Affinity Photo 1.9 New Features

[Music] hello and welcome to this affinity creative session my name is james ritzen and i am the product expert for affinity photo speaking of photo version 1.9 has just been released so this session is going to focus on the new features and functionality it has to offer if you are watching live please don't hesitate to interact in the live chat and let us know what you think let's jump in and see what this update has to offer we have a new divide blend mode which is fantastic for correcting color casts especially in photographic situations like low light urban photography where you might have artificial street lighting or even a mixture of different color temperature light sources so to use this effectively we can add a fill layer off the layer menu here just temporarily hide that layer then i'm going to grab my color picker here and i'm going to color pick a nice bright yellow tone something like this then i can click here to assign that to my fill layer which i will now show and i'll set its blend mode to divide and there we go instant color cast correction if we feel the correction is perhaps a bit too strong that's not a problem we can simply drop the opacity down so i can type 8 for 80 opacity perhaps i might try 50 or maybe somewhere in between 75 that will do nicely now this is also really useful for false color infrared photography so i'm going to perform an initial red and blue channel swap using my channel mixer adjustment here so on red i'll just swap that to blue and blue i will swap to red okay and ordinarily at this point we would have to use various adjustment layers to bring out the red tones and try and reduce the cool blue color cast so we might use hsl selective color for example instead i'm going to add a fill layer i've set this to shift f created a custom shortcut for it as i use it so frequently i'm going to hide that fill layer then i'll get my color picker again and this time i will pick off a cool blue tone from the building assign that to my fill layer show the fill layer and set the blend mode to divide and there we go i have a really nice starting point for further tone and color work linked layers are now in version 1.9 and there are going to be some quite wacky and weird things that you can do with this feature i'm going to show you a couple of basic examples but i'd love to hear some more ideas in either the live chat or the comments so one approach to creating a linked layer is to go to layer and choose duplicate linked okay so i've got this cut out silhouette layer here i'm just going to move it across flip it horizontally and put it into place now at a very basic level most of the attributes of these two layers are linked apart from things like transforming and scaling so that means if i alter the opacity that now occurs on both layers simultaneously also i could go into the liquify persona and just push a few pixels around like so then when i click apply that change takes place on both layers okay so far so good but the other approach to linking layers rather than duplicating an existing layer is to be able to link attributes after the fact so if i select the pen tool using p and create a very quick vector shape i'll just give it a black fill let's say i'm experimenting with some abstract ideas and i've already duplicated this vector curve shape like so what i can now do is go to view studio and bring up the links panel okay and if i select one of these curve layers i now have a range of attributes that i can link to another layer so if i click drag this second curve layer i could link up the vector curves attribute between those two layers so now if i select the node tool and i start to move these vector curves around you'll see that because i've linked the vector curves attribute those changes now take place simultaneously on both layers together this gets even more interesting if i decide to take one layer and perhaps scale it up slightly like so okay let's rotate them as well why not and then go back to my node tool and keep editing so even though i've changed the scale between these two vector curves i can still edit the actual node points simultaneously so this is going to be really useful for so many different workflows now just another example just to give you some more ideas let's link up more than two layers so i have a couple of missed layers in this composition i've got some foreground tone and i've also got an ambient occlusion pass this is a 3d render so i'll select my first layer that's the missed pixel layer then i'm going to link the opacity between this and the inverted mist layer then i'm going to select foreground tone and link that to the inverted mist layer then finally the ambient occlusion and i'm going to link that to foreground tone and now i can use the two arrows here to move between the layers that are linked to the opacity and visibility so now if i modify opacity on one layer it changes on all of them simultaneously and i can get some really interesting compositional effects here the other thing though is because we've only linked this attribute we can still change other attributes between these layers for example with foreground tone i might change the blend mode to soft light and on the mist inverted layer perhaps i might go for something like a a screen blend mode and then just experiment with that and see what happens or in fact i might change this back to normal go down to my mist layer and try something like an overlay blend mode for that layer instead okay so really there are so many possibilities for linked layers we've only really just scratched the surface but i wanted to quickly show you how powerful this feature could be this is one of those low key features that is actually incredibly useful so previously when we wanted to push pixels around in the liquify persona we would have to commit those changes destructively now however we have a live liquify filter layer so when we apply this layer to our layer stack we are taken into the liquify persona and just as an example i will push some pixels around like so okay and for anyone familiar with the liquify persona you will notice that instead of saying apply up here it says done so when we click done we move back to the photo persona but now we have a live liquify filter and if we hide it we can see the before and then we can show it to see the after so this has a serious benefit for multi-layer compositions in this case it's just a single image but imagine if you had several layers making up some kind of composition you