Affinity Photo - Angel Wings Tutorial

Key Takeaways

today we are going to create an angel hello my friends and let's get started so this is the end result and this is the picture we are starting with and I found some very nice wings on line these are some Swan wings I believe and I will link them in the video description as well as the picture of the girl the first thing we're going to do is to adjust them in the perspective so select the layer with the wings I will rename it to wings so you can see which layer I'm talking about and we will duplicate that layer so we are not disturbing the original layer because we will use it later on and now we go down here to the perspective tool click it once and you can see there's a grid over the picture and this will help us oh I have to hide the other wings sorry this will help us adjust the wings in the perspective there we go let's see I want to put them in a way where they come out of the back of her body at the tail so let's put this here and get this nice and stretched out a little bit there we go want to keep the head in the middle somewhere so this looks pretty ok let's click on apply and the next thing we want to do is to hide the wings at the parts where they are overlapping the body so I will reduce the opacity so we are going we can see easily what's going on here and now I will click down here on mask layer to create a mask select the mask layer and use our brush tool I will sue min a little bit use the brush tool set to black to just brush out the areas that we want to hide so I will start with a pretty big brush to make it faster and then I will go and select a smaller brush there we go resize it zoom in a little bit you can hold control and rotate your mouse wheel to zoom in and use your spacebar to move the picture around and you can see now I can easily paint out the details at the areas where I don't need them it's a pretty fast thing to do there we go and this will also help us that we don't distract the original wings we are just hiding them this is pretty important if we want to change something about them later on here with the hair it's a little bit more difficult so I'm going to hide the wings I'm going to click on the picture with the girl and certainly use my selection tool or select selection brush tool paint over this a bit there we go and then click on refine and paint around the edges a little bit this gives me a better selection I can click here on white or black and white to see how the selection has gone it doesn't have to be too perfect okay this looks pretty good I will leave it like that we're gonna apply so we have a selection here and now I click again on our mask layer and I will use the brush again let's make the wings visible again to just brush out these parts because now there's a mask on it I don't have to be careful at all just brush over it okay with control D I can deselect the mask and you can see it's pretty well let's set the opacity or to 100% to see what we did and let's looks pretty okay maybe this hair here is not in the perfect way I will use my brush again set it to small like 1 pixel size and now I can go in here and brush in a little bit more details for the hair so that is pretty okay maybe I set it too wide to reduce this a little bit again oops nope that was a little bit too much let's see oh I did paint on the pic the picture instead of the mask I'm sorry let's use the race tool set it smaller and erase this part again nope okay I'm going to go some steps back see is your way there we go okay good you can go steps back by ctrl and C so hold ctrl and press C or set like in zero multiple times so this will go several steps back okay this looks pretty good the next thing that we're going to do is to adjust the color of the wings as you can see they have kind of a bluish hue while the dress of the girl has more like an orange hue so select the wings layer and click down here in adjustments and select the color balance and with that it set to mid-tones we can just move around these faders here to get the wings to a position where you can see that they blend nicely with the background it's kind of a thing that you have to eyeball basically where you have the feeling that it looks like it's mixing good with the background the wings are too dark yet so we have to adjust that too okay so I will leave it like this we can readjust it later oh by the way you have to drag this layer onto the wing so it's really just adjusting the wings and not the rest of the picture let's create a second adjustment layer with curves down here curves also pull this in onto the wings so it's just affecting the wings and I will make it brighter pull this in a little bit there we go so we have a nice brightness okay going to readjust the color balance a little bit doing it more red let's go to the highlights a little bit a little bit more add a little bit more pink see with the yellow tones that looks good okay perfect so let's go on to create the shadows and this is where we need our other copy of the wings there they are I will bring them into the front so I will just push up the layer I will lock the other layer so we are not changing anything there by accident and now with our wings I will rename this to shadow with our wings selected I will just go to arrange up here and flip vertically so they are upside down and move them in a good position so they are touching the lower parts of the wings and again we are going to use our perspective tool to bring them in a position where they look like they are actually on the ground and I want to point out right now that I am not creating perfect shadow for the light situation instead I am creating shadow that is looking good for our picture the difference here is that this is an artistic choice because the original sit the original position where the shadow would actually land doesn't look as interesting and you will find this in a lot of pictures especially also in paintings that people or artists create their own light situations to really fit the picture that they want to create so with this selected I will hold the ctrl button and click on my wings you see it creates a selection and I will create a new layer pixel layer use my brush tool set to black I will set it to a good big size and then just fill the color just paint it in so everything is black there we go okay now I can control D to deselect and I can hide our shadow layer I'll put it behind the picture and also lock it and then I can rename this to shadow so this is our shadow layer and now if I reduce the opacity you Cedar's starts to blend with the ground in a way that looks like a shadow and I was headed back to 100% again just to show you another thing that we are going to do and that is click here in effects with the layer selected with the shadow layer selected