 What's up guys, in today's episode we're taking a look at Affinity Photo. We're going to go over the top 10 things that you need to know as a beginner. Let's go! If you're head on over to affinity.serif.com if you haven't got it already, head on over to buy now and then what you'll see is you can choose Mac or Windows and then you'll see there's a free trial button just here it's just in the link. If you hit that then you'll be able to sign up and you'll be able to get a free trial. I think it's for about 14 days at the moment and it's just well worth it before you invest the money at the end of it if you like it it's only 50 bucks it's £50 in the UK but it's definitely the first thing you'll need to do is just get affinity installed. Once you've opened up the program the first thing beginners need to know is how to import your images into Affinity Photo and I'm going to show you two different ways how to do it. The first is head on over to finder then I've created a folder called Affinity Photo and what I'll do is select the pictures that I want to move into then I'll click and drag and just move them over into Affinity Designer and it will open them up and it won't open up in a way that there's these tabs at the top so if I hit the tabs I can switch between the two images. I can close the images by pressing the little x on the tab and I can close the image I've got open by pressing command w or control w on a pc and that will close the image. There's another way to do this one is pressing file and then open this will open the browser you can then select the images again or you can press command o control o on a pc that will open the same dialog box select the images hit open and then it will import it ready to start or retouching. Once you've opened your image up in Affinity Photo the first thing we're going to talk about is the actual layout of the program itself and we'll just touch on over the a few of the basic things that you'll need to know. In the left hand side are all our detailed controls and what these are is the pan tool with the hand so you can pan around your image then you've got a direct selection tool then a few of these we'll talk about in detail later but there are other things like an eyedropper tool where you can select individual colors and it appears over here in your colors then there's things like a brush and an eraser and then we go into things like we can add shapes so if you click and hold on the shape you could add any of these shapes to your image just by clicking and dragging then we have the text tool warp tool and the zoom tool these will come into in later episodes because they're a bit more advanced but this is where all your detailed actual tools live then we have a contextual tool bar so if I change between different tools this tool bar actually changes and it gives us a bit more information about the one we're actually on at the moment so we have text tool you'll see I can choose all of my actual text characteristics up here and it's a really good place just to look when you're in a tool to see if there's any control that you have on the right hand side we have at the top this is all about colors so we have like color selection tool then we have swatches and we can choose between some pre-selected one or once that have been made by Pantern so we can choose some nice colors then we have brushes where we can go in and see the actual type of brush that we want to paint with if we're doing some more graphic design and then histogram is something where we'll have a look in a second and you can see the colors of your image beneath that is the layers panel and whenever you do photo retouching there's different layers involved and what they are is it's how you build stuff on top of each other so if you were to add text on this it would be on a different layer and sometimes you like where's the text gone but it's actually beneath a layer in here so you can so let me just quickly add text you'll see that it adds a new layer and then I can delete it or I can reorder them in this toolbox here if you want to rename your files sometimes it's good to rename so your background you might type in beach you just click on the name and then there's a little lock icon here now whenever a friend's photo opens the document it automatically locks it for you so you're going to want to unlock your layer and that way we can work on it in a second then there's a little tick icon here and that means we can switch the layer on and off something we want to do we want to preview layers beneath it's a really good tool then at the bottom of the layers panel all the way down here is this is where we're going to add some actual filters to our image non-destructive filters we'll add them in a second and I'll walk you through but this is where you do that and there's also other more complex things you can do then at the bottom you can look at your history by using these tabs and seeing what you've done so you can go back and forward and you can transform objects then you can use your navigator which is your pan zoom in and out and that's really all the most basic things you're going to want to know for now now that we know our way around the affinity photo basically and we've opened our image the first thing you always want to do when retouching is crop and straighten your photo so you might take a gray photo of a beach it's really really obvious here because there's a horizon which is which is meant to be a straight line but it looks a bit wonky and sometimes you think I'll ruin the photo by not doing it straight but it's a really easy way to fix this and this is going to be the first thing you want to do whenever you open an image or it's anything that I do whenever I open an image so in the left hand side go down to the fourth one down or you can press c on your keyboard and this opens up the crop tool now up here in the contextual panel there's lots of different things we can do so we can we can change the actual grid on there for now fades grid's fine you'll see the straight lines and that'll help in a second but if you actually go to this here it says straighten what I'll do is it'll give you this little cursor and if you click and drag and you'll drag this horizontal line tool and then let go and then you do that on a straight line and the whole in the program will actually automatically just straighten your image for you and that's really cool then what we can do is we can choose our crop by clicking in these lines here you can choose the aspect ratio of your image you can you can crop a portion that you want so crop it so it looks nice but I just want to get rid of this see the invisible background here that's because we rotated the image and there was nothing there so I'm just going to choose a crop that I think looks good then when I like it I'm going to hit apply and that's cropped and straightened the photo and you can see it looks a lot better than when we first started one of the first things that I like to do whenever I import an image and get it set up is get rid of imperfections in the image I used to do a lot of beauty retouching so we'd you could do this on the skin with blemishes or spots or acne or you could do it in this image I'm going to get rid of this flag in the bottom corner I don't really like the way it's sitting in the image and that thing is quite simple to get rid of and a good example of this tool so if you go down here on the left hand side just beneath the little water drop click and hold and click the in painting brush tool make sure you've got the layer selected that you want to do most of the time I don't like to work on the original layer so I press command j and that will duplicate my layer control j on the pc and then I can switch it on and off to see what the original looked like