AN INTRODUCTION TO AFFINITY DESIGNER FOR SUBLIMATION

[Music] hello everyone this is Leanne from of Love & shiplap and the founder of subnet sublimation graphics and tutorials here on Facebook if you're joining us on YouTube please be sure to come join our Facebook group and if you're catching us live on Facebook don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel those links are in the video description depending on where you're watching today's video is going to be an introduction to everything that you need to know to get started with affinity designer for sublimation printing and design now I could never cover all of the tools and features that are in this program in one video and I don't intend I'm doing that today my goal with this video is really for those who are just starting out and they're so completely lost and they don't even know the basics or where to start so this video is going to cover all of that stuff if you've been in my group for a while then you know that I highly recommend affinity designer first and foremost when it comes to affordable software's you really can't beat this it has more capabilities than programs like and Inkscape and it is more affordable than programs like Corel and Photoshop or the Adobe suite of products it's also more affordable in addition to that when you're comparing it to something like silhouette silhouette is not a graphic design program and therefore it doesn't even have a fraction of the capabilities that a program like this does now I've had a Finity designer since it was in beta I've had it for six years then that that's how long they've been developing the 1.0 version which is what is currently available and this program has a one-time license fee for life so when I got this in beta I believe it was 39.99 and even now the price is 49.99 and that license is good for life it includes all of the updates of this version so in six years I've never paid more than that original license fee that I paid now it is my understanding from the affinity designer forums that when a new fully developed version comes out which will be the affinity 2.0 that then you may have to pay an upgrade license fee I don't anticipate it to be more than what the program would cost itself which again will most likely be around that $50 price point I imagine that if you already have the 1.0 that upgrade to the 2.0 is probably gonna be half of that obviously I don't know for sure because this is all new but as I mentioned even if you had just paid the $50 or the $40 like I did six years ago that's six years that this program has continued to develop and I have not paid any more which is substantial savings when you compare it to something like the Adobe suite of products where you're spending $40 a month and that really adds up over the years on when you're a small business and it's really not specifically about the fact that yeah you can tax it up those costs it's about what's most realistic for your business and your skill set and capabilities I think that probably 85% of the people who are in our group and watching these videos they do not have and will never be taking the time to learn the advanced skill set that benefits from programs like Photoshop so with that in mind it's kind of a waste of money when you can achieve all of the same tools and get the same high quality printing for a fraction of the cost another reason why I really like affinity is that I do feel it's a little bit more user friendly than Photoshop if you guys have seen my videos then you know that I really do make things look easy but it's just because they are easy and so often I see people trying to overthink the process which is something that I will talk about today as well in our introduction video and last but not least one of the main reasons that I prefer this program be is because it's so feature-rich and it only uses 20% of the processing power that Photoshop does so with that in mind if you are not springing for that gaming quality laptop then this program is going to give you significantly better perform most of the features you're probably going to want that Photoshop currently has there something that affinity doesn't have but you can work around them pretty easily and it's not gonna be glitchy or limited like Inkscape and silhouette can be so again I really recommend affinity designer I love this program and I do think it's really great so before we dive into our introduction I also just want to draw your attention to the website for affinity designer so if you come to affinity serif comm just see the got set up here you'll see it there's a tab here that says learn I see so many incredibly basic questions in not just our group but in other groups as well and even though I'm gonna cover a lot of them today I highly highly recommend that you take time to go through the free videos that have been put together here so when you click on the learn tab you're gonna brought to this interface and depending on which program you're using you can choose desktop videos or iPad videos now affinity designer is for your vector artwork options affinity photo as the name suggests is largely for photo editing but it does have a couple of features that are not an affinity designer that are beneficial like a warp tool is not available infinity designer but is in photo and you can work with both programs interchangeably so I do recommend if you really think you'll use some of those features or if you happen to do a lot with photos that you get both and then affinity publishers of course for document creation which not very many of us in this market are doing this but just for the record so when you click on like we click on desktop you can see that there are all these great videos that really go through them everything and they're nice and short because they're designed to only cover one specific tool at a time so you know whether it's you want to learn how to expand a stroke or you want to learn how to divide your pixel modes your preview modes it showed walks you through just all of these different features of the program and there is literally a video that's under five minutes for every single tool that is in the software so this is free it's very easy to go through if you're not sure how to do something you can always type in we start typing and transparency we see that there's two different options that's going to teach us about the transparency tool and then of course you can click through all of these also on that learned tab you'll see that it does advertise the desktop workbook now I have the workbooks for both affinity designer and affinity photo