could have the liquify filter layer sitting above all of those and of course it would be liquefying everything non-destructively so what we can also do is double click the liquify filter this enables us to go back into the liquify persona and make some further changes if we need to so this is brilliant because we now get that complete non-destructive workflow flexibility with the liquify operation this is a nice and easy feature to show you so now in addition to being able to import and export luts or lookup tables you can now batch import them on the adjustment panel so if i expand the lut entry here you'll see we have the luts that ship with the app but now we can click the cog icon and choose import then just navigate to the lut files and click open these are luts that i've actually created in affinity photo using the maximum quality setting so these are quite large luts and therefore they will take a few seconds to import but once they've all finished importing they're now ready to be applied so all we need to do is just single click on each lookup table in question to quickly apply it and because of the way the adjustment panel works it replaces that existing adjustment rather than adding additional adjustments to the layer stack so this means you can just really quickly click through your different luts and audition particular looks to find the one that you want and then of course you can manage these luts so you can right click on alert and either export it or delete it or perhaps rename it as well text on a path which was previously found in just affinity designer has made its way to affinity photo as well here is a quick example of how you would use it so i'll grab the pen tool then just single click once and twice to create a basic vector curve then i can use the artistic text tool and if i just zoom in and offer my cursor to the vector curve notice the icon changes then i can single click and start typing my text along that vector curve path so let's change the font color and the actual font itself to something more suitable and bring the point size up as well so now what we can do is use the node tool to modify the nodes of the vector curve path dynamically okay so we could of course add curvature if we wanted to but i'll more or less just leave this as it was since it looked pretty much as i wanted it to and i might just finish off with some layer effects let's add a bit of red outer glow not too much just a slight suggestion and perhaps some outer shadow as well okay if you're interested in this feature do have a look at the video tutorial as i go into a bit more depth with a couple of different examples you can now save custom workspace or studio layouts as presets so for example here i have the default user interface layout that we encounter when we first run affinity photo now for my particular workflow i like to make a few changes so i will bring out the scope panel have that to the left here i don't really use the swatches panel very frequently so i'll get rid of that same with the adjustment panel i do a fair amount of work with 3d renders hdr documents that type thing so i'll bring out the 32-bit preview panel but i tend to sit on the channels panel most of the time i also like to use various macros so i'll bring out the library panel on the left hand side here okay now this is kind of the bare bones of my particular setup and i can now save this by going to view studio presets and i'm going to add this as a preset okay now you might also want to create different workspaces for different tasks so for example you might want a specific setup for color grading let's create this now so i will reset my studio back to the factory default now let's go to view studio scope let's get that scope panel out again and this time i will dock it to the left hand studio i'll do the same to the histogram here let's put it on the same tab group i'll get the color panel bring that down here and also the channels panel let's put that on the same tab group okay so now i might go and save this as a color grading preset and with just a quick mouse click i can very easily toggle between these two different setups that i've now created so you can create multiple different studio presets you can also manage them here as well so you can quickly click through to apply them and you can of course rename and delete them so this is going to be a really useful feature for a lot of people if you like to work with channels there are two small improvements worth pointing out so across on the channels panel i will right click the background red channel create a spare channel from it rename the spare channel to red and the first improvement is that we can now duplicate spare channels we have this option now on the right click menu so let's duplicate that rename this one to modified and the second improvement is that you can now single click to isolate and edit spare channel information so i've isolated the red modified channel and i might just quickly apply a gaussian blur filter to it so now i can click to toggle between the red channel and the modified red channel and to come out of isolation mode i'll just select my background pixel layer so to put this into practice i might show you a very quick example by using brightness and contrast like so and then i'm going to right click the red channel and load it into the alpha of that brightness and contrast adjustment but now we've also got the second version with the gaussian blur applied so we can load this in instead and we can audition two slightly different looks between the unmodified red channel so that's the harsher lines and tones versus the channel with the gaussian blur applied where we get this nice sort of hazy glow effect okay and that was just a quick look at those two small improvements to the channels panel external file linking which was previously restricted to affinity publisher is now available in photo and designer so within the context of affinity photo you are usually working with existing image files or documents so typically you would need to go to file placement policy and change that from embedded to linked then if you start to place files so i'm going to bring in these three render passes here like so just set their blend mode to screen and perhaps just add a brightness and contrast adjustment above them ordinarily these would be embedded into the document file but because we set that placement policy to linked they are now externally linked resources we can manage these off the view menu here by going to resource