Compositing Techniques in Affinity Photo with James Ritson

hello and welcome to this affinity creative session my name is james ritson and i'm the product expert for affinity photo today we're going to be looking at various compositing techniques we can use in affinity photo to produce imagery like this now i love compositing and i typically produce more fantastical or outlandish imagery but today i want to kind of dial it back a little bit and focus more on specific techniques and how to achieve non-destructive editing from start to finish so for example this is a version that i worked up earlier and you can see all of my layer work here i can actually just turn all of this off to get back to the original image that i started with so the entire process is non-destructive okay let's get started i'm going to close this example down and start with my base image here so first of all i'm going to cut out the foreground so that i can replace the sky to do that i will use the selection brush tool located here and i'm just going to increase the brush width like so or we can use left and right bracket and just brush in very quickly to the foreground detail here now a useful technique that i use all the time is quick masking so if you press q on your keyboard or you can toggle it up here you go into quick mask mode and the background areas that is areas not included in the selection have an overlay so we can clearly see which areas we've currently missed from our active selection and we can just go in and correct that very quickly and easily i'm not too worried about micro detail because we're also going to refine the selection and the matting will pick that up so come out of quick mask mode down here i've got some tricky areas of the tree line so we're going to jump into selection refinement on the context toolbar here and all i do is just drag across the areas i want to map like so okay and i'm pretty satisfied with that result so now we need to tackle which output option to use and this is important especially when we're dealing with cutouts because selection and mask don't perform color decontamination and what that does is it disregards the background color contribution from the mask or the cutout and that's incredibly important with compositing and cut out work because you don't want a colored fringe around the edges of your cutout layers so in order to perform color decontamination we need to choose either of these two options i don't really need a mask so i will choose new layer and click apply and what that will do is actually give me a new layer as my cutout and i've got my old layer here still preserved in case i need to use it for anything so i'm going to rename this and call it foreground one and then i'm going to bring in my new sky so in my spare time i do like to take a camera with me and shoot skies whenever i have the chance really it's just a great idea to build up your own image library of skies so that you can make your compositions truly unique rather than just using stock imagery all the time so i'm going to try one sky let's just drop this in and see what it looks like okay i need to scale it slightly so v for the move tool i'm just going to scale that like so and then i need to move it underneath the foreground layer so one option for this is to just click drag it underneath okay that will work alternatively i prefer to use keyboard shortcuts quite frequently so i can use command left square bracket on mac and let's just position this up here now the other thing that we're going to tackle at this point is the actual aspect ratio of the composition i don't really like the um the sort of extreme landscape aspect ratio here so because i've got all of this extra sky information just hiding outside of my current canvas i can actually use the crop tool so that's c on the keyboard and just bring that all the way up so i end up with more of like a square aspect ratio composition i can just hit return to commit that and there we go we've got loads of nice sky detail now okay so the other thing that we need to tackle is tonal blending obviously this sky does not look at all like it belongs in this scene so one very quick way to fix that is to add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer okay we'll just add that above our sky and then i reckon all i need to do here is just bring the brightness up and probably just increase the contrast slightly as well there we go now another useful technique i use all the time especially when time when trying to tone or blend layers together is to actually zoom out because when you're working at this kind of zoom level your eyes are only kind of really focused on one particular location or one zone at a time whereas when you're tonal blending you kind of want to blend for the overall scene if that makes sense so by zooming out it means your eyes can just focus on the whole composition and then you can tweak accordingly and just get an idea of how that is affecting the entire scene okay i'm happy with that so let's just fit to screen okay now um one other thing we need to tackle is the direction of the lighting so you'll notice with our foreground image here the light is kind of coming off from the right you can see the sun hitting here and the shadow is being cast so our sky is clearly contradicting this this sky looks like the light source is coming from over here we just need to flip the sky basically so we select the sky uh this is important have the move tool selected then we can either go to arrange and flip horizontal