5 easy ways to get professional looking photos - Affinity Photo Tutorial

hello my friends how are you doing my name is Olivia I am a professional designer and today I'm gonna show you five easy tricks on how to make your foolish look more professional without working too hard for that I know that's part of the question don't think I don't know I know everybody wants the easy way out today I'm going to show you how also a quick reminder I'm part of the lock down 2020 project over on the official affinity channel so please check that out I'm gonna show you how I edit it this alien landscape alright let's get started so the first thing to get more professional results with your photography is to overshoot what does that mean overshooting is when you take a lot of pictures different perspectives capturing different emotions and situations trying out different kind of effects and the cameras and some of them might be good you try out different things afterwards you can delete most of them but some of them might catch amazing moments and by the way keep in mind things look different on the little screen on your camera or on your phone this will really improve your photo skills so the second trick is cropping and I know it sounds super easy but it's extremely powerful to do this here are some examples of pictures that have become icons because of the way the photograph has cropped them for example this picture by Elliot Irvin you can see how much information is in the original shot it was a completely different picture and then it became an icon because of the way it was cropped you can see how this condenses the breacher but brings out the story the small size of the doc you can now clearly see the sweater he is wearing we have some guys in the background as a reference and then the feet of the woman standing there giving us even more reference and cute details on how small this dog actually is now here's another famous picture by Arnold new man again you can see all the information in the shot and this is the iconic picture that came from that it's not just cropping is also rotating it a little bit and this completely changes the story and it brings something out that couldn't be in the original pictures that you can see how powerful cropping is here another example by Albert recorder who has photographed Che Guevara again there is too much information the guy here on the left these kind of plants here on the right there's a lot of stuff going on that diverts the attention from the main subject here and this is the iconic picture that we all know now the look on his eyes looks so intense while here a lot of that guest lost and now let's have a look on how to use that for example here we have a nice picture of a water lily but the blossom is kind of small in the picture there's a lot of stuff that we don't really need and the blossom is right there in the middle we could improve on that so let's go over here to the crop tool you can set up your own custom ratio depending on where you want to post that so think a little bit about it is it for Instagram is it for Facebook is it for your slideshow stuff like that they all need a little bit different ratios for example on Instagram its square you have these guides here that you can use over here this overlay you can choose between the thirds golden spiral and diagonals to give you a little bit more support residing what kind of cropping you want to do so for the cropping I want to use the third screen and I want to crop way into the picture you can see I want to put the lily down there into the lower third of our picture because this gives a very private nice moment now the water lily is really the star of the picture we are closer in there it feels more like this little wonderous wonderful world so this is a very different relation to the picture and to the water lily then we had before with this pictures you can see this makes quite a difference let's go to the next picture we have here and this is about color don't just go with white balance and then that's that for example here we have a really cool picture but you can see we have a blue background and we have these kind of pink magenta colored blossoms here we can go in here and create an adjustment for selective color and selective color gives us the benefit that you can select individual colors here like red yellows greens cyan blues magenta all these kind of things and what we want to influence here are the Blues the science and also the magenta okay so let's go for the Blues first and I want to pump up the blue in this case and reduce the magenta in here let's see maybe also reduce the yellow a little bit okay let's go over to the science and push that up quite a bit you can see how that goes stronger remove the magenta from that area like that it's okay and now we go to the magenta is here which is the blossom color so you can see here and pump that up quite a bit like so and maybe reduce the blue out of there a little bit let's see what the yellow does oh no we can leave that in the middle so you can see now we pushed the distance between the blue and the red tones or the magenta tones in this case a lot more it gives better contrast this is the original picture and this is our edited version you don't have to go for this kind of look but playing around with colors to see what kind of look you can create what kind of story what kind of impression you want to put into the image can be a very nice and easy tool to create your own style to create your own expression what is the idea that is in the picture should it look a lot colder a lot warmer do I want something that's a bit frightening do I want to have a laugh scene is it like what kind of feeling is there a kind of emotion do I want to transport through the image in colors are an amazing way to do that you could say the colors are basically the music that comes with a picture so let's go to the next trick guiding the eye with lighter and darker parts in the