they are very good if you think of like a college textbook where if you were learning a software it would start you off with the really basic stuff and then work your way up and have like little projects to work on in between that's how this is set up so I do appreciate that it is very thorough but if you don't want to have to spring for that the videos are here so that's affinity serif comm and you click on the learn tab and you'll be able to access all of those very easy to follow very short videos to teach you how to use all sorts of different tools that are included in this program ok so I'm using a Finity designer on a Windows laptop if you are using a Mac your interface might look a little bit different and I do know it does look different on the iPad as well all of the same features are available on the iPad and Mac versions you may just have to look around for where they've been placed I know that on my iPad a lot of the stuff is placed differently in the side toolbar and it did take me a little bit of searching around to find them I'm not doing a video on the iPad but I did just want to go ahead and mention that so let's go ahead and start with the basics first at the top here you'll see that you have these three icons these three icons represent the different personas that are available in affinity designer now a persona is your style of workspace by default it's in the designer persona if you're looking at some older directions for doing work in affinity it might be called the drawing persona they recently changed it to be called the designer persona now the designer persona is where you would draw curves and shapes and create artful tags and you're really going to do the majority of your work here because this is the vector this is the the vector drawing persona and we know that vector work is important because is what scales easily and gives us the best results when it is enlarged the next one is our pixel persona now this is great if you're doing freehand work what a lot of people seem to do who do freehand work is they start in the pixel persona and they will you know sketch out whatever they're doing with their stylus or their Apple pencil or whatever it is that you're using and then they will switch back over into the vector purse the designer persona the vector drawing so that they can add those shapes and colors and fill in shades and things like that and then lastly this is the export persona which shows you you know what your document is going to be when it's exported so I never use the export persona and quite honestly you probably never will either so when you open up your program and you're ready to start something new you start by going to file and then new now you have a few options in here so there's two different spaces that you can create you can create a document space or you can create an artboard so let's start by talking about a document space now a document space would be if you were planning on creating a design or if you're simply getting ready to print your design depending on what you're doing is going to dictate what size you need so you can see I already have a preset here that says t-shirt standard this is because any time I'm going to make a design that I plan on marketing specifically for t-shirts that I put my shop for you guys I do the design size 5,000 pixels by 7000 pixels so if I was going to be creating a design today that is the one I would click on and use now this is a custom one in which I created and you can create your own template as well by going over here and choosing whatever sizes you want so let's say we were going to do this a simple square that can be used on anything we might do 5,000 by 5,000 pixels your dpi I typically go with 400 now 300 is the minimum when you are creating a digital design I'd like to do 400 so that your design will actually be scalable to larger sizes and the reason why I do that is because if we're being realistic many designs are being scaled up for larger items whether it's a doormat whether it's a three XL to 6 XL shirt whether it's a floor mat a beach towel there's just so many possible uses when you're creating designs so with that in mind I always go with the 400 dpi so that the there will be a higher pixel rate so that when you when you enlarge the design or when your end user enlarges the design it's going to still come out clear next we're going to choose our color format now it should already have RGB / 8 selected but um RGB /a is the one that you want to choose for digital design work and if you are printing so maybe you um you know grabbed a clipart somewhere and you just want to add some text and print it you always want to choose RGB forward slash eight now this is applicable in the printing world if you are sending a document to a professional printer that's going to be using a laser printer and that would be like if you created something that wanted to be printed at Staples for example then you want to use CMYK we use RGB for designing and for those things that we're doing because our inkjet printers whether you have the Sawgrass or you have one of the Epson models it converts that RGB into CMYK the laser printers do not have that same capability so that's one of the reasons why they say if something's supposed to be printed it's supposed to be in CMYK if something's going to be digital online it should be RGB so just kind of keep that in mind we want to select RGB /a and because I know someone will ask the difference between the eight and the 16 is the bits now RGB / 16 gives us technically more colors and even with 8 you're getting you know millions probably billions of possibilities there are a couple of problems with choosing the RGB 16 the first is that most computer models cannot register all of the colors that can be created which means a color that you created in your document may not actually print accordingly RGB 16 also results in a substantially larger file size which may not be able to be processed accordingly with your end-users computer or if you're sending it off to be printed RGB 16 oh um because items need to be converted from RGB 16 to RGB 8 for the best printing when that conversion happens it actually dilutes out some of the colors that you might be using so the main goal here is that when you use RGB you're getting more accuracy when your printer is going to convert that to the CMYK to print and again that's relevant to your inkjet printing so we'll choose RGB slash 8 now color profile very important here this out your color profile is the color profile of the document you are creating this is not the ICC profile that may have