or my preferred method is just to right click transform flip horizontal again it just it it's entirely dependent on your preference really both do the same thing and now this scene looks more correct in terms of lighting however down here the tonality of the sky doesn't quite match the tree line so another useful little technique is to use a fill layer with a blend mode on it fill layers are non-destructive vector layers which means you can add a gradient fill and then you can go back and change that at any time so let's go to layer new fill layer and we're just going to drag to create our gradient just hold shift to constrain it here let's go like that okay now we need to set the blend mode to screen and i think i need to reverse these two stops yes i do so we can reverse the gradient stop just by using this option up here and now this node wants to be pure black and then this node down here we're going to it might work with pure white but now we're just blowing out all the detail so we're just going to move this slider down like so until we start to reveal the sky detail again just let's zoom right in and just bring this up until we get a nicer match between the foreground and the sky we don't want to lose the sky detail completely we just want to make it look like this kind of like a a white glow coming up off the horizon so that it matches the scene okay you know what while i'm here i might try another sky and give myself a couple of options for later on so i will select these layers just hold shift select more and group them let's call this sky one let's just go back out and grab a second sky okay just position this in place like so and again let's do some tonal blending so um i like to use my custom keyboard shortcuts quite frequently you can create your own shortcuts by going to the preferences menu and then if i just come out here you'll have this category list just select keyboard shortcuts and all of these options here pertain to the top menu options so for example if you wanted to create a shortcut for the brightness and contrast adjustment you could go to layer and then down here you'll find all of the adjustment layers and you'll see i've made a shortcut for this on option b so i just use option b to add my brightness and contrast adjustment i'm going to push the brightness up add a little bit of contrast as well that might actually be too much for this scene maybe i don't know let's see we'll just zoom out again use this little technique to kind of gauge where those sliders should be okay that looks about right and then i will group these two and call them sky two okay i'll turn this off for now we'll go back to our original sky but it just means that later on in the composition or perhaps at the very end i can just quickly swap the sky and see how i feel about a different sky instead so now what we need to do is i'm going to bring in some different foreground detail okay i want more of like a forestry or a wooded look to the image so i've picked out another suitable image for this so that's our starting image and then this one here has more of a tree line so we'll just drop this in like so over the top v for the move tool to position it now here's another useful little technique if we just turn this layer off essentially i kind of want the the curvature like where the tree lines go to match between these two images but also i want to get rid of these buildings here and also these colored trees over here so if i turn this layer back on we can very quickly use number keys to change the opacity of the current layer so if i use 5 that gets me down to 50 opacity and then what this enables me to do is just you see here i can position this so that that tree line which i'm going to use sits above the buildings and these trees here as well okay that looks good but as a result i do need to crop up some of the bottom here so c for the crop tool just bring that up like so and then hit return okay now zero to get back to 100 opacity for this layer i am going to add an empty mask down here so to do that we hold alt or option whilst we add a mask okay so that mask is now completely inverted and we can use b to get the paint brush tool just increase my width and up here i want to set my current color to pure white which means i can just quickly paint in like so over those areas okay now i've gone too far i've started to paint in some of the sky here not a problem we can just toggle over to black using x on the keyboard and then just subtract away from these areas okay looking good so far but we do need to do some tonal blending here and this brings me to another keyboard shortcut that i've set up and i use quite frequently so if i add my brightness and contrast adjustment layer it gets added as a parent layer and then if we wanted to clip it to a particular layer we would just offer it to the layer over to the right like so and drop it in and that's fine but i wanted to speed this process up so what i did instead was in my keyboard shortcuts i went to the arrange option and down at the bottom here you've got insertion inside and i just made a shortcut of shift i for this so now what i can do without touching my mouse at all is i just have the layer selected then i go shift i option b and it drops my adjustment straight in there ready to manipulate and of course it's clipped to just that layer once again i will zoom out just to make sure i have the correct tonal blending i think that works pretty good but again this is the beauty of non-destructive editing you know if it