manager and as you can see we can view each of these resources in turn and it tells us that the placement is linked now you could of course select these and embed them for example if you are working with different network locations all the time and you're worried about files going missing or being relocated for peace of mind you could simply just embed them or alternatively you can make them linked again you can also collect these images or documents into a single location which just helps rather than having files scattered around different locations now speaking of files scattered around locations i've got a sample document here when i open it it's going to tell me that it's missing some resources so i can click yes to locate them and these resources are just in a folder different to the one that affinity photo expects to find them in so they're in this folder here so i'm looking for this file in particular so as you can see these are scattered around in different folders and i'm just going to locate them quickly like so so now that it's found my three different jpeg files it will re-link them and our previously blurry layers will now turn full resolution again but in the future on my resource manager i might just want to collect all of these images into one particular location let's create a folder on the desktop called linked images click collect in there and now they are all in one location rather than being scattered around in different folders so there we go that was a quick look at externally linking files and how that all works we have a new type of layer called the pattern layer and this allows you to create repeating bitmap patterns across your entire document so here is a very basic example i can go to layer new pattern layer and i'll just change the width and height to 256 pixels okay and here is my pattern layer but so far nothing is happening and that's because i need to select a brush based tool like the paint brush tool and then in the middle of the document i can see the bounds of the pattern layer but because i have my real-time brush preview i can also see exactly how this pattern will repeat so what i will just do is single click and stamp into the pattern layer like so then switch across to the move tool using v and now i can move my pattern layer around i can rotate it i can scale it and i can even shear it as well so like i say this is just a very basic example but we can of course use another approach to create pattern layers and this is going to be really useful for architecture workflows especially and that's creating a pattern layer from your layer selection so for example here i have an architecture floor plan now separately i've opened up this seamless wood texture i will go to layer and new pattern layer from selection i'll take this pattern layer copy it and paste it into the floor plan document v for the move tool scale this all the way down then temporarily hide my pattern layer now selecting the background layer which is the diagram i need to use the flood select tool that's w and quickly make a selection of the floor areas then show my pattern layer add a mask to it and there we go now just one final tip if i want to scale the pattern layer you'll notice it scales the mask with it so any transforming we do like moving around it of course also affects the mask there's a really simple solution to this just check lock children on the context toolbar so that's this top option here and now that mask stays in place while we are free to manipulate our pattern layer until we get the result we are after creating custom brushes is now considerably easier because you can create brushes from layer content for example let me just get the selection brush tool and quickly draw out a selection of the cloud here then jump into selection refinement and i'm just going to drag over most of this cloud detail to map it like so so we're just trying to create more of a separation between the cloud and the blue background sky here and on my output i'll also change this to new layer which performs color decontamination and so it disregards the blue background color contribution now i'll just rename this to stay organized and across on my brushes panel i will create a new category rename it to clouds then with my cloud pixel cutout layer selected i can use new brush from selection okay now this creates an image brush or a full color brush based on that pixel layer but as you can see here that is a huge resolution brush because we've created it from a 24 megapixel document so this is worth bearing in mind if you want to create performant brushes that don't slow down you might want to resample your document first so let's resample to a width of 2048 pixels then when we use this option again we'll see the brush creation itself is actually much faster and we have a smaller brush width or resolution i'll delete that initial brush and let's just double click to get into the brush editor let's see bring the spacing up and let's have a bit of size jitter as well on a random controller there we go and across on my test document i can just quickly select that cloud brush and there we go i have a nice cloud that i can stamp into my compositions now that's all very well and good for creating image brushes or full color brushes but there is a slightly different procedure for creating black and white intensity brushes so with this document again i'll use the selection brush tool very quickly create a selection then i'm going to add a mask layer okay and let's say at this point i've also deselected so if i select the background pixel layer that's just full color pixel content and then create a new category let's call this category masking brushes if i add that that then becomes an image brush but instead if i select the mask then do a new brush from selection that now creates an intensity brush instead okay but the problem here is it's using the entire bounds of the document and instead we just want to use that isolated region here so to achieve this we need to make an active selection of the mask to do this it's command click on mac or control click on windows you'll now see we have that selection and now if we add that new brush you'll see it's isolated to just the bounds of the selection okay so across on my test document i'll just make a few changes here let's set the initial size to 256 pixels let's increase the spacing let's have some size jitter some rotation jitter definitely perhaps some scatter i might bring the spacing tighter now perhaps reduce the size jitter okay then i'm