Affinity Photo - Light Leak Effect - Tutorial / How to

Key Takeaways

hello my friends today I'm gonna show you how to create this beautiful light leakage effect you can see here's the original picture these are the effects applied to it my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer from beyond Austria and thank you to all my patrons who make these videos possible let's get started so a light leak usually refers to a problem when photographing or developing a negative film where light came either into the camera or leaked onto the film during the wrong storage or during the faulty development process and a lot of these lights leakages tend to be orange or red or blue around the corners which is also connected to the way and negative film works okay so now I'm gonna show you how to create these in affinity photo and I will show you two very easy techniques to do so first of all I'm going to use the rectangle tool down here on the left and we'll choose the ellipse tool and I will just set the filling to white and then draw out several circles randomly in one area like this okay and what you can do now is you click on the layers and on the numbers on your keyboard when you hit for example the five this will set the opacity to 50 so I can go in here and randomly hit buttons and give them different values on how strong the opacity is of that one circle you can see here they're changing that's very nice the next thing we are going to do is select the upper layer hold Shift key and click on the lower layer to select all of them and then we're gonna hit ctrl + T on our keyboard to group all of them and I will set now the group blend mode to screen looks like this the next thing we are going to do is click on effects and we will apply a little bit of Gaussian blur to it that's to taste and the next thing is we are going to apply an outer glow for example here we can select the HSL color wheel and we can select a red color and enhance the radius you can see here this is starting to shine in red that's pretty helpful and now comes a cool little trick that you can do i will duplicate the group there you go duplicate and then right-click on the group and rasterize it and when this little window here pops up click on preserve don't as well unhook the preserve layer effect so they are not preserved so we're gonna rasterize that and now everything including the effects are in pixels and the cool thing about that is I can now go again to effects again enable the outer glow and select a different color for example let's select an orange and you can see now we have these two colors stacking up on top of each other and you can play around with this and you can even go in here rasterize it again and hope the little hook for preserve layers and now you can again use outer glow let's select a blue color this time set the radius like this you can see this can create some really cool interesting effects let's see maybe let's go you can play around until you're happy with what you have what you see and by the way another thing I want to point out is when you click here on the wrench this opens up and you get some more settings so for example you can reduce the intensity of the effect and this is very helpful in this case as you can see but you can also change the blend mode to something else that looks more like what you're going for so you have a lot of options to be creative about this to be playful about this and now that we have created this shape what we can do with it is we can resize and change it sometimes it's locked from the ratio so to change that you just hold the shift key and then click on one of these handles you can see now you can resize it in any kind of shape you want so that's very useful by the way I'm going to set this back real quick make it a little bit bigger and then again rasterize it without or without the effects preserved so we have this and now I can for example make it smaller and what I can also do because now everything in here is is pixels I can for example use the mesh warp tool click on that and you can click for example just on the lines and auto all these edges here and bend them into any kind of strange shape you want or that looks interesting to you so these can be really deformed shapes which is good for like light leak so this can be a lot of fun to play with in any way you want you can of course afterwards rotate this and still change the shape so you have a lot of freedom to go about this in any kind of strange way to create an interesting light League on your picture and of course always you can play with the blend mode if you want to have a different effect you can do that I will leave it on screen for now and we will create a second one with a little bit of a different technique so again I'm going to use my rectangle tool and I will make actually this time a rectangle with it and basically we are doing at first the same thing so I'm going to blur this a little bit there we go and then apply our outer glow and this time I'm going to go more for the blue colors there we go make it like this you can see already it's starting to look pretty interesting going to rasterize it without preserving the effects going in here creating another glow rat is okay oh no it's still white so let's set this to red or maybe orange let's go like this a bit more yeah let's make it like this that's good okay so let's rasterize this again without preserving the effects and we will set this to screen there we go and what I'm going to do now is also an interesting thing you can do because again we have rasterize it and everything now is pixel we can go into the liquify persona and keep in mind that in the liquify persona only the selected layer is affected even though you can see the rest of the picture and right now I have selected the upper tool which is called liquify push forward to forward is in any direction you're pushing so like moving your finger through water for example and on the right side here you can set the size of your brush to harden as the opacity the speed is how strong it effects the picture and I can now move this around you can see we can create beautiful ways of distracting this and make it more how does a coincidental or how would you how we say that more an accident basically you can see here also you can play with the borders because this will also stretch out the light and the glow so this is also very helpful too as you can see here I can stretch this left and right and try to get more of this blue out here and this can create a very interesting effect that looks more like an actual destruction of your picture let's hit apply now so now we have this and you can see wow it looks pretty interesting and another thing that we can do here is that we can now take another rectangle yet and draw it over all of the picture like this I will drag it out a little bit on and below so it's a lot bigger than my original canvas because I will now set it to blue like this and go to effects again Gaussian blur blur it quite a bit you can go a hundred you can even like a hundred is the maximum here but you can enter numbers you can go 200 hit enter and now the blur is 200 maybe it's a bit too much for this case let's see let's set it to 130 in this case that's okay and let's set a blend mode here for example scream again play around with the blade blend mode see what fits what is interesting to you I believe it is green at this moment and the cool thing is of course you can move this rectangle around to only affect the areas where you want to have this kind of like light leak that's getting into the picture and it doesn't have to be that kind of extreme on your photos or you can see here right now we have an effect where just the border of the picture is affected and but the light is still leaking more inside of the pictures that this can be pretty interesting let's put this on top the other layer and of course you don't have to have these extreme or that many light leaks in your picture I created them to show you what you can do and please play around with the different blend modes and rasterize it disturb it with liquify and with the mesh warp tool so there's a lot of different policy possibilities to create really beautiful light leaks and make your picture more interesting and give it some kind of a vintage and action touch so or like more adventurous touch this was a tutorial for today thank you very much for watching and see you in the next episode if you like my videos maybe subscribe to my channel I create two tutorials per week and if you want to support me even more head over to patreon where I have some great options for you thank you very much and see you next time bye