Bokeh Balls Trick - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

bouquet is a very lovely and popular effect and I will show you today different techniques throughout the video on how to create this in affinity photo it's very nice and easy so let's get started the first thing of course we want to do is to have a nice photo that we can start with and as you can see there's no bouquet in the picture yet I will delete the other layer so we are not getting confused with them and of course the easiest way to do this is to just go to file place and then select one of the bouquet textures or pictures that you've downloaded from the internet but don't just leave the video yet because there's a lot more to do and a lot more to learn on how to perfect this so with this texture selected set the blend mode to screen and you can see it works but the background is blown out so not ideal what we need to do is to click here on blend ranges with the texture selected texture layer selected to get this window and now we use the source layer ranges and reduce the left side where the dark colors are pull this down to the bottom and you can see it reduces the influence of the lighter colors on the background I will also reduce it here a little bit so it's getting not as intense and just the light parts are left over that we can use and it's pretty nice and the cool thing is of course we can move the texture around where we want to have it so we want to use something where we create a nice effect around the face of our models so we will use one layer up here duplicate it and then use a second layer down here and as you can already see we have to look out for errors in the picture like this we have white lines here or glowy lines here that is not good here we have a half okay here and another one here we have to reduce that so let's fix this so I will rasterize them right click click on rasterize for both layers rasterize the other one too there we go and now we will just use our eraser tool over here set the hardness to 0 set it to off to a fitting size that you can work with and then we will just erase the parts that we don't want to have in our picture select the other layer there we go and also maybe make it a bit bigger over here to reduce these lines in the background very nice there we go so this is soft blended with the backgrounds from the edges we have one here I'm not going to erase this because this is blending with the other circles so what I'm gonna do instead is I will go here and take our clone brush and we'll just copy this part up here the opacity is reduced to 25% let's see ok this is good let's do this multiple times so we are getting something that is in the range of what we want to achieve with that maybe down here too so we blend it nicely with the other circle that we had before did it a bit too much registers let's go back some steps there we go ok that's nice so now we have a full bouquet circle and as you can see right now the bouquet is not blending completely natural with the background we can improve on that we can do that a bit better what we want to do for that is click on the upper layer and create a new pixel layer on top of each or all of the other layers we will go down here to our rectangle tool let's reset this or not we cannot confuse and with the rectangle tool just click and drag a rectangle over all of the picture then we will set our rectangle layer to 0 by the way we didn't have to create a pixel layer that was wrong because the rectangle is creating only I will delete that okay with the rectangle layer selected an opacity at zero we will go up here with says fill and click on gradient and there's two circles here for our blending colors so let's start with the right one click on the circle click on the color then click on the color picker and select a nice dark color in this case for the right part click again on the color picker so it's activating the color now we click on the left circle click on the color click on the color the color picker and drag it over here select another picture I will select a dark orange this time again click here on the color picker to activate the color and now we have this nice gradient we can set the opacity back to 100% you can see the gradient is going over all of the picture and all we need to do now is select the blend mode that fits our purpose there is a lot of choices of course you can go with light and color as a saree you can go with screen that has a very nice and blown out effect you can go with overlay it's a crushed and intense effect but a bit too intense maybe so I will go with soft light which gives us a nice and soft effect and as you can see it gives us a deeper and more how can I say a live picture so our bouquet fits better with the background one more thing you can do is to go over here with the with a rectangle layer selected go over here to gradient tool click on it and it will give you this nice line here in the middle and this will enable you to set how the gradient plays out so how how strong is it fading from left to right but also where is the right style side ending and where is the left side starting as you can see if I push this over there's more orange coming into it and of course you can pull it to every angle so we can even make it a diagonally gradient from the lower part of the upper parts there's a lot of possible what is here to play around and this is basically the first technique the second one that I'm gonna show you is really cool because we are going to create a gradient no no sorry I'm a bouquet brush and that is pretty easy let's hide the other layers I will keep the rectangle gradient over the picture because this will give us an advantage and I will create a new edit pixel layer below our gradient layer now we are going over to our brush tool