 Welcome to another edit with Affinity Photo. It's been a while since I've done one of these edits in Affinity Photo. I'm trying to get my channel to be a little bit more educational this year. And so I'm going to go ahead and show how I edit my photos if if it's something that people want to see. I don't use Lightroom. I used to use Photoshop and now I use Affinity Photo and I've been using Affinity Photo for about four years. So I'm currently using Affinity Photo on a laptop. I used to use it mostly on my desktop. It's a quite a bit older computer and the laptop has a much newer operating system and I think Affinity Photo is running a little bit better on it. One thing that I used to do on the old system was I had a lot of nick plugins that I kind of relied heavily on in my workflow. Now I'm on the laptop. I haven't loaded the plugins. I felt like maybe I was getting a little bit too reliant on the plugins. So for a while anyway I'm going to be using Affinity Photo and only Affinity Photo for my edits. So the image we're going to edit today is from a shoot this last fall. It was at the Oregon Dunes. And I picked one that isn't a perfect exposure and it's got some issues. But I think we can resolve the issues and make a pretty nice image out of it. I'm not trying to be a spokesperson for Affinity Photo. They can do a lot better than me in promoting their software. I'm just trying to show you how I do it. This isn't a tutorial. This is just how I use the program. So I've got a raw file loaded up. Let's jump in and start the edit. All right we've got the photo loaded up and there's a couple things wrong with this photo as you can see. It looks kind of dark and it's got this spot on the sensor. A big spot like a piece of fuzz or something right on the sensor. You get into a some good light and what do you get? You get fuzz on the sensor. But I think where it's located I think I can crop quite a bit because I don't need this this little clump over here. It's kind of messy anyway. So if I'm able to crop it about here I think I can save this image. Now I keep the tone curves off. Open this up. The development assistant. Where it says tone curve down here I have it set to take no action. So that's one reason why it looks a little on the dark side when you when I bring in a raw file into Affinity Photo. You can set it up to apply a tone curve and it does lighten it up. But generally I start with just the raw data and so if it's a little on the dark side that's okay. But you might prefer to go ahead and apply the tone curve when you're using the develop persona. But for me right now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to turn that off and just take no action there. So we've got a kind of a dark looking file and we've got this ugly mess over here. So first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and lighten it up a little bit. A little bit on the exposure slider. A little on the brightness slider. That might turn up the black point just a little bit. I don't usually do a lot of contrast adjustments or saturation adjustments in a development persona. You can add a little contrast if you want to. Just want to be careful. You want to make sure you take a lot of a good information into the photo persona. If I slid this all the way over I think it would be overexposed. This is it at a sunset and the light is pretty low. It's pretty warm so I really want to overcorrect that. It's kind of hard to do while recording. That looks pretty good. We're going to develop that and take it into the photo persona. First thing to do here I think we're going to crop it. I think for this image I'm not going to keep it in its original aspect ratio. I'm going to go ahead and crop it unconstrained. I could put it in the original aspect ratio but for this image I don't really think it's that important to keep that aspect ratio so I'm going to go ahead and leave it unconstrained. What I want to do is at least crop out that little group dark group at the end there but because the way that fuzz drops down into the dunes there really I just I think I'm going to try to crop out just the edge of it so all I have to do is deal with it in the lighter area. Bring it down just a bit because there's really nothing in the sky that's all that important. Keep it just balanced just a little bit closer to a four by five it looks like. I think that looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and apply that. All right let's deal with this piece of fuzz here. Get it where we can see it. Magnify it a little bit. We're here about 75 percent. Over here we've got a good assortment of tools and I like this in-painting brush tool for this kind of operation. That took care of it pretty slick. All right now we can just work on contrast and the color and saturation. Let's start with the levels. Just a little bit darken up the shadows adding it's basically just adding contrast to the image is what it really needs. Looks pretty good. We're going to go with that for now. Let's go down to brightness and contrast. Slightly lighten it just a little bit. Let's add a little contrast. A little bit more. Too much. It's starting to come together already. Really is in vibrance. Add a little saturation. Bring out some of those warm tones that are there. Not too much. It's so easy to overdo this. There's a little bit of a haze in the sky. There's really not a lot I can do about that. I think that looks pretty good. I know this is this is pretty basic stuff. To my eye that looks pretty good. It's really good when you get an image where you think you like it. It's good to look away from the screen a little while. Maybe leave your monitor go get something to drink. Then come back to it and then look at it again to see if your eyes have weren't overly adjusted to the screen before. I find that if I stare at an image for too long my eyes have adjusted to that image that it isn't really as dark or light as my eyes are telling me. Sometimes it's good to look away for a while and then come back and get a fresh look at it. For this one we use the vibrance, brightness, contrast, and the level slider. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe I will try the shadow highlight. If I can darken just the shadow it's just a little bit more. Just to add a little bit more contrast in those darker areas. Is that really adjusting anything else? Yeah I think that looks pretty good. Probably do the same thing in levels. Can check what you've done. Well it seems to pop pretty good now. I don't think that looks unrealistic. That looks pretty much what it looked like when I was there. Now you can save this and it'll save your your layers that you've created. I usually don't. I rarely save a edit because it doesn't take very long for me to get to where I want it to be. So I could save this as a 16-bit tiff which is what I normally do and export this as a 16-bit tiff. I've done so many of these that I rarely save it. I just export it. When you're exporting it you're just saving it as a tiff. It still has a bunch of information. If I want to fine-tune it a little bit make some tweaks to it it's really easy to do as a tiff. I rarely need to go completely back to the beginning to edit a photo. And I'll make a jpeg version. I like to put a border around these. So I'm going to go ahead and flatten this since I'm not going to save the layers. I'm going to go ahead and flatten it and then we're going to put a border on it. Gotta have a border on it before it's done. I like a border on my photos. It feels like a piece of art that way. So resize campus. Think a point in the center. I like to click at the inches. I'm going to make it a thin border. Resize it. Okay now we go to layer. New field layer. Drag that behind the pixel layer and there's the nice border. We'll export that to the file. Export jpeg. I know it's pretty basic stuff. It doesn't have to be that complicated when you're editing your photos. That's what's so nice about this software. It's just a few different... They give you a few different usable tools. They make some really usable layers. It'll do a lot more complex editing than I've showed you here. It shows where we started. Well that's it. That's another edit in Affinity Photo. If you'd like to see more of these, let me know. I don't really want to continue making these editing videos if nobody's using Affinity Photo. I know it's a pretty small minority of people that probably use the software. It's an alternative to Photoshop. It may not be for everybody but I find it works great for my needs. I've found anything that I need to do that Affinity Photo can't do. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.