Affinity Photo Tutorials – The Best Way to Learn How to use Affinity Photo

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The following is an outline of the steps taken to remove a white background with Affinity Designer. For a more thorough learning experience, consider watching the video tutorial below:. This makes Affinity Designer a unique application in that it can be used for both vector design and raster editing.

To access the Pixel Persona, look for the icon in the top-right of your screen. It is representing by a series of colored boxes:.

Once opened, you should immediately notice that the tools on the left-hand side of your screen have changed. This is because editing pixels requires different tools than you would typically use for editing vectors.

Next, we have to unlock the layer. Navigate to the right-hand side of your screen to the Layers tab. Right-click on your layer and look for Lock in the menu.

Next, right-click the layer and select Rasterize. This will convert it to a pixel layer, which will allow us to delete portions of the image. Considering that written instructions may be a little difficult to learn from for something like this, it is recommended that you watch the video tutorial at the top of the page for these next two steps.

The Selection Brush Tool is a freehand brush that allows us to paint a selection around the subject of our photo. For this tutorial we want to make sure that we have both the Snap To Edges and Soft Edges tool settings enabled.

The snap to edges setting is what allows the tool to auto-detect the edges of your subject, and the soft edges setting will give your subject a more tapered finished along the edges. Without this setting enabled you will end up with hard, pixelated edges that do not look clean. Once the settings are in place, use the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard to set the size of your brush, then manually draw a selection going around your subject. Make sure to fill in the remaining white area of the image as well.

Zoom in on your subject and use the Selection Brush Tool to manually correct the imperfections of your outline, only working from the inside out. To do this, hold Alt on your keyboard, and then click and drag. Holding Alt allows you to remove parts of the selection, whereas not holding Alt allows you to add to the selection. Navigating back and forth through these two functions, go through your image and make sure your subject is perfectly outlined.

Next, open the Refine Selection menu by clicking the button in the toolbar that reads Refine. The red mask represents where your selection has been placed, and it gives you a better visualization of how a photo would look once you remove a white background with Affinity Designer.

You can zoom in on the edges of your photo to get a closer look. If your selection already looks good as it is though, then it would be wise to leave it as is.

This is where the magic happens! Once your refined selection is in place, all you have to do to delete the white background is simply press Delete on your keyboard. With the background deleted, we can now release the selection. In the Export menu, make sure that you choose to export your document as a PNG file. This is very important! Other formats, like JPG, do not support transparency. So if you export your document as a JPG file then you are going to end up with a white background again.

Exporting your document as a PNG file ensures that your image will have a transparent background. Leave the default settings as they are, then click the Export button. You will then be prompted to name your document and choose a location for it to be saved to. And with that, you are finished! That is how you can easily remove a white background with Affinity Designer! You would normally have to use something like GIMP for this sort of task, but tools like the Selection Brush Tool make it quick and painless to do things like remove a white background with Affinity Designer.

If you have any questions or if any part of this explanation is unclear, simply leave a comment below. As always, thanks for visiting! Want to learn more about how Affinity Designer works? Enroll Now. Want to learn more about how Adobe Illustrator works? Check out my Illustrator Explainer Series – a comprehensive collection of over videos where I go over every tool, feature and function and explain what it is, how it works, and why it’s useful.

This post may contain affiliate links. Read affiliate disclosure here. Hi, thanks so much for video. I got all the way to the end but when I press delete on my keyboard nothing happens!? Is this anything you can help with? Sounds like the layer is locked. If not that then try right-clicking the image layer and selecting Rasterize.

Awesome tutorial. I cannot get it to work, I first made the mistake and selected the wrong area, I then corrected myself after I worked out what I did wrong and when I press delete it deletes everything and just leaves an outline of where image is supposed to be, everything turns to transparent background. I have been having a lot of problems with affinity and I am beginning to wonder whether it was all worth it.

Thanks for your help. I did this while in vector mode if it matters. Best, Ed. This is the best ever. And he does not skip simple steps. Other videos go fast over key steps so much that sometime i have to reply to find where the mouse pointer went in 0. I am having a similar problem as Jeremy. I select the background, and when I refine the background, the image I want to keep is highlighted in red.

Yet when I click apply, my image disappears as well as the background. It will show me the outline of the image I want to keep with a checkerboard background, but the image itself is…? Hi Rebecca, check the tool settings when using the Selection Brush. They should match my settings in the video. Hi Nick. Thanks a lot. Did you check that out? Thank you for the information. However, every time I try to do this, it keeps erasing the item I want to keep instead of the background.

What do I do? You have to create the selection on the background, not the subject. Your email address will not be published. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment.

Attempting to create animated GIFs in previous versions of Inkscape proved difficult due to a lack of proper tools. Thanks to some of the advancements in version 1. Arguably the most powerful tool Adobe Illustrator has to offer is its Envelope Distort feature, which allows you warp and distort vector objects in any imaginable way.

In this tutorial we’ll be going Skip to content. Hey Nick, Awesome tutorial. How do I do a selection on background? Am facing same challenge. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Read More. Become A Master of Affinity Designer! Become A Master of Adobe Illustrator!

 
 

Get the wet plate look in Affinity Photo using image layers and textures | Digital Camera World

 

Having the ability to trace vector copies of your images is a standard feature of any vectors graphics software. Designer, for whatever reason, does not possess the ability to do this. Vector image tracing is when your design software uses an algorithm to automatically generate a vector tracing of a raster image:. The benefit of using a feature like this is that it saves a bunch of time. The downside is that the results are often random and imprecise.