doesn't quite look right it's not a big deal we can just go in and modify it even when we've done more layer work on top of it now the other thing we have is some buildings down here i'm going to in-paint these which means basically remove them and replace them with surrounding content but i'm also going to do this non-destructively so i will create a new pixel layer using this option down here i'm going to move it underneath the brightness and contrast adjustment layer and then i'm going to get the in painting brush tool set the sampler to current layer and below increase the brush width and just paint in like so just go over some duplicate areas if we don't get the result we want first time round that's fine and then down here i've got some little lights and road signs that i want to remove so we'll do that too this is kind of my new detail i don't think anyone would ever see this unless they were scrutinizing the image but nevertheless we will remove it because we're perfectionists right okay but because i've done that on a separate pixel layer i can just alt click or option click and isolate that layer you can see on an alpha background there is my in painting work and this just means that you know at a later date if we wanted to change something with the layers underneath or even something on this layer you know that content is just added non-destructively and the brightness and contrast is blending on top of it so if we did want to change the brightness and contrast we don't have to go and redo the in painting work and of course if we decide that the end painting wasn't quite right we can just have another go we you know we haven't actually done anything destructively to this layer at all okay so the next thing we're going to look at then is i'm going to put a another composite element into the scene to give it some interest so what i did was from a different photo bash imagery pack i found this wrecked plane that looks quite nice so i'm going to open this as a separate document to do that we just rather than offer it to the document we offer it to an area of the interface like so then i'll get the selection brush tool just use a nice big brush for the bulk of the selection and then just paint in to these areas oh just hold alt or option to subtract there like so i think you know what i'll use quick masking mode this is going to give me a clearer idea of exactly what is in my selection selecting is sometimes tricky especially with jpegs where you might have even things like compression artifacts or noise it's not always the easiest process but thankfully combination of quick masking and using a small brush width for the selection brush 9 out of 10 times it's a pretty easy solution okay i'm going to refine this so jump into selection refinement up here i'm just going to mat all of these areas because we've got quite a lot of sky detail that shows through the fuselage and other areas like so down here as well not too worried about the although having said that there are a pair of legs there let's subtract them there we go now let's just see we can map that as well but i'm not too worried about the accuracy of the foreground because we're going to be masking that out anyway you'll see in due course but these areas are important just to tackle because it's kind of like a a bit of an ordeal to do them manually okay so once again we want color decontamination i'll just sort out this area here actually sorry i've seen some little holes here as well there we go okay right i'm gonna stop now so we want color decontamination again so we need to select new layer click apply okay and then we'll just copy that pixel layer so command c or ctrl c on windows paste it into our main composite document v for the move tool move that into place scale it down you can hold command on mac control on windows to scale around the center i'm going to put it sort of in our scene roughly here now in terms of scale i'm not going for realistic scale because ultimately you know this scene is going to be viewed perhaps on instagram something like that on you know some small devices so we we kind of want our areas of interest to stand out so we don't want to make the plane you know this small even though it's not very realistic we're not going for full-on realism here photo realism we kind of you know we want to make a big deal of this this element that we've put in our scene so i'll stick with this for now but i may revise the scale later i don't know yet but the other thing we need to do is do some textured masking so let's just rename this actually let's call this crashed plane i'm going to add a mask layer b for the brush tool but this is the problem we have a soft round brush at the moment and if i just brush in here it just doesn't look very good because you can kind of see like semi-transparent pixels of the foliage here and yeah it just it doesn't work so we're going to undo that and instead go across to the brushes panel now there's a masking category that ships with affinity photo we're going to use that and down here we've got a couple of textured brushes so i'm going to use this first one just make sure my color is set to black i believe to subtract yep there we go and because it's a textured nozzle it kind of the brush strokes are randomized as well so you get this nice textural approach to masking i'm just going to zoom in so you can really see this so as i just brush across the foreground detail here what this is doing is is kind of helping to bury the plane into the trees so it looks