Creating a fantasy composite in Affinity Photo with Affinity Revolution

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Hey there, I'm Allie Anderson. You may have seen me before since my husband and I make tutorials right here on YouTube. Our channel is called Affinity Revolution where we've been making Affinity tutorials for almost four years. Today though, I have a special tutorial for you. We'll be using Affinity Photo to make this beautiful composite image. It's going to be a lot of fun and I'm sure you'll learn a lot. Let's get started. My idea for this image is to create a pop-out book effect. I'm planning on keeping the base of the book and the surrounding area looking the same but I want to layer elements on top of the book pages. Now I would love to tell a story with this pop-out image. By looking at these surroundings it looks like the book is sitting in some sort of office building so my idea is that there's someone sitting here and they're tired of being at the office. Maybe their mind is somewhere else, maybe they're thinking about their next vacation. So my idea is to turn the pages of this book into a wave with a surfer on it. That sounds like a nice vacation daydream. A quick note about choosing images to combine — for composites it's a good idea to make sure that the lighting is consistent with each one of your images. So for this book let's take a look at the shadows. It looks like the light is coming from the windows behind the book and the shadows are coming towards us. So we need to make sure that our images look like that or that our images have no shadows and we can add shadows to them. If the coloring of our images is different that's okay we can make adjustments to that but shadows are harder to change direction of and blend into an image. So with that in mind here's our surfer image. It looks like the light is coming from behind him, you can see that the light is kind of outlining his arm right here and that's perfect for our book so I'll bring this image into our other tab by copying it by pressing command or ctrl C and then I'll paste it into our book image with command or ctrl V. So now I'm going to select the move tool to move this surfer where I want him, so looking at the pages of the book I love that this left hand page is kind of going up at an angle and I'd like for our surfer to be on that page. However he's facing the wrong way so I'll right-click on this image, go to a transform and then choose flip horizontal so now he'll be going up the right direction on the page and I'm just going to lower the opacity of his layer so that I can better see the page and where to place him. I'm going to place him here where the waves completely cover the page. I'll go ahead and turn up the opacity so we can see it again but then I'm going to turn off this layer. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to mask our surfer onto the page so I need to make a selection of the page so I'll press P for the pen tool and then I'm going to trace an outline of this page. As you're tracing make sure that your points are outside of the whites of the page. If you can see the whites of the page afterward it's not going to look very good because this is a pop-out book. I'm okay if the waves and surfer are popping out up here so I'm just going to trace roughly around this area and then I'm going to bring it back into the page right about here. Alright with that page traced I'm going to turn our pen path into a selection then I'll turn back on this surfer layer and then with the surfer layer selected I'm going to press on the mask icon. At this point we can see that our surfer has been masked to the page but there are a few extra elements here that I want to get rid of so I'm going to select our mask layer and then press B for my brush tool and using this brush tool I'm going to paint in black to remove from our mask. So I'm going to bring down the hardness so that the edges of our paintbrush are looking softer and I'm just going to quickly get rid of the sky and then to gradually get rid of these waves I'm going to lower the flow of my paintbrush, that way I'm just painting away a little bit of the waves at a time. Now that I've gradually painted away parts of the waves in black I'm going to switch my color back to white so that I can make sure that the key parts of the waves are filled. Then I also want to go over the surfboard to make sure that I didn't get rid of too much of that. Alright and there we have it, we have our surfer added to the page. I'll press command or ctrl D to deselect and now our next step is to continue the water down the page. Now to do this I'm going to press command or control V one more time to get our surfer back onto the page then I'm going to drag this layer down here so that it's beneath our original surfer. Now I'll select the move tool to move this image into place. I'm looking for water that will match up nicely to that water and I'm also looking for enough water that it will cover the white page that's left behind. I'll just decrease the opacity to make sure that's covering the page all right and I'd say that's looking very nice for filling in that water. So now I'm going to use the same technique we did before. I'll turn off this water layer, select the background layer and then use the pen tool to trace a selection of the page. That way the water will only be showing on the page. This time, because I'm not covering the entire page, I don't need to trace the whole book page but I will trace a little bit extra so that we can use this to blend the pages