Mask like a PRO - Affinity Photo Essentials

Key Takeaways

hey my friends how you doing today I'm gonna show you five awesome ways how to mask things in affinity photo that will blow your mind and I know masking can be stressful if you don't know which tools are the right one and a lot of people look like this when they think about masks because it can be headache but after this video I promise you're gonna look like this my name is relieve you I'm a professional designer and of course I want to think of my patrons who support me and make these videos possible okay so here we have this photo and it's a nice picture but it could be improved one of the most amazing things you can do with masks is to use them with a group because that means you can apply multiple adjustments to the same area first of all I'm gonna create an adjustment layer click on adjustment and this time I'm using a curve adjustment and with this layer created on your keyboard press ctrl + G to create the group like that you can see now it's in a group and the next thing is that we will apply a mask to that group and here's a little bit of secret sauce for you we're gonna click down here on the mask layer icon to create the layer a but at the same time we're gonna hold the Alt key and this is gonna create an empty mask where the effect is not applied to our picture yet so open up your group double click on the curves layer and pull it down maybe stronger than you need it and this will enable you to see where you're actually painting the mask so use your brush tool now set it to a low hardness but set it also to spacing two percent or lower and you can now brush in here with a white color that's important white color onto your mask so you can see here when I paint in here that's good enough and the next thing is double-click on the curves adjustment again and adjust it to your taste so in this case for example I only want the shadows to be darker not the brighter area so I will click here and here to make points that keep these the line in this area and just pull down on the darker side of my curves and you can see here that the shadows are indeed getting darker and now like I said you can apply multiple adjustments to the same area so I'm also creating an adjustment for vibrance here and I will push the vibrance up a little bit so we get a little bit more color in our eyes and as you can see this will only affect the area that we have selected as a mask for the group I want to separate the background with the eyes and the sea from the guy in the front and we can use channels to make a mask to separate them and you might think what our channels well if you think for example about a JPEG picture that is RGB then we have red green and blue as our channels so where do you find the channels well either you look down here on the right side where these tabs are or if you don't see that go up to view and then to studio and then make a check mark next to channel so you see that after you know where to find that you can see here we have these three different channels and you can click on them and when you click on them the picture turns black and white and shows you the parts that are red in the picture in this case because it's a red Channel and for us to create the mask we have to remember that everything that is white is going to be mask and everything that is black is not going to be masked so in this case we still have a lot of whites in the foreground where the guy is with the boat so let's click on green and there is a lot already a lot better but part of the check it are still very bright so let's split on the blue one and now the boat and the guy are almost black so this is good for us and also you have to remember we don't want to completely mask it we want to have like a gradient in there a little bit so still the adjustments feel natural and the object isn't completely separated from the rest of the picture okay next point you just right-click on the channel and there it says load - pixel selection click on that and this will create a selection for you and now there are two routes that you can go you have to decide what you want to do one is you can click down here on mask layer and this will create a mask layer from the selection of these pixels and you can apply the mask to any layer you want so this is very versatile but what you can also do is you can click on either any adjustment layer or any live filter layer and it will apply this selection as a mask to that adjustment layer for example and this is what we will do in this tutorial so click and select curves as our adjustment layer and now to deselect press ctrl D on my keyboard the picture is still black and white how do we fix that very easy down here on channels you just click on this reset button and this will bring back all of the channels okay so now if we adjust the curves you can see that this is mainly adjusting the background and not the foreground so we can make our picture a little bit darker and this can be very helpful for us let's go on to the next step we have here this motor of the boat and we want it to stand out a little more and and smart way how to select that and also a little bit of secret sauce by the ways we're gonna use our pen tool which is over here either you see this wide arrow which is the note tool then click and hold until this little menu pops up and select the pen tool okay with the pen tool selected we can click click click around our shape so when you click on the starting point this will close the shape and now you can fill it with a color for example let's fill it with black like this there we go okay cool so now what do we want to do in this case I'm going to use an adjustment layer again and I'm going to use it for brightness and contrast like this so we have created that and now with the curve that we have created I will push this layer on top of our brightness and contrast adjustment and then right-click on it and say mask to below okay so you can see now the shape is gone because it is used as a mask and when I now adjust my brightness and contrast you can see that this is only applied to our engine here where we have created the mask so this is a nice way to do it but why did we use a curve for that well the reason for that is I can still go to the curve and now I can use my node tool this white arrow here and I still have all these points and I can go in here and say I want to adjust these points you can see it can pull them out so the effect is applied to more of the area but you can basically move it around and say okay I want to have this on different areas of my picture I want to be a bit more surpri precise down here stuff like that so this is a very good way to adjust your your layer and by the way if you say well this is a little bit sharp as a mask for example if we make the effect a little bit strong or you can see these are like pretty sharp lines here which can be useful sometimes but not all the time you can of course go in here with your curves selected to effects and make a little bit of Gaussian blur on there and as you can see this will make the selection a bit softer so let's go with 0.1 pixel and you can see now we have a nice and soft selection okay let's zoom out again so this was the second one creating a mask from a curve and mask down okay next one is a gradient mask we have this ice here in the background we want to have a bit more clarity so more focus is on this part of the picture but we don't want to have more clarity in the foreground or in the background how are we gonna do that so first of all we are going to create an adjustment for clarity and this is a live filter by the way so click on live filters and create a clarity live filter like this make sure it sits outside on its own not like in this case under one of the adjustment layers because then you can't see the effect so now if I push this up you can see we get a lot more clarity in the background but also in the foreground and I don't want to have that because I don't want to distract from the ice shapes in the background so the way to do this is that we are going to select over here our gradient tool this year and I want to click and pull in the area of our well where we want to affect the area of the picture basically and this is a linear gradient so it's just going from top to down over the full width of the picture and again you can go in here and select white or black and you can see here when I select a point in the middle and I make this white and then I make the edges black like before where it is black the effect is not applied and where it is white if it is applied and you have these little lines here you can push them out to make the gradient a bit like different from the way it's going from one color to the next color okay good so now if we adjust the gradient again you can see that it is only applied to that area where the ice is but not to the foreground not to the background just to this area in here and this is what you can do with a gradient and as you can see you can do it also with a live filter so this is the third one now comes the fourth one which is also very useful and that that we can create a brush mask so here and also here a little bit of secret sauce for you again I'm gonna select adjustment and selective color this is a very good effect remember that selective color like that and you go to the neutrals go to the neutrals and then adjust the black and you can see here that this magically improves the picture and makes it makes it look like a lot more interesting but as you can see here although this effect is pretty cool the face now is a little bit too dark so I want to soo-min here to the face and what I'm going to do is I'm using my paint brush tool and when you use the paint brush tool another secret sauce here also always make sure that you click on more and make sure that the spacing is very low like one or two percent so there are no gaps in between because you can see if I push the spacing up I get these single dots we don't want to have that we want to have consistent connected lines so push it down to 2% let's go back in here and again set your in this case set your color to black because we don't want the filter the adjustment to affect the face okay now we can just brush over the area of the face like that and there we go now the face is unaffected and if we zoom out you can see that now the face is a lot brighter than before or like as it has been before that by the way if you want to know where you have painted with your brush there's an easy way to find that out hold the Alt key on your keyboard and click on the layer where you painted the mask like that and you can see we get a little shape in here that tells us exactly where we paint is you can see here are actually some bright spots you can paint over that again and to get back to the normal view the only thing you have to do is simply click on another layer and there you have the normal you back again okay cool okay thank you very much write in the comments which kind of mask you like the most or use the most and if you like this video please give me a thumbs up thank you very much and see you in the next video bye you