like it's actually kind of you know in between all of the tree detail and i think i'll just go a little bit higher okay that's looking like a good starting point so just before and after there we go that looks significantly better now let's look at blending this in tonally so i'm actually going to talk through several different techniques that you can use you can use just one of them but i'm actually going to combine them so the first is of course what i've done before which is use adjustment layers for tonal blending so shift i option b to put a brightness and contrast adjustment inside the plane layer and then we can just perhaps zoom out again make the contrast match this scene let's see do we decrease or increase perhaps we decrease oh no maybe we just leave it maybe slight increase it's sometimes difficult you know but again that's why you can always just go back and revisit it especially when you start adding more adjustment layers on top of your composite layer work it might reveal tonal discrepancies that you wouldn't have seen before so there's absolutely no harm and no shame in leaving it as it is now and then going back if it doesn't look quite right now the next thing i will do is add a white balance adjustment okay this plane looks too cool for the surrounding temperature of the scene so we can add a white balance adjustment i actually made a shortcut for this so i use option w which i will use now okay and that's above the brightness contrast and we just add a little bit of warmth to the plane and perhaps a little bit of tint as well okay so that's starting to look a little bit more like it matches and the other thing we can do is some brush work so i will create a new pixel layer but actually i'll use my rather than just this option down here i'll use the shortcut so shift command n on mac shift control n on windows get the paint brush tool uh don't forget that we've got a textured brush so we need to go back to our brushes panel i'm just going to choose a nice soft round brush from the masking category okay and what i'm going to do is color pick so option or alt click and drag i'm going to choose a surrounding let's sort of like have a drab olive type color and i'm just going to brush around the edges here so what we're going to do is just get the brush strokes in place in fact i'm going to undo this and instead color pick from another color down here okay i'm gonna paint in here so what we're doing is just getting the brush strokes down and then we're going to use a blend mode so we could for example try multiply that's far too strong at 100 opacity so with the pixel layer selected i could press 5 and perhaps try 50 percent let's see what that looks like before after not too bad let's try overlay which will bring through a bit more of the kind of highlight intensity 100 what does that look like perhaps that's too strong or it might actually be no okay let's try 75 to get numbers in between uh multiples of uh so 10 20 30 for example you can just type numbers in quick succession so if you wanted to say 35 type 35 i think we'll go for 75 yeah that looks about right now the other technique is a little bit more involved and we're going to use channels so i'm going to add a curves adjustment that's command m on mac control m on windows and on the channels panel here what we want to do is isolate the composite red green and then blue channels now notice that the blue channel in contrast to red and green that's dramatically different the contrast just does not match at all so what we can do is change our channel target here to blue and then to try and match this contrast i reckon what we need to do is bring this up here so these are the black tones or the shadow tones and then add another node perhaps here and drag it down okay yeah that looks nice so we've now made the contrast of the blue channel from the plane match more closely to the foreground but when we reset to get all of our channels back here you'll notice the plane now looks too green it's kind of lost its unique individual color so what we need to do is go back to green and red and kind of do the same thing but not match the blue curve entirely just kind of going to move these around like so until we get a nice bit of red in there not too much but just enough to kind of make it stand out a little bit and make the make the plane look less chameleonic like it's suddenly taken on all of the colors around it okay i think that will do the final thing is uh lighting so we've got our light source coming from over here and the plane kind of had some kind of you know in fact let's go back and have a look at it the original image yeah okay so the plane is backlit um so it's kind of like soft and diffused around the front here so what we actually need to do just close this down now is add some like rim lighting over here so new pixel layer b for the brush tool i've got my soft round brush i want a white color i'll set the blend motor overlay and then i'm just going to paint in across the top here like so and actually yeah i think i can stick with 100 opacity for that that doesn't look too bad and it just kind of brings it out of the scene a little bit makes it pop slightly okay so the next thing we will do is a bit of creative brush work to add some color to this image so i'm going to on top of all of these layers add another empty pixel there get the brush tool and let's just resize that a little bit set the blend mode to overlay drop the opacity down to maybe something like 20 and i'm just going to paint into