been provided for your ink so please understand these are two different things you want to make sure that the color profile you have selected is either the Epson srgb or the srgb IEC followed by this line of numbers this is the one that I have always used and if you guys have printed my designs you know that they look great this color profile is going to be embedded in your file so that if you are making designs and you send it off it's going to make sure the color stay correct on the individuals computer screen so like I said you can use either the Epson srgb or the srgb IEC now if you were working in white toner printing or direct garment printing even though I know first level nation mostly I just do want to touch on this you are going to be using whatever profile is provided for your printer until that is provided by you know whatever company so you can see that these profiles from Canon were automatically installed because that's my daily printer that I print my shipping labels and whatnot on and I don't have the white toner printer plugged into my laptop at the moment but if I did I should see another option there for that printer so our color format will be the RGB a our color profile that's RGB IEC followed by these numbers if you're making a design you always want to make sure you have checked that transparent background box and if you happen to open up your workspace and it has a white background and you can't figure out why you just go back to your document properties and select that and then you can choose include margins it automatically has these preset and I'll show you guys how to retrieve them from your printer in just a second now if you want to let's say you want to add this so you'll hit the plus sign here to add it and then you can right-click and rename and I'll just name this general square design and now that's there for future use so if you know that there's different pixels that you want to use for your designs you can preset those so that when you write to create you just click on one and hit create and have your workspace ready for you now if we click on document setup if we need to make any changes you can just click on document setup and actually you can go to file and document setup as well there's two different ways to access it um let's say we wanted to work in inches which we would do if we were printing you can select that from the drop-down menu and then if you want to retrieve your margins from your printer you just select that option and it will retrieve them from whatever printer it's picking up if you're using the epson workforce printers it's actually like point 1 1 7 pixels all the way around but that printer is not currently on so this is picking up for my Canon and then if you happen to you need your colors here also make sure that color is selected to convert not assign because otherwise when it's open in different programs it may not actually pull the correct colors and then if you needed to adjust your dimensions or maybe make it portrait size you can do all of that in here as well so now this is a workspace this is a document space that is ready for us to create a design I personally do really like using the document space if I'm doing a design that's just gonna be you know one time I'm not gonna need to do more of it when I say need to do more I mean maybe you're gonna create something that you want to have multiple colors of and you want to have all of those different pieces all together then you would use the artboard option so I'm gonna go ahead and just exit out of this because we don't need this now and now we'll create an artboard so we'll go to file and new once again and we're going to you know we can choose our dimensions and we'll check that box that says create artboard we make sure all of our settings aren't the same which they should be the same every time you open up your program but it always is a good idea to double check and then hit create so now the difference between artboard and a document is that you can add multiple artboards on your page so if I just click on navigator over here in the bottom and zoom out you can move that artboard over there and I can click on the artboard tool here in our toolbar and add another one and like I mentioned this allows you to create designs that might go together or maybe you're just changing colors so to show you that I'll just show you here we go these trucks that I've been working on for a little while now this is a great example so you know I've got a yellow one for school I've got a red one for Valentine's Day and I'll probably do some Christmas ones but I can go ahead and add another artboard where I can just duplicate over so if we just if we zoom out here and I add another artboard and then I can actually just right click in my layer panel and hit duplicate duplate my artboard i meant to duplicate the graphic but if we just go here and select all this and i hit duplicate and we can actually move that over there and now i could go ahead and go through all of my layers i could go through all of my layers and i could change the colors however i wanted in there so if you have items that go together you can do them all on one artboard and it definitely makes a little easier to work on each project individually and then when you're done you know you can export your specific artboard so I'll come back to exporting in just a minute I am gonna leave this open but so that's the difference between artboard and a document design space I mean X I this and now let's talk about if you're gonna print I see so many people try and make printing a design so much more complicated than it is now the thing about what I see a lot of people try and do is they're trying to say okay I've got this design you know this whatever and they try to do file and print and then automatically have it resized let the printer resize it I do not recommend doing this your proportions of it being resized or your dimensions of it being resized are not going to be equivalent to the substrate that you're trying to use so this is not the type of printing that you want to do that that method of where you go file and then print okay and where you you do the fit type you do scale or fit to printable or shrink to turnable so fit to printable would mean it would resize this see how it resized it to fit on our design um when you do something like this that's great for document printing but it's not great for design printing because you want accuracy if your design is supposed to be 11 inches wide to fit a large t-shirt you want to make sure it's 11 inches wide so that's when creating the