going to add a mask to my black fill layer and i now have a randomized textural brush for masking so you know you can use this for cut out work where textural edges work better than smooth round brush edges or you could increase the brush width and you could have a bit of a border so let's set this to white for example and then just paint around the edges here so you could have a bit of a textural border going on for your images and that type of thing so the possibilities really are quite endless and you can use those two different techniques depending on whether you want an image brush or an intensity brush okay we have now arrived at my favorite feature for version 1.9 which is astrophotography stacking this is a huge deal for me and i hope for other astrophotographers as well now to save you the boredom of watching me stack three different data sets i've already stacked two of them and now i need to stack my third data set which is sulfur emission data so i will go to file new astrophotography stack and we're taken to a dedicated persona for the stacking process now we can add light frames and various calibration frames but to speed up this example i'm using calibrated light frames i'll just go to add my files here there is my folder full of sulfur data so i will just add the top level folder then on the left here i have the bad pixel map tool this will let me apply a bad pixel map i've created earlier which will tackle all of the hot pixels and the column defects so now i can just click stack and what it will do is take those light frames and stack them together into a final result that has an improved signal-to-noise ratio okay and as we can see the defects like the columns here have disappeared so now we can click apply there is our data so i'm going to rename this to my sulfur designation copy it paste it into my main document then with these three layers selected i will set the blend mode to add and i need to align the layers as well that's no problem i can just go to arrange and align layers by stars so i'll just give this a couple of seconds and then we'll see those stars turn sharp so now i just need to map these three sets of data to red green and blue depending on what kind of color palette i'm going for so i'll go for the hubble color palette that maps sulfur to red so i will use a recolor adjustment here clip it into the sulfur layer duplicate that clip it into the oxygen which gets mapped to blue then duplicate once again drop that into the ha or the hydrogen alpha and that gets mapped to green okay so now we have our full color composition i'll just crop away the extreme edges here let's do a bit of tone stretching as well so i'll add another curves adjustment perhaps just bring these tones up slightly and i might want to bring in a bit more contribution from say the sulfur the red and perhaps the oxygen as well so i can add a levels adjustment and just raise the gamma slightly for both of these okay then to get rid of the background color cast i can merge all of my changes so far into a pixel layer then i can run the remove background filter under the astrophotography category let's just drag our sampler to let's find an area of the background here with no star detail about there check sample color handle there we go that knocks out our background let's just raise the output black level slightly and then of course you can go on and do further tone and color work to your document here i might add a simple brightness and contrast adjustment let's see i might also use a selective color adjustment perhaps experiment with the green tones here slightly but really there's so much you can do and i've gone to the extent of recording six different astrophotography workflow video tutorials for launch covering things like um bi-color compositions sho compositions which is what this is um one shot color camera setup workflows that type of thing so please if you are interested in finding out how to use affinity photo for your astro photography stacking and retouching have a look at those tutorials but this was just a very quick look at the stacking process okay i have saved the best for last so mac users have long been able to take advantage of metal compute hardware acceleration now this basically speeds up raster operations in the apps by performing them on the gpu or graphics card as opposed to the cpu or processor and in some circumstances the performance difference between the two is incredibly vast and this is a prime example so here i'm working with a 32-bit 3d render now doing anything in 32-bit is quite taxing for the cpu and here i've got a live depth of field blur filter compositing on top of all this layer work now this is on cpu so watch as i drag my control around on the document view it's not updating in real time it's really struggling and although you can't hear it the fans in my pc are now getting quite loud as the cpu is really being worked so all of those cores are being fully utilized and still we can't get smooth performance okay so now let's go to edit preferences performance and i'm going to enable opencl compute acceleration which is the windows equivalent of metal compute i need to restart the app so let's do that very quickly now and once we're back in the app i will reopen that document okay and this time let's bring up that depth of field blur dialog again now look at the difference so this is being composited on the gpu or the graphics card okay and this is just smooth instant response on a 32-bit unbounded precision document so this is a huge game changer if you work in 32-bit for example architectural visualizations hdr documents for example photography that type of thing or even if you work in 16-bit or 8-bit perhaps and you do a lot of compositing work you like to take advantage of affinity photos live filter layers in particular hardware acceleration is really going to be a huge huge benefit and i think it's the next step up for the app in terms of performance and having a wider adoption and that wraps up my creative session on what affinity photo 1.9 has to offer if you want to know more don't forget i have produced various tutorials that cover each feature in more depth do have a discussion in the live chat or leave a comment below and thank you for watching you

Channel: Affinity

Views: 90,826

Keywords: Affinity Photo, Photoshop, New Features, Release, No Subscription, Astrophotography, Stacking, Linked Layers, James Ritson, Demo, LUTs

Id: 0Rfs_-frEmY

Length: 40min 31sec (2431 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021