this area so this is kind of like my non-destructive dodging and burning i guess so we're going to add a nice bit of highlight here and then use x switch to pure black and just paint down here to darken the foreground so now if i zoom out and turn this layer off you'll see the before and the after so you probably wouldn't spot it if you were looking at the finished image but that's just a nice i call it like a redirection of light you know just bringing the viewers attention to the areas you want to focus on and kind of just bringing other areas less focused basically you know making them um making them so that you pay less attention to them okay now the next thing we're going to do is add another pixel layer get brush tool again and we're going to set the blend mode to reflect so i was thinking of a catchy name for this um but i couldn't really come up with one so i guess something like color separation uh basically we're going to add some artificial color to the background areas and the foreground areas to kind of separate them a bit more tonally so what we might do is pick like a a sort of an olive color and then just paint into the foreground here this is far too strong but don't worry we can just tweak the opacity okay so that's our olive and then on a separate pixel layer so just create new pixel layer using this option here reflect 20 again and we'll go for like a reddish orange and just paint that into the background detail and just zoom in here up here okay this is looking a bit garish at the moment but don't worry we'll sort that out by tweaking the opacity okay so then let's select these two layers they're both at 20 opacity let's use one on the keyboard to drop them down to ten percent okay that looks a little better and all this does really is just add some like a subtle dash of color to those areas and just helps to you know separate them tonally a little bit as well okay uh what else shall we do then let's think um i believe we could use a gradient map adjustment actually so again this kind of um this is just another one of many techniques that you can use i'm going to use a gradient map to remap the colors of the shadows mid-tones and highlights so for the shadows we're going to choose like a dull orange so somewhat down here for the mid tones perhaps a brighter reddish orange color slightly desaturated and then for the highlights like a quite a bright cyan then we'll close that down and change the blend mode of this to overlay this effect is far too strong and it looks hideous so we'll try a low opacity let's try 20 percent and again we'll just turn this off so we can see the before and the after so this adds a nice splash of color to the scene as well okay now the next thing i think i will do at this point is add another set of composite elements so go back out to finder i've got a uh they come from a photo bash pack called crows and ravens so i've shortlisted three here and i'm just going to drag them in all three of them at the same time drop them into my document like so v for the move tool and i'm just going to scale them down i've got multiple layers selected which means the aspect ratio does not constrain by default so just hold shift to do that and then command on mac control on windows to resize around the center okay let's sort of position them roughly here and then i'm going to move them to have some kind of like triangular formation i'll scale this one down slightly as well like so okay so how do i feel about that perhaps they're a bit too high rather than having to select all the layers all together it's actually easier to select them group them just give this name of birds and use v and then i can just move the group around like so it also makes it easier if i want to add some kind of effect or tonal blending so for example i could use shift i option b and then drag the contrast down perhaps increase the brightness slightly and then as well as that i might add some motion blur so i can use a live filter layer to achieve this so with the group selected layer new live filter layer blur motion blur then i can just drag to determine the level of motion blur and the direction that's far too strong so we'll just take the radius down until we get a nice amount of blur there we go that looks about right okay so what am i thinking at this point then i think i will change the composition slightly uh i want the the the viewer's eye to focus more on the crashed plane and the birds so to do this i need to crop off any kind of redundant uh detail from the foreground so c for the crop tool and i'm just going to bring the crop handles in either side and produce an image that has more of a square aspect ratio let's try that yeah okay i think that works for now yeah okay so we've got all of our composite elements and let's add some lens flare why not let's add some lens flare so i'll go back out to find it here is my lens flare that i picked earlier we will drop this in over the top in fact i'm going to turn the birds off because it's going to help me see the rest of the composition more easily so now i need to scale this up i also need to flip it so right click transform flip horizontal okay to match the direction of the sun and bring that even further like so just hide that slightly off screen then set the blend mode to screen okay now here's another little blending technique this lens flare it it's adding a nice effect actually in fact i really like this the tonality of it the way it's affecting some of the background detail in the foreground here but the