right size document comes into place so anytime you're gonna print you want to start by opening up a new document so file and new and you just click on this tab that says print to make it nice and easy cuz there's already got all these preset page sizes so we'll scroll on down here you can see the got like business card poster definitely makes a little easier somewhere in here there's letter I must have missed it there it is so we'll click on letter size because that's the page size that we're going to be printing and you have a custom page size you can also just change your dimensions right here and create a custom page size so if you're printing choose the page size that is going to be whatever you print and of course this will depend on you know your substrate if you are printing a design for a large t-shirt that needs to be 11 inches wide then you would use the ledger option the 11 by 17 media so that your design would fit properly on there if you needed your design to be 20 inches wide or 18 inches wide then you would use the super be paper kind of common sense but again I see a lot of people ask this question about not knowing what size to use and you really just I don't think it's not difficult so let's just mean um alright so we're gonna select letter size and again make sure our colors are all correct and we're just gonna this is for printing so we're gonna go ahead and hit create now because this is pulling up my margins from from my Canon printer I'm just gonna uncheck it so it doesn't confuse you guys alright I recommend keeping your workspace in the portrait orientation because as you are trying to set things to print it's going to make it easier as well now I'm bringing this up again because I see so many people who they have this horizontal and then they go to print it in portrait and it doesn't print properly so you will just save yourself so many headaches and so much stress by not making this more complicated than it is make keep your workspace in portrait size and if your design needs to be rotated then rotate it which I'm going to show you how to do alright so the first thing we want to do is import a design so we go to file and we select place and we'll just choose I believe this is our freebie this week at my website so if you catch us at a later date sorry you can still get the design of course okay so you want to make sure that you click and drag and that will allow you to have a little bit of control over the initial import I'm just gonna delete this so I can show you this again if you don't click and drag if you just do a single click it's gonna import massively so again you can go to file and then place or you can click on this little picture icon right here this when you hover over it it says place image tool so I'll select that again and if I just do one click you can see it exports in it the full size the first step after you have imported your design is always going to be to resize it you can do that by clicking on the corner node and just kind of dragging it back and forth that's always an option and if you click on where it says transform down here in your sidebar you will see the dimensions you want to make sure that you lock that aspect ratio always do this you do not ever want to skew a design like this source or whatever to make it fit on a substrate um I can assure you that no designer in the history of ever created their designs for anyone should do something like this and it does not look proportionately appropriate on your substrate so you're going to put together a professional product so definitely make sure that you don't do something like that I'm just gonna do undo there we go so make sure that lock the aspect ratio is locked and let's say that this design was going on a small women shirt we would go over here to our width because we know that a woman's shirt needs to be about nine nine and a half inches wide so we would just hit our nine point five inches and it will automatically resize for our shape now because of our print margins this may or may not fit and also another thing we can see is that this design because of the space around it is actually smaller than the goal size of nine point five so you have a few options here first you can choose to crop use the vector crop tool and you can when you click on that you'll see you got me zoom in you can see you got these little brackets and you can just drag them in I usually try and make sure there's not too much space around the outside of my designs but you know not always perfect okay so if we do that and then you want to make sure to click back on your move tool to deselect it and then we'll click back on our transform and see we actually were over an inch under the width that we wanted so we'll click on that again and we'll hit that 9.5 there we go now our design is the appropriate width obviously if we tried to print it just like this we would be cutting off our design which we can see it's cut off on the edges and if you ever don't see what's cut off on your design or if you don't want to see what's in these spaces you simply do that by going to view view mode and then clip to canvas so see how it no longer shows us what's off of our print space it's totally up to you depending on what I'm working on I go back and forth between them but I have seen that question a few times I did just want to address it while we were there okay so the next thing that we want to do to prepare this to print is to rotate it now you have a few different options when it comes to rotating anything that you import into your program your rotating tools are these ones up here on the top now the first two are used to mirror or flip your design because we have the mirroring setup when we print we do not want to mirror in our program very important to keep that in mind and I'll make sure to show you guys that before we finish our video and then you have these options to rotate it counterclockwise or clockwise and of course you can always just rotate it yourself but I personally I like to make sure I just use these that way I know that it's straight so that's one of my preferred choices okay so this was this is our rotating tools and then the next thing that you probably want to do is Center it on the page I know that I personally prefer for my designs to be centered if it's just one and it's filling the whole page because that way I'm sure that if there's any ink on the edges or anything like that that gets caught with the rollers that it's not going to be on my design and I can just trim those edges and be good to go so that's where your alignment tools come in and you can see