In Inkscape, this feature is called Trace Bitmap. For whatever reason, there is no image trace in Affinity Designer. Will vector image tracing be possible in the future? Who knows. That said, we still have a problem to solve. The only real way to go about vector image tracing with Affinity Designer is to do so manually using the Pen Tool.

This can be done by simply drawing individual elements right on top of your image, and then coloring them in using the Color Picker tool. In fact, I created a video tutorial demonstrating how to do so:. This method may be right for you if your image is simple enough to trace manually, or if you have something that needs to be traced with precision. The downside of using an automated tracing feature is that it very rarely traces over your image with absolute precision.

Inkscape is a free and open source vector graphics editor that is similar to both Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer. Any regular visitor to this website is surely no stranger to Inkscape. I promise you though, Inkscape is worth a try. From there the UI is pretty self-explanatory, but feel free to check out this tutorial I made in case you need help:.

Not only that, but Inkscape is the only vector graphics editor available on all three operating systems — Windows, Mac, and Linux. The downside of using this solution is that you have to download yet another application, and then launch that application just to use it for a single task. A common name that kept coming up in my research though Vector Magic :.

The benefit of using a web-based solution like Vector Magic is that you can easily create vector tracings of your images, without having to download any other applications or use any third-party plugins. Another downside to this approach is that when I used it, it was really slow. It took a couple of minutes just for it to trace my example image, whereas Inkscape and Illustrator are nearly instantaneous. Between those three options you should be able to meet all of your vector tracing needs, as cumbersome as it may be.

What are your thoughts? Have you tried any other solution that you found helpful? Feel free to post any questions you may have as well if any part of this lesson was unclear. Want to learn more about how Affinity Designer works? Want to learn more about how Adobe Illustrator works?

Check out my Illustrator Explainer Series – a comprehensive collection of over videos where I go over every tool, feature and function and explain what it is, how it works, and why it’s useful. This post may contain affiliate links.

Read affiliate disclosure here. There is a bit of hostility in their forums from those that police it, directed at those who dear to request new features. So I will just avoid. You can use Inkscape to trace images and xnconvert to save to webp format. Both are free open source software. I have used DrawPlus since the first version! I had always upgraded to the new release up to DrawPlus X8. Affinity Designer is essentially a remake of DrawPlus.

DrawPlus is such a great program, but there are some areas that are lacking compared to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, but for the price difference, hands down Serif always wins! I have been reluctant to purchase Affinity, since DrawPlus X8 is so great. Today after downloading the Affinity trial and one of the first things that I noticed is that there is no AutoTrace function! I thought maybe I was just not finding it, so I did an an online search and found your blog post.

I will say that I am shocked that there is no AutoTrace function in Affinity. Autotracing is the process of converting a bitmap into a vector graphic. In DrawPlus, autotracing can be performed in the AutoTrace studio, a dedicated studio environment which uses a variety of profiles. Kinda makes me wish that I could have been a fly on the wall during the Serif corporate staff meetings when they decided to Trash the AutoTrace function when they redesigned DrawPlus and named it Affinity.

Also how they trashed all the other Serif Products like WebPlus etc. This definitely a deal breaker for me. Thanks for the time you put into gathering this information. For me this is the one feature that has kept me from jumping on board the entire Affinity trio, which, in my case would be Photo, Designer, and Publisher.

Every other thing I need to do these three software packages can handle with ease. But as someone who creates vinyl graphics, vector tracing ability is an absolute must. There is absolutely no way I could afford to spend the time you did in your workaround hand coloring or hand tracing an image in order to then use a third party tool to then accomplish this simple task.

What should take seconds could take 30 minutes or more. Vector tracing is an absolute must have for anyone working with vinyl graphics, signs, decals, and t-shirts.

How affinity can think that this is not an important feature to include in Designer is beyond me. It is the single reason that keeps me using Adobe products since Illustrator can vector trace just about anything I throw into it in a matter of seconds. The sad thing is, no matter how much I would like to switch, I simply cannot, because there is no way I could run my business without this much needed functionality. I totally agree, Ron. Where Affinity really shines, in my opinion: the mobile apps, creating isometric designs, working with text, working with vectors and rasters at the same time personas , and how stable it is.

Your email address will not be published. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. Attempting to create animated GIFs in previous versions of Inkscape proved difficult due to a lack of proper tools. Thanks to some of the advancements in version 1. Arguably the most powerful tool Adobe Illustrator has to offer is its Envelope Distort feature, which allows you warp and distort vector objects in any imaginable way.

In this tutorial we’ll be going Skip to content. Nice article but it seems that Vector Magic is a paid service. Thanks for the post by the way, very well written and thought out for a workaround. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Read More. Unfortunately, there is no image trace feature built into Affinity Designer. You will either have to draw your vector tracings manually using the Pen Tool , or use an alternative solution.

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Color correction in Affinity Photo 8. This can be understandably confusing as a user of other design applications because layers function in a mostly universal way everywhere else. In short, adjustment layers are non-destructive alterations you can affinity designer layers tutorial free to a layer. Once the texture is imported onto the document, you can apply it to sffinity object as a fill by creating a clipping mask.