of course and set Gaussian to on with this little hook here and make it a little bit unsharp like this so it's more like a shadow from the field just a little bit not too much don't go too wild because it's pretty close to the ground still okay now we're going to reduce your path City and you can see it looks pretty good for a shadow but we have one problem when we zoom in a little bit you can see that the shadow here is just black and you can see that the other shadow the original shadow actually has kind of a green tint from the ground so - to achieve this kind of effect what we're going to do is to create a mask that has the same size as the shadow and we'll use again our color adjustment but we're going to use it later because first we have to reduce the shadow so the easy thing that we're going to do is just to create a mask again and then paint onto the mask with our brush again so set the brush to black and here we can go pretty quickly on these areas down here where you have a little bit of this material here I will set it bigger and pretty soft from the actress from the hardness and just click a little bit so we have a little bit of a gradient a blending so a part of it is in the shadow a part is not but there's a soft kind of blend on the other side we can do the same thing a little bit there we go remove this here a little bit and then set it to smaller again make the hardness higher and work a little bit on this part here there we go very nice as you can see down here we have an overlap of the original shadow and the fake shadow that we created and we can play around with this shadow but what I found is easier is to just replace the original shadow so what I'm going to do is I click on the shadow layer again and use my brush tool with black selected and opacity is 100% yes good and I will just paint over the original shadow there we go I can see nicely where I'm going so like this okay and now I will hide the shadow that we created and I will just replace the original shadow so I will remove the lock and go here to our clone brush and select an area that is on the same vertical area or horizontal area sorry there we go I click here and then I go over here and I will just paint in part of the ground select some more put it in over here there we go so we remove the original shadow from the picture maybe I use a little bit more detail here make it smaller go in here there we go very nice okay and now when I turn on the original shadow you can see that we don't have an overlap here it's a little bit of overlap left here let's also remove the shadow over here there we go one second okay I will make it softer as it's the zero-percent it's really soft there we go okay nice good and this should help us let's turn on the other shadow so it's pretty okay I can turn I can use the brush again select the shadow layer and paint in some shadow where it's still needed and by the way you can see here we have some shadow on the shoes but actually I don't know should we leave that eye let's use the mask click on the mask and again with black brush this out a little bit let's see how that looks it's probably nice to have some brighter shoes down here okay so that's pretty okay I think it will also remove the shadow down here on the shoes themselves let's make my brush a little bit smaller so these are kind of artistic decisions that you have to decide for yourself what kind of look feels better to you let's see okay so now I am going to click on the shadow pixel layer with my control button selected so you can see it creates a selection and I will then create an adjustment layer no I will create them no yeah I will create an adjustment layer sorry I was confused for a second color balance adjustment there you go and it already has two masks on it from my selection so that's pretty nice I can control and deselect there we go and now if I adjust this you can see it's just affecting the area that we have created the artificial shadow for so that's pretty nice make it a little bit more blue this is another one where you have to eyeball it pretty much to get it right but you can see that this is a very nice effect on the color of the shadow let's make the shadow a bit darker actually go like this and let me zoom in so you see the difference you can see here if I turn off the color balance it's just a black shadow but if I turn on the color balance it's getting this kind of greenish color that I also have over here so that's pretty nice let's see for seconds I will remove the shadow over here because here it's kind of doubling the original shadow we don't need that let's see up to this line here maybe also down here and bring it back a little bit here and reduce it a little bit too much with it there we go and now I can adjust the brightness of the shadow from these two so they mix up and also the color balance so let's bring up the color balance make this more green oh nope one second I will make this really the wrong color so I see where it's where the shadow is and then I again use my brush because now I also have to reduce it here set it to black again I don't have to influence it over here just on the other side there we go okay nice so now we can go back and actually adjust the color of the shadow to fit the other color that we have on the ground let's see it looks pretty okay you can see it's not not too easy but it's doable it's kind of you have to go back and forth a little bit okay so I think this looks like it's the right color so that's pretty okay that's pretty good we have some problems over here with the shadow I have to paint it in here a little bit and see it's way too bright let's use the brush set it to white and on the mask not on the not on the actual pixel layer there we go paint this in again I think I just removed too much of the shadow over there you can use the black again to reduce the shadow in here a little bit or should we leave it like that maybes a little bit of shadow on the dress I think that's okay that looks pretty okay good so as you can see we have created it's a little bit different of course than the original part that I created this is the original picture there's the wings is a little bit in a different position so it's changing a little bit every time but I think we created a pretty convincing picture of the girl having wings and actual shadows on the ground that also fit the perspective so thank you for watching if you like my channel maybe subscribe to it I do a new video every three days if you want to support me even more head over to patreon where you also get the original file with all the layers you can get feedback on your work and we can even live chat about things that you want to know and kind of directions you want my channel to go in so thank you very much for watching and see you in the next video bye