it's right here when you click on that you've got your options for aligning horizontally or vertically so if we just select the align Center and the align Center and hit apply it will go ahead and align itself in the center of our page now let's say you want to do it by hand or maybe you're just trying to line up a few things together so if I resize this down so I can show you guys how to line up a few things together we have what's called snapping grids so that's this little magnet here at the top now snapping kids are my favorite when I'm trying to line stuff up because let's say I want this centered in the page as I hover this that green line shows up that lets me know that is the middle of the entire page now let's say I put this over here and I'm gonna right click and duplicate it or sorry to duplicate you need to do it over in the the layers panel so if I hit duplicate and let's say I want the edges lined up see how when I did that it showed me where the edges were and if I wanted it in the middle of the page it'd be there and then see how the second green line appeared if I unclick it's not going to show them but that second green line appears through the middle of our first design this is letting me know that the edge of this is in the middle of that design and then the red horizontal line is letting us know that this is the center of the page in the horizontal on the horizontal axis so when you happen to be putting a lot of different things together you're trying to align text those snapping grids really come in handy and make things very easy along with the alignment tools now if you want to import more than one graphic for printing you can absolutely do that as well by simply clicking on that place image tool or going to file and then place and then choosing your next design you absolutely can print as many as will fit on any piece of paper and then you'll see if I push this here it's showing me that the middle of the design that I just imported is lined up with the top of that lower design so in terms of just getting ready to print that really covers um at the vein the main things which is importing rotating resizing and aligning those are the main things that you need to know how to do if you're going to print a document so I'm going to go ahead and just well leave those here so we can just show you how to print so the next we'll go to file and then print okay when we go to print there are a few things that we need to check first color management if your printer has an ICC profile that has been provided by your ink manufacturer you will make sure to select it here under the printer profile option you want to make sure that the layout is defined by driver and that's one of the reasons why we leave it in portrait so that you are not dealing with you know any kind of complications as far as that goes you would only choose print to file if you wanted to export this and save your say that as a document which is not what most of you are doing most of you are going to print you know automatically you want to make sure that our print type is set to scale as I mentioned before this goes back to that making sure that your print is actually the size that you make it which there's a little bit of leeway when you're printing stuff for like t-shirts but if you're trying to print a template for a door hanger or keychain or a car coaster you obviously want it to do the accurate size so make sure that your fit type is selected to scale now you'll go ahead and select your printer in my case this would be the workforce 77 10 or I do have the sawgrass printer in here as well and then you're gonna click on properties now the paper settings will depend on your ink so you do want to make sure that your letter size your document size matches what's selected here it will automatically update but whatever your print pages whether it's 11 by 17 or 13 by 19 or a and a half by 11 make sure that it is selected in your document size I use um printer Jack ink and paper so my paper type selection is high quality plain paper with the high quality turned on again this is for printer Jack ink some inks do better using the premium presentation matte but with this particular ink that actually alters the colors so that so I don't use it um you what you can do is when you set all of your settings whatever they are for your ink again make sure that this is for your ink I'm not gonna do a whole bunch in this because again it's relevant to your ink you also want to click on more options sorry make sure that high speed is unchecked and mirror image is checked unless you happen to have a substrate that doesn't get mirrored now most of them do the ones that don't um are like glass hops and cutting boards like those ones don't get mirrored and you'll know your substrate your supplier will tell you that it shouldn't be mirrored but you can go ahead and always have it set to mirrored and you can save all of these presets by going to add/remove presets and then giving it a name and you can even select a cool icon if you want and then hit save so you can go ahead and set all of your settings for your printer with your page size and you can choose you know like I did letter we could do another one that is legal size and another one that's tabloid another one that's Super Bee and you can create all of those so that you don't have to go through and do all of your set your settings each time you can just select the one that's relevant and hit print so make ants a lot of that because I don't want to print obviously and waste any paper now let's talk about saving before I walk you through some of the other tools that you're gonna want to know how to use so let's say I want to save this project for future use like I'm not ready to print right now I might want to add some more designs tomorrow whatever the situation may be then you just go to file and save as now save as is going to save your affinity designer document or artboard so we hit save as it tells us it's an affinity to file you can rename it and save it now I don't need to save this so I'm not going to but just so you guys know you would give it the name and you would save it here and this saves your design file so it looked like this these are design files now let's say you want to export this to use it for a design then you would go to file and then export and you pretty much always save as a PNG you can modify the size if necessary and then you have this option here for the whole document but if you happen to select one of the graphics it'll give you some different options so let's talk about that for a second we'll talk about that