to affect for instance only the eyes, hair, or face. You typically want numerous adjustment layers to impact the same part of the image. Hence, you really need to reuse the mask. Placing layers using the same mask within the same group is a way to achieve that.
Creating and Editing a Selection
Typically, we want to only influence, e.g., a head, body or similar. To select a person and not the background, it works very well to use the selection Brush tool (hit W to select). While working with this tool, you can use Option click to remove selection areas if you have too much selected.
REFINING SELECTION
An important trick I was taught about this tool is using the Refine...
dialog. Right underneath the regular toolbar, you will find an area with buttons and drop-downs related to your currently selected tool. At the far right there is a Refine...
button. When you click that, the selection turns into a sort of Red Mask which you can easily edit.
When doing this, you work with different modes. If you select Foreground
, then you add to your selection. Background
will subtract. But the most interesting is probably Matte
which lets you draw at edges. Affinity will then use smarts to calculate where the edge is and adjust your mask accordingly.
The same functionality is available to edit masks. You right-click a Mask and select Refine from the drop-down menu.
Summary
Okay, that was a lot so let me summarized the important stuff to keep in mind:
Get back panels you lost by using the Window menu
Get used to hotkeys such as
[
,]
,X
,B
,E
, shift and option clickMasks are outstanding, use them more! Usable when you need named selections, or want to do easily undoable erasing (blending) of a layer
Child adjustment layers apply their effects only to parent layer
Use non-destructive edits more actively. Most tools can be configured to use layers below.
Of all the blemish removal tools, the clone tool and in-painting tool are the most usable.