Powerful Dramatic 3D Light Trick - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends how are you doing today i have an amazing trick for you on how to create dramatic light in affinity photo and you can even control the light source let's get started my name is olivio i'm a professional designer and i want to thank all of my patrons who support me and make these videos possible the first thing you need for this trick is a levels adjustment so let's go down here to adjustments click on levels up here and add that as a child to the image layer we will use this later to bring down the brighter areas in the image a little bit and make some finer adjustments if they are needed now here is how that trick works first of all we need a lighting adjustment you find it down here in the live filters as the second last choice so let's click on this and you can see here we have our light source i want to switch this from spot to directional so it's one light source that is very big and has just parallel light from one direction and what we are using to create this effect is texture now let's pump up the texture and you can see that this actually doesn't look very good so we need to have a way around that and here is where the second trick comes into play again go down to the live filters and this time choose gaussian blur that's the uppermost live filter so let's choose this and put it below our lighting live filter as a layer like so and then choose both of them and actually group them together as a group make sure that all of them are turned off sometimes when you select the layer it's getting turned off now let's open up our adjustment for gaussian blur here click on preserve alpha that is very important and then we can go down here and adjust the radius and you can see the more we adjust the radius the softer the image is getting of course it doesn't look very good right now because it is very blurred this is why we put both of the layers into a group because now we are selecting the group and setting the blend mode from pass through to soft light so let's go in here and set this to soft light you can see here we choose this and you can see now we have the original crisp image let's zoom in here you can see we have all the details in here and the light effect is blurred on top of the face but we are also adding light to the image so that might mean that the brighter areas in the image might be a little bit overexposed might be a little bit too bright so for this we have created our levels adjustment click on that and then go here to our output black and white level and limit the white level a little bit until you feel good about these brighter areas here okay so now that we've done this we can open up again our lighting live filter and you can now play around with the direction where the light is coming from and you can see that this will create light and it will also create shadow in your image when you push it up higher the light is getting brighter when you push it more to the side the light is getting a little bit lighter so that's good but you can also influence the amount of light by reducing the color from a white down to a gray value you can see this will give us less light because there is no slider for the brightness of the light so we have to actually use the brightness of our color in here and as you can imagine you can also use colors if you want to but i'm gonna stick with a white light here's another thing to look out for that's pretty important the ambient light is on right now and this can influence your image so i would suggest to set it to zero percent so you don't have any additional light only the light source in your image you can see now i can move the light around and i don't get these kind of drastic results also up here you have diffuse specular and shininess and you might want to play around with these settings to taste to see what kind of results you are getting for your image and also for the shadows that are created with the effect by these textures you can also play around with the size of the texture down here you can see this has a pixel size so there's a lot of ways to play around with this but again when i turn off and on this group for our light you can see that this created a beautiful and dramatic light for all of our portrait in post and with the normal usage of affinity photo that's it for today thank you very much for watching my tutorial and see you in my live stream also join my facebook group and have fun with the weekly challenge have a good day bye [Music]