in just a second sorry so PNG is your most common selection if you are creating digital designs with that in mind you want to make sure that has that transparent background that we talked about and then you would just make sure whole document selected adjust the size if necessary and select export and once again it will give you an option to save that file if you're working with a template that you might want to be saving your file as a PDF same steps file export and that you would choose PDF and of course you have options she's flattened or for print keep in mind that if you choose for print or for export it's going to have the layers built in so that may be ideal if you're someone who sells blanks or if you're trying to make designs that fit specific substrates that are made into a template it's good to offer both if you do do that just so you guys know but that would be your option there PDF flatten if you don't want to have the layers available so I usually if I have a filled template for you guys on my website it's a flattened PDF is one of the file formats that's included because I don't want you obviously to make edits and mess anything up it's so that you can just open it and print it and it's ready to go everything's the right size and all you have to do is print it and there are additional formats so you can see right here we have the option to print in a Photoshop format you also have EPS and the TIFF and then JPEG of course JPEG is not gonna be your preferred choice for if you're making digital designs because PNG s are more scalable and have the transparent background so just keep that in mind I just want to make sure I covered all those for you now let's say you only want to export part of this so we just click on one design and then we would once again still go to file and then export and now when we click on our area we go back on our PNG it's giving us the option to do our whole document or the selection with the background which would be this design that we've clicked on or the selection without the background so if you select a width background it's going to give it a white background if you select without it will have no background and of course we always want without so if you happen to make multiple designs that go together on one document space you can select each one individually you can go ahead and click here and resize it to the size that you want it so it's a high-resolution export and then hit that export again now the same idea goes for your artboards so let's say I made a whole bunch of these trucks and obviously I want each truck to be an individual file I would just go ahead and go to file and export and then it's gonna give me an option to I want to export the entire document or to choose my artboards so once again same thing you would select the one hit export when you do it's gonna give you the option to enter your file name and save save and you are done alright so now we've showed you how to get your page set up depending on what your goal is we've showed you how to set everything up for printing and get yourself ready to print and I've showed you how to export and save export and save your files so I'm just gonna get out of this and I'm gonna delete these because we don't need those and now let's just talk about some of the other tools that are available to you that are pretty easy to use now I mentioned before that you one of the nice parts about affinity is that you can switch back and forth between the designer persona and the pixel persona our pixel persona again is best for that freehand drawing so if that's what we were doing we would you know click on our paintbrush and we could choose any of these brushes you know I've got some that I've purchased that's what all these are and then you have the ones that automatically come included just like if we selected pencils and then you can go up here to your width and you can increase the size and then you can stay here and just draw now when you um one of the reasons why people who do a lot of freehand work use the pixel persona first and then go back to the designer persona is so that they can create this base layer of whatever design is that they are creating and have it as one pixel layer that they can then overlap to create the shades ingredients me personally I have zero freehand skill so this is definitely not a technique that I use but maybe someday I'll be able to draw something more than a heart in the pixel persona there are some there are some tools that are not available in designer persona these tools do not work on vector graphics so like if you make a shape if you use one of our shape tools and make a shape that's not going to work you're not going to be able to use the smudge tool or the blur tool from here on those these are specifically for the pixel work that you're putting together okay I'm not going to go through all of these different tools but when you hover over them you can see what they're called and then you can go back to that learn tab on the affinity website and you can watch a video on how to use the blur brush tool how to use the smudge tool or you can just play around with them if you want to go ahead and delete a layer you simply click make sure the layer is selected in our layers panel and click the trash icon and if you're in the pixel layer and you want to create a new layer you simply add pixel layer this little checkerboard that's here you'll find that the pixel layer has a lot more brushes available because that a lot of the brushes are picks our pixel brushes and like I said this is this is that platform if you're trying to do the free hand and the doodling and things like that if you're looking to do more vector based work which vector work is all shapes and shading and things like that then you do that in the designer persona so we click back here we've got a few things to work with um as I mentioned you can import your graphic by using the place image tool and then from there you can go ahead and build on it there's also the stock option so I'm just going to use that since we're already here I'm just gonna type something in um the stock that's included is not particularly special but it just gives you something to kind of play around with especially if you are trying to learn the ins and outs of this program so I'm just going to click one of these oops I didn't realize that it would open up a web browser to download which I don't want so I'm just gonna go grab one of my own designs okay so let's say that we're working with this design every time you import something or add something to your workspace it's going to