EM we have a frock and of course the frock is made to blend in with the Leafs in the background but for us he needs to stand out because we want the picture to show the Frog so what we can do here is usually you could use a vignette here the vineyard tool in affinity photo but it's not very flexible so I want to show you another way we're going here to the left side and using our shape tool select the donut tool and you want to put a donut over all of the picture like so make it big enough that's good okay and you can reduce the hole radius up here so make the hole smaller like that good the next thing we're going to do is that we are going to create a curves adjustment like that down here and then curves adjustment and then put the donut on top of that right click and mask to below like that so now this works as a mask for our curve and now we can pull down here you can see the outer parts of the image are getting darker but we don't of course want to have this hard border so what we gonna do is to select the donut again just the donut disguise and then use blur and you can use even more blur like if this hits a hundred you can go in here and say 300 so this goes soft where you just need to make sure that the blur doesn't influence the corners of the image so if this gets brighter at the sides in a way that hurts your image you can zoom out there and then make this bigger and then use the whole radius to make that smaller again to adjust that so you can see this is a very nice way to create a vignette and also what this does for us is I can now for example use it like this I can make an oval vignette and then rotate it to the side to follow the shape of our frog and so let's make this a little bit bigger here like so good so now you can see we have a bit of a highlight around our frog by making the surrounding darker there is another thing though that captures our attention and that is detail so what we want to do here is to put a bit more con dressed on the frock not on the surrounding so we do basically the same thing but the opposite way in this case so what are we going to do is to create an adjustment layer for brightness and contrast and then we are going to create shape for ellipse and pull the ellipse over all of the frog like so now right-click on the ellipse which sits on top of the brightness and contrast adjustment and then click mask two below so this again creates a mask for our effect and now we can double click on our effect and say we want to have more contrast in that area here again you get these kind of hard borders so go to your ellipse and blur that so that software around that you can also move your ellipse around so you can place the effect exactly where you need it maybe rotate it a little a bit and you can see that this gives us a lot more attention on the Frog this is the original image and this is the changed image where we have a lot more attention on our frog of course you can say if this is a little bit too dark you can make the picture brighter again like so with the testing the curve so you have all the freedom is completely non-destructive so that's very very helpful so the last trick I want to show you today is by using one of my cat pictures I want to crop it of course ever as I showed you before so we have two sixteen by nine ratio let's pull this down a little bit maybe so the cat is more in the center alright so here is the trick of what you can do with that you duplicate the layer and this is a trick that I have shown before but here's the advanced version of that trick set it to soft light you know that much but the next step is amazing look at that go to effects here click on preserve alpha for Gaussian blur and then move up your radius to blur the picture and as you can see here you can decide how strong the effect is and you also get this kind of soft glow around the image so that's pretty cool and just with this one effect you can see the picture gets warmer it gets more contour it also has this kind of soft effect on it so that is pretty cool now the next step we have already seen but I want to show it again go here to adjustments selective color and now again I can play around with the color so in this case we have some red values here and we have some yellow well use in the cat so here we have the red values so let's push this up because actually the couch is pink that the cat is lying on and then let's remove a little bit of the cyan and then we go to the yellows and we can't push the yellow a little bit maybe let's see let's remove a little bit of the red maybe let's see what the blue does we can remove a little bit off the blue and you can see now we have a nice picture that also accentuates the different features of the cat like the acute red nose and the bright yellow eyes now and you can see if I select both of these layers and turn them off just these two adjustments is a super easy way to give you a better picture before after before after well that's for this tutorial hope you liked my tricks to make your pictures look more professional I also want to thank all of my patrons who support me and make this video possible this is very very much appreciated thank you for being one of my supporters and if you like my videos maybe subscribe to my channel give me a like or even leave a nice comment thank you very much and if you have more questions also put them in the comments thank you and see you soon bye

Channel: Olivio Sarikas

Views: 14,269

Keywords: affinity photo layers, affinity photo adjustment layers, affinity photo learning, oliviosarikas, olivio sarikas, olivio affinity, olivio tutorials, affinity photo tutorial, affinity photo tutorial windows, affinity photo 1.8, affinity photo tutorial 2020, affinity photo tutorial for beginners, affinity photo manipulation, olivio affinity photo, professional photo editing, better photo results, better looking photos, how pros edit photos

Id: Iramo-2tsCo

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020