problem is that you can barely see it up here and i kind of i want some more of that to show through so we want to reduce the contrast of the composition before the lens flare gets composited so underneath it we will add a brightness contrast adjustment bring the contrast all the way to the left then above it add another brightness and contrast adjustment and bring the contrast back a little bit like so and perhaps reduce the brightness slightly as well okay so that's helping to expose more of the lens flare detail up here let me just show you what happens if we don't use these two adjustment layers so you can see we're actually bringing through a bit more of the lens flare detail it's quite subtle but it's it's these little differences that kind of make the overall image okay i think this is looking pretty good what i might do just to finish this off is perhaps just some more work on the colors and so on so we have a number of ways in which we can tweak the colors one of my personal favorites is selective color okay and what it enables you to do and i use this all the time is add a color cast to the whites neutrals or blacks in the image so for example if i select blacks and then reduce the yellow contribution you can see here we can add a nice blue color cast to the shadow detail obviously this is too strong so we just need to take that back but if i just bring it down a little bit you can see i add this nice little blue tinge to the detail down here and i really like being able to make all these little subtle changes the other thing we might do is go to the yellows this image or this composite comprises quite a few yellow tones as you can see and we might reduce the yellow contribution and perhaps reduce magenta as well and that gives us more of a lush green look to all of the trees and the foliage down here okay maybe try not to overdo that too much but i don't know i just i can't make my mind up i love experimenting with tonality and color because i mean objectively you might disagree but i don't think there's any wrong approach and sometimes what i like to do is just go back and revisit old images and just try a different combination of adjustment layers just to mess around with the colors and you know you know sometimes it's for the better sometimes it's for the worst but that's again the beauty of non-destructive editing is that you can you can just make these decisions on the fly you can revisit really old work and perhaps with a fresh mindset you can just revisit it and you know make it look more unique or improve it okay i might for example add an hsl adjustment perhaps increase the red color contribution although that's probably a little bit overkill maybe just a little increase there and perhaps increase the saturation on the yellows as well there we go okay um one final thing before i bring the birds back in i've been looking at this for a while i'm not happy with the blending of the plane here so i'm going to go right down to the crash plane revisit that mask layer get my brush tool select that textured brush make sure i'm set to pure black and just subtract away from these areas down here and also this is my mistake i think i missed out oh no i didn't actually this isn't part of the background it's part of the plane but it just it it's too visually distracting for me so i'm going to remove it there we go i think i'm happy with that now yeah okay that looks better uh the final thing is i might just turn off that curves adjustment see if i prefer it with the contrast adjustment i do but there's perhaps too much red so we just need to go back into red and tweak that slider i'll tweak that node sorry until we're happy with the tonality there we go okay i think i'm pretty much done let's turn on the birds again there we go we've got our birds up there and then i'll just zoom out see how i feel about this about the the overall contrast of it if i want to quickly adjust the contrast i might add a final brightness and contrast adjustment and just move the contrast slider and this is a great thing i kind of when i was working this up you know to prepare for this session i went with a quite punchy contrasty look but then i i visited some um other works from artists i follow online and then i kind of grew in you know i grew in love with the kind of like the matte look where you don't have any kind of like true blacks in your image and so then i i thought well maybe i want to try that as well and ultimately you know what i can't decide so i'll tell you what i will leave the deciding vote to you the viewers so would you prefer it with more of a kind of like less contrast matte look or should i go for a punchier more contrasty look it's up to you so that about sums it up uh i appreciate this probably isn't like the most exciting composite to produce it's not very uh fantastical i suppose it is a little bit but not like some of the work i produced but i really you know it was the kind of like the project that had a great mix of techniques i really wanted to get across to you all you know especially in terms of tonal blending how to clip layers click you know clipping adjustment layers into pixel layers for tonal blending that type of thing and just how to do the whole thing non-destructively so i hope all of these techniques you found really helpful thank you so much for watching and take care all of you thank you you

Channel: Affinity

Views: 49,992

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Id: 7VLo-gYriNg

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020