appear here in your layers panel you can move things all around when you add them so let's just add some shapes these are our shape tools they're very easy to use and they give you a lot of versatility I highly recommend taking some time to play around with them let's just I don't know a lot of triangle and you'll notice with any shape that you choose you're gonna see like a red dot somewhere and this allows you to make some modifications to how the shape is so if I wanted to go all the way over to make a 90 degree triangle then I would just slide this all the way over and I could go the other way what I like about that particular feature is it gives you the ability to kind of play around with the different shapes so if you click on the little corner spot right here you'll see all these different shapes that you can work with and some of them like the star tool just grab that for a second you can modify the depth of your points you can make them more rounded and then you can even go up here and see the other options that are presented with you and maybe you want to add more points so these shape tools give you some ideas some unique features to kind of play with and if you see in some of the videos I've done like on how to make a bunny or how to make a wineglass or how to make them no you know that you can use these shapes and merge them together to create other shapes and it gives you a great face for whatever it is you're trying to do so I'm just going to delete that one I'm gonna right click and duplicate this triangle so if you again if you want to duplicate you have to do it in the layers panel so you're right click and duplicate and let's say we want to make these two triangles a background so I'm gonna make this one kind of a seafoam green and you can't see it cuz it's underneath and then we'll make this one I don't know pink okay currently these are covering our design which is obviously a problem in order to move them you can click on one of your tools up here so if you hover over them you've got moved to back and see it moved it all the way to the back and then move back one move forward depending on the location options or you can just move them in your layers panel which is pretty easy so I moved that to the top and now it is on top of everything here and the reason I'm showing you this is because I see people ask all the time they'll have a graphic and they want to add text and they don't know how to just add text or add a shape so that's how you do if one to add shapes we've got shapes here I can duplicate another triangle and make this like a three triangle thing but again it's covering that green one so I'll just click and drag in the layers panel and now it's behind that and the same process would happen if you wanted to add text you'd click on your text tool you click and drag to give it some size you can then resize it or you can manually enter the numbers here you highlight it select a font and then put it over here if we wanted it to be hidden you can move it behind your layers so pretty easy um working with the layers is honestly a lot easier than I think some people make it out to be and I don't you guys to be intimidated because it really gives you that ability to add text to layer your designs whatever it is that you're trying to do I mean if I open up our pickup trucks again and we look at one of these we can see all these different like shapes that I've put together and the textures you know to make the little tail light to add the little lines that are on the bumper all of that is all these different layers so if I wanted to move stuff around I could and you know this is just kind of what a detailed project looks like with a lot of shapes and textures and whatnot if you guys were wondering so in our layers we can just move things all around and so if you're making your own design you can just layer them accordingly and with around so that's the layers panel your layers panel is probably going to be somewhere over in here but you can move any of these by simply dragging them so if I put that that would go here if I wanted it here I could just add it there or you can just put it back down here where it was I really like having the layers panel on the side here because it's easier to see you when it's all open all right let's see so I did show you guys if you need to resize something that's over here in the transform panel makes it nice and easy we made sure to cover our rotating options of course if you're trying to merge shapes let me just get rid of our design here so let's say we want to merge these three these three triangles that we made you can do those up here this is our you know add subtract divide that you would use to combine any shapes to make another shape so if I let's get rid of these ones if I did some other triangles and just clicked and moves them and you see we got those um snapping grades I was talking about make this a little bit bigger for you guys and then if I just did it again okay and then I could click and drag and I can go ahead and hit the add one and it will merge them into one and just like that we've got a Christmas tree that we can add some texture to and decorations so um so these those are your tools for merging different shapes together and if you want to connect curved so lines that you make that would be with your pen tool so if we just did like this one and if we click on that node tool I've used this a lot in demos and then you can go over here to your stroke panel and give that a nice thick stroke and then let's say I want to make another one okay so if you wanted to merge these curves together so instead of being two layers they would just be one you click and drag and then you go to layer geometry and then merge curves and now that is one piece so if you're creating custom lines you would do that I know I've showed you guys some different things with doing curves and videos so that shows you how to do that you showed you how to do your shapes we showed you how to move everything how to the line now let's just talk about if you're a toolbar display gets messed up Hugh go to view view and then studio and you'll see all of these different tools that you can have or not have in your studio if you somehow lost something and you just don't know what happens you can always just click reset studio and it's gonna put it back to whatever the default settings are and then if you want to customize your toolbar you can select customize tools and you can drag and drop them over in here if you want to add different things and I'm gonna hit close and you can also customize your navigation bar too so