Affinity Photo - 5 MORE Tricks for better Pics

Key Takeaways

five more tricks for better pics hello my friends and let's get started with some other tricks on how to really fastly improve your pictures the first thing we're gonna do is we duplicate the layer and then we go over here where it says effects and select Gaussian blur PAMP that up to the maximum and it's really blurry but the edges are not blurry so make sure you click preserve alpha so it looks like this then we go back to the layers window and now we can set it to either to either overlay soft light or hard light and you can see you get a really nice and dreamy atmosphere in your picture very nice dark and saturated colors on the outside very dreamy and lights colors on the inside of course with opacity you can set the effect to your taste and the picture looks a lot more interesting that way and has a dreamlike atmosphere this was the first trick the second trick that we are going to do is when you want to set your picture to black and white don't just go to HSL and reduce the saturation yes this is black and white but it's not enough control it doesn't look good enough so what you want to do instead is go down here to adjustments and go to black and white adjustments because here you can set what part of the black and white picture should come from the different colors from the original picture you can see here there's a lot of green and the picture and you can do a lot with that for example if I push the green colors down a lot that the boy is sticking out with his code so this is a much much better way to create a black and white picture and to find the look that you really want to have in your picture really try each of these sliders to see what effect it has sometimes it's very small so for example the magenta slider is just influencing a little bit of the goats feet and the shadows down here so if you don't see it right away just jiggle it a little bit so it's kind of popping and jiggling in your pictures it makes it easier to see so this is the correct way to convert a picture from color to black and white so this is the second trick and like I said you can do a lot with that in the sense of storytelling in your picture and it's very quick to do okay let's go to the next effect the one thing you can do is again click down here in adjustment layers and select HSL to adjust the colors but the problem is when I adjust the colors are just all of the colors and that is not good because I want to adjust some just some of them so up here it says master let's reset this up here it says master and you can select a bunch of different colors so in this photo we have a lot of green so let's select the greens and you can see we can move that around and the boy stays the same but the green colors change so we can make it a more intense green maybe we can also make the green darker in the background so we can work with a lot of things here set the saturation in whatever way we want and of course we can also go over here and influence the Reds and the yellows other colors in the picture so this should more influence the skin color of the boy you can see this is more the skin and the goat in his arm that you can influence here and less of the background so this is a nice way to select and adjust individual color layers basically in your picture and work with that in a quick way without having to select anything and as you can see and let's let's do some extreme things here so if I push this up here and then I go to the Reds and push this over here each of these settings stay where you have left them even if you change the colors is not just for one color you can use it for all the different calls that suggested here I will reset this let's go to the green again push it down and you can see now I can even make it so the boy pops out more of the picture because I can set the background green to a darker green so he doesn't have too much of this very light color in his backgrounds it's a very easy and fast way to adjust your pictures okay let's go to our next one and this is a really nice one if you want to bring some sunny light into your picture it doesn't really help to just put some yellow color all over the picture instead what you want to do is again we go down here to the adjustments and you want to select the gradient map this is very important you can see here really freaky colors in the picture but you can also see that the gradient map influences different parts of the image or different brightnesses of the image in a different way so what we want to do is we will go on the Left to black on the right we set it to white and in the middle we set it to a nice warm tone orange or yellow tone so maybe like this is kind of good you can still move this around if you want to and of course this is too extreme but what we can do with this is that we will set this do we set it no we leave it normal and we just reduce the opacity and you can see here that you can get some really nice sunny colors in your picture and you can always click here go back and readjust your gradient if something didn't work out or maybe you want to have another kind of orange another kind of yellow in your picture of course you can also you use blue colors to make the image a lot colder of course you need to reduce the opacity a lot in that case so let's rather make a warm picture I go back to a rather orange color in the middle so this looks pretty nice so this is a very fast and easy way to bring some sunny feeling into your picture and we can work with this to create the fifth quick tip for you and that is to use this again so I will use the same gradient just duplicate it there we go and now I'm going to set it to scream and make it much more intense so it's way too much but what we're going to do is we are going to create a mask layer down here so there we have the mask layer and then you take your brush set it to a pretty big size and first you paint everything with black so all of the mask is empty and then you set it again to white and you can paint in some kind of nice warm glow in your picture wherever you feel like it should be so let's in this case set it to the left side there we go and again of course like I said you can adjust your gradient so this layer is set to screen don't forget that and we will readjust the color a little bit maybe let's see maybe like this is a nice color so a reddish orange in the background and of course again you can adjust the opacity to see how much of a light a warm light you want to have and you can also adjust the other layer to get it closer to your warm glow because if you don't have this so i if i hide this one you can see there is a warm glow in the picture but the rest is still pretty cold so you want to have this warm glow but at the same time influence the rest of the picture is pretty important because if it's a sunny day everything is sunny so you don't have just a sunny part in the world the rest is a cold part you have to recolor everything and you do that with a gradient map and with the chess ting the opacity you can see how much of a glow you want to have and of course you can exaggerate it if you want to be more artistic with your picture with a more natural style try to use a very low opacity on the gradient map that goes over all of the picture and a higher opacity on the one that is creating the warm glow on the outside okay so basically this have been our five quick tricks quick no sorry quick tips for today thank you very much for watching and if you want to support me head over to patreon the link is in the information of the video so you can be part of our community I give you feedback on your pictures you get more of a say on which topic is going to come next in my videos and of course you get other benefits that you can look up at the side like some goodies crunch maps brushes stuff like that okay thank you very much and have a nice day looking forward to your feedback and your comments see you