or not so here you can use your bracket tools to make this circle bigger or smaller make it so you can paint over the image make sure you've got the layer selected then just click and drag and you see this red it paints over the image and then boom magically it's gone so I can click on and off to show you what it looked like and it's done a wonderful job so I might want to get rid of this on the horizon line as well and then there you go it uses some it's like AI to understand other parts of the image and add in what it thinks should be there it's a wonderful way to get your images looking great and it's super easy and quick to do now that you've got rid of all the blemishes in your photo it's cropped and straightened it's looking great we're going to add the non-destructive adjustment layer now what that means is we're going to change some of the characteristics of the photo like make it black and white or we'll make the contrast a bit more and we'll do that on a layer above the image so we can switch it on and off and we can get rid of it if we don't like it so we'll head on over to our layers panel at the bottom here you'll see this half circle if you hover over it says adjustments click on that and then these are all the different things we can add into the image whenever doing retouching I like to do as little as possible but make it look realistic so I'm just going to show you levels and what levels is is you can change the black and white on the image so if I just move the white up and move the black up you can see that it actually affects the image it took a long time to load but it's actually launched a histogram here and what I like to do is so you'll see between if I move the black between here and here there's nothing and then here is when you start it's basically ruining the image it's destructing it so if I just move it up to where it's not ruining anything and I'll do the same with the white adjust there and I'll just exit that and I'll just show you what I've done it's only very slightly but it makes the photo look a lot better and you're not basically destroying any of the actual natural pixels in the image because you're using that blank level at the bottom there are other things you can do in here you can add you can click recolor and it will add a color over the top you can change it it's a bit too much for me so if you don't want to hit reset hit x and then you can either switch it on and off or just delete it from there so you can see we're not actually affecting the original image we're just adding non-destructed layers above the image now that we've got our image looking good with our adjustment layers I'm going to talk about blending modes and adding different images on top of this so if you go into the other image I'm going to copy it and then I'm going to bypass and command c or control c heading back to this image and pasting it we'll paste it on a layer above now if you just go up here just next to a pasta you'll see it says normal now this is where you can choose the blending mode of the of the image and there are some cool things you can do here so the two main ones I want to talk about a multiply and screen multiply effectively keeps all the blacks in the image and makes the whites invisible screen does the opposite it makes the white and the light colors opaque and it makes the black see through so for this I'm going to click screen so I don't want to see the black but I want to see the fine works then I'm going to use my direct selection tool just going to reposition this and then the next thing I'm going to show you really quickly is how to resize something so if you select the little not yours on the corner move it up you'll see a lot of people do this if you hold shift it'll constrain the proportions so you're never changing the photo when it's looking realistic at all times there's nothing worse than seeing someone who's done a retouching job and squashed something and it just doesn't look good so always hold shift when you drag it around then reposition it and then when you're done just click out so you can see I've repositioned this I've added the blend motor screen so all the black goes invisible and it actually looks quite realistic above the city another common thing that beginners want to do is add a text layer above this so we might be making a graphic design poster if you hit the little a or hit a on your keep or T on your keyboard sorry you get the text tool and then what you can do is you click drag and what affinity programs do really well is they give you a preview of how big your font's going to be so you don't need to guess so I think that looks good I'll let go and then I'll just type in happy new year then I'll select my object selection tool and just position this to where I want it in the image then as we discussed before up here is where all are really our text controls so we can change the font by clicking on this and moving down I thought that I like to use a lot as diedo when I used to design vogue magazine you have a look at it on the shelves you'll see diedo used a lot and that's it's kind of like an art deco style font it's got these really thin fins and these really fat thick edges on the on the font and it's really nice it looks really classy especially when using it with like fashion things so I use diedo quite a bit just going to position my text and then there's other things that you can do you can make a bold if you want here you can italicize it and then these are your controls for having it in the text box whether you want a central lined left aligned or other more complex font stylings but for now that's fine I'm just going to select off it and that's looking good to me the last thing that beginners want to know is how to export an image once you've got it looking good how you want it and this for example might be a postcard or a poster so I'm going to head up to the top hit file I can save it that will save it as an affinity photo document you'll always want to do that and save it first but then if I want to export it for printing or for web I go down to export and that gives me a really nice little export dialog box and this is where I can choose different file formats so just quickly there's a few things you can do if you want to open it in Photoshop you can save it as psd which is really nice then the others are more complex graphic design elements but the basic thing you need to know about saving is or for now there are two different file formats you'll need to know png and jpeg png when you're working with photography is an uncompressed file that means it's the largest file size but it's also the highest quality jpeg is compressed so you'll see here even though it's the quality is as high as jpeg can go it's 3.4 whereas it's something like 5 or 4.2 for png and with jpeg I can make the quality less but it will also make the file size dramatically less and that's what you want to do when you're saving out for websites so you know the internet loads images and it takes a while to get them in you want them as small but as high as quality as possible and it's a little bit of an art form by taking a look exporting them seeing what you think of it looks good but for now I'm going to keep it here I'm going to export and then I'm going to choose where I want to save it to I'm just going to type in my file hit save and that's it saved guys I hope you liked that episode let me know in the comments what you think about affinity photo is just something you're thinking of using if you haven't already checked our school that antonycomboy.com got loads of free resources tutorials if you want more in-depth tutorials a bit like today then check it out think about subscribing to the youtube channel we're going to put a lot more content and until next time keep designing