we go to view and then customize toolbar sorry the other one is customized tools that's these are your tools the toolbar is this part at the top so if you customize toolbar and then you can click and drag so maybe I want some more options for for alignment I can just drag that up there I don't really need to add anything else but just wanted to give you guys an example and then now you've got additional options here so every place that there's space you can add new items and new tools now you'll notice that some things are shaded out that is because those options aren't available for example the movement tools are not available because we only have one layer the we can add because this is for shapes we can add or divide but this is not for curves so just to cover that as well and then thick glasses really just to cover coloring so if we just make a heart it's this ugly green color so we click on our color tab the closed circle is your fill color and the open circle is your outline stroke if you happen to notice that you made a shape and it's because it has any type of like a subtle hue and you can't figure out what's going on because it's supposed to be white this is where you would check and you would be like okay is there a color is there not a color and go from there so you know we could just make this pink you can also any recent colors that you used will be saved here you can also use this icon to create your own palette so if you are looking to you know have specific colors that you use with someone's logo you can create your own palette for that by clicking on that icon and if we just add a stroke color to the slide black for example if you click on the stroke tab you can then choose a dotted line stroke a brush stroke which that would correlate with the brushes tab so if we click on one of those we've got like a sweepy brush going on there and then you can of course add the size the width of it and if you're using a straight line one for like a square then you can adjust the caps which shows you pretty easily here as well now there are some fun default styles which like you see those here so if you click on that it'll automatically apply all of that to your object that you've selected and these defaults are made by a combination of effects so when we click on our effects tab you see different things that are checked and all of these have been implemented to add the colors in this whole texture to our little heart here and then if we uncheck them all of that is gone okay and in terms of effects let me just get this stuff out of here put a heart again now your effects tab gives you a lot of really cool options for customizing text shapes graphics that you import really anything so you can just honestly just play around with these so if you wanted to blur you've got the Gaussian blur option if you wanted to add a shadow you can add a shadow' you wanted to add a glow you can do that also there's the option to add an extra outline this is outside of the stroke so if we make that blue and apply the radius it goes outside of that stroke we wanted to make it 3d and then for some of these like the 3d and the emboss and the color overlay you can click on the layer effects gear and you can make additional modifications here and play around with the direction of your hew player out the directions of your glow for example on this one you can play around with the diffuse the shininess as it's called so got some different options and I recommend really taking the time to play around with the effects panel and the different tools that are in it because you just never know when something's gonna come in handy for a project or a certain look that you're looking for and these lighter effects are probably some of the most used things when I'm creating different graphics for me um because it gives me so many options with shadows and hues and just to kind of bring stuff to life and that's one of the reasons what that's one of things I like about it alright so the last thing I want to touch upon in terms of the basic stuff that you need to know is making any modifications so if you go down here to the bottom you see this Halfmoon this is our adjustments um listing so when you click on that there are all these different color adjustments and things that you can make I'm not going to go through them all but I encourage you to take time to go through them if you wanted black and white for example you could convert something to black and white if you can play around with the hues as necessary if you need to adjust an adjustment you just double click on the icon and then you can you know hit delete if you didn't want it anymore if you need to adjust the vibrance so especially if you happen to license clipart a lot of times clip art that you license does not have good vibrance for some reason so you would go ahead and you could adjust the vibrance in here you know or the saturation and then you could even add another layer where you adjusted the brightness maybe the contrast a little bit so this is where you would make those adjustments now this is not photo quality adjustments once again like I said the beginning that's what affinity photo is for but this does give you a lot of options to change colors to adjust hues to improve the vibrance exposure shadows anything like that that might be in your clipart or your graphics so minor editing stuff in terms of like photo quality editing but big editing options if you're trying to edit clipart or make some edits to something that you have created yourself as I've said there's just so much else that we could go over an affinity designer but this video is really just designed to be an introduction to cover all of the basic things that you should know how to do and that working with this information will really help you propel yourself forward with your goals feel confident printing and even feel confident starting to put together designs if you guys have any questions or comments please leave them below and I will be sure to answer them and if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel or joined our Facebook group please head over and do that as well aside from that I thank you guys for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your night [Music]

Channel: Sub That: Sublimation Graphics & Tutorials

Views: 43,160

Keywords: affinity designer tutorials, sublimation tutorials, sublimation designs, sublimation printing, first print sublimation, sublimation printing with affinity designer, affinity designer help

Id: infAwY98qk0

Length: 64min 27sec (3867 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020