paintbrush tool and you want to click up here on more I have to reset this because I already created the brush let's reset this because we want to go from zero okay there we go now it's just a round brush okay click here on more and you can see it's just a line so this is not ideal for us what we want to have is something looks like a bouquet so click on dynamics and now we can set a lot of variables so we will introduce a size jitter and we will introduce a flow Chittor and we will introduce some scattering on the x-axis some scattering on the epsilon axis and you can see now it's spreading out I will make it bigger there you can see this gives us much more of the effect that we want to see in our picture let's go this is a bit maybe too big this is nice okay so you can also set the hardness jitter a little bit not too much maybe like this shape sugar we don't need rotation we don't need because it's round so we can't work with that okay and with this set we can already paint something okay like but there's a lot more to do yet so as you can see it's a good start but we need to do more let's go ctrl a so do we select everything and just delete it and the next thing we need to do is okay it's already set to blend so the blend mode set it to screen so this is importance and the next thing we need to do is also set of course the blend mode off the layer 2 screen so this is the blend mode of the layer this is the blend mode of the brush so now if we paint we have this and if we paint again it's giving us these blown outs and over lapses of the circles so that is pretty nice for us to have let's delete that again I need to go back to our settings let's set the size jitter to stronger accumulation jitter we can also do this is the transparency of our brush there we go let's try this again so it's a bit of trial and error but it doesn't matter there we go this already looks kind of good and the next thing you want to do while looking at this is click on your layer and click on effects one thing we want to do is activate Gaussian blur and set it a little bit to a way where we think ok this is what we want to have so this looks kind of nice the other thing we want to do is go to inner glow activate that set it maybe in this case to a dark red and to have more option you can click on this little wheel down here for layer effects it will open the window and there it gives us also a blend mode a little bit more settings so this is very nice make it more intense make the radius higher the opacity can stay like this and let's see with different colors as you can see now it gives us the ability to have different colors in our bouquet so they are not all the same color and that's pretty important because it makes it more alive we can reduce the opacity a bit let's see with the radius if it's higher smaller radius maybe let's leave it like that intensity let's see also leave it like this probably I will set it back to red because I think this works pretty good with both we already have as a collar of course you can also play around with the blend modes but screen works pretty good in this case what is with multi ply no multiplies much to intense color burn much too intense this is not good what's with soft light soft light is also nice on overlay overlay is also pretty nice so we can use this let's leave it at that it's a lot about experimenting of course ok let's delete this again and make the brush a little bit smaller no this is as it's way too small there we go 100 maybe a bit bigger no this is too big like this brush it in here a little bit and a little bit more now the last one was a bit too much into the face I will reset or let's do one up here I will zoom out a little bit so more space to work with let's get back the brush what up here and then we will take some smaller ones brush them in here a little bit maybe wait let's set the dynamics and reduce the flow where's the stairs is spacing let's make the spacing a lot bigger for the small ones and also the size jitter so it's really good that we have these options to do that let's move this to the maximum ok and as you can see we can really create our bouquet where we feel we want to have it there we go you can of course go to your layer and reduce the opacity if you want to have more or less of this effect in your picture but this is basically how you create a bouquet brush that looks pretty nice and it does of course not look 100% real but it gives you more opportunity to play with it and it's more of like a fantasy effect a nice effect so let's compare this with what we have before so as you can see it's a little there's a bit of texture and other things going on inside of the light so it does look different but this effect is pretty nice also you can see it has its own value and it has this bouquet look but in a more graphical amp designs and hand-painted way so these are two different ways to create it and you can of course mix both together so let's hide this one display this one in here let's see if we get something nice if we just paint in some smaller ones down here see set this screen reduce the opacity set the effect of the layer to Gaussian blur a little bit and as you can see they mix pretty well so it's a nice way to bring some extra life to your picture to your layers if you want to or just use them on your own on their own so that's very nice and this is the tutorial for today I hope you enjoyed it if you want to support me by the way you can do sue on patreon I have a page where I post all my tutorials and of course you get my original layered files with it in this case I will also export the brushes and the support at the moment is just one dollar because it's an early supporter program so if you want to choice join me do so support me and thank you very much see you in the next video bye