together. Alright I'll turn this into a selection and then turn on the background layer again, then I'll select this extra water layer and press on the mask icon. So now that layer has been masked to our selection which is looking great but I do want to blend this water together, so I'll select the mask layer and then pull out my paintbrush again by pressing V and then I'm going to switch my paint color to black and I can begin to erase. However if I use black to erase on this layer we'll start to see the page again. That doesn't look very good so I'll press command or control V and instead we'll paint on the mask layer that's on top. So now with my low-flow paintbrush I can gradually paint away the edge to blend these waves together. I'll press command or control D to deselect and I can see some sharp edges over here. Now I can try painting that but it looks like it's not coming off because this is coming from our other mask layer so I'll select that layer and then I can gradually paint that away in black. Alright I think that page is looking so good now that our image is masked onto the page. Our next step is to make the page look more realistic by adjusting the lighting and the coloring, so first I'm just going to close up these layers then I'm going to add a shadow to the page. So if I turn off these layers you can see that books naturally have a shadow where the pages meet, so to mimic that effect I'm going to add a curves adjustment and paint in a dark curves adjustment right there to kind of look like a shadow. So I'll select my adjustment and then go to curves and then I'll make it nice and dark. I'll go ahead and invert this adjustment by pressing command or ctrl I and now I can paint in white to slowly reveal that curves adjustment. If you've painted too much you can switch your color to black by pressing X to get rid of any extra shadow. So right now it looks like our shadow is also on the book and we want it to be locked into this page, so to make sure that it's only showing on the page I'm going to group these two layers by pressing command or ctrl G and then I can drag this curves adjustment into the group. So now it's being locked into where these waves are on the page. I think that's looking so good. As a final step, looking at the overall image, it looks like the lighting in this office is warmer than this very blue tinted wave. To add more warmth to our surfer I'm going to add a lens filter adjustment and I can adjust the optical density to something I think is looking good. Right now it's being locked in the group which is perfect it's only affecting our surfer. But something I don't like is that it's turning this top part of our wave orange and that doesn't look very good. So what I'm going to do is with the lens filter selected I'm going to come up to this gear icon and I'm going to bring down the highlights node so that it's not affecting the highlights as much as the shadows and we can see how that's looking. All right that's the warmth I was looking for. I'm going to close up this group and I'll rename it left because it's on the left side of the page. Next let's set the scene for the other page. We could add more water to this side and call it good but I want to add to the scene by adding a beach. So let's add in this beach image. Now before we add it in let's take a look at the lighting. It looks like the lighting is coming from over here and the shadows are going in this direction and that's perfect for our image. I'll press command or control C to copy it, go to our book image and press command or control V to paste it in. Now I'm going to select the move tool to move this into place. I want to lower the opacity so I can see what I'm doing better. Now I can go ahead and bring that opacity back up and then turn off this layer for now so that I can trace this page with the pen tool. So like before I want to try to trace this so that you can't see any whites of the page. So if I were to trace it like this we would be able to see this white page afterward so I'm going to try to trace it so that it's slightly overlapping with the water so that we won't see the whites of the page. So as you can see I traced slightly outside of the page. That way we know for sure that it'll be completely covered by our beach. I'll turn this into a selection and then I'm going to turn back on my beach layer and then I'll press the mask icon. I'll press command or ctrl D to deselect so that we can take a look at this. Now because I trace slightly outside the page it looks a little off right here, so I'm going to select my mask and then press B for my paintbrush and now I'm going to paint in black over here to reduce this edge. I'll bring my hardness up so that it matches the edge. All right and I think that looks good. Next to add to our pop-out effect I'm going to change my color to white so that I can paint back in a few of these rocks and make them pop out of the page. So in this case the rock extends past the page but I'm going to make sure that it ends about here and I'll just bring it up like that. The great thing about these edits is that you're the master of your own illusion. So I can manipulate this rock how I'd like it and do the same up here. I'll just go back in with black to get rid of that extra blue water. I like how the rocks are looking as they're popping out of the page. Now as I was going around the page doing this I noticed a few objects that I'd like to get rid of, so I'm going to select the main beach layer and then I'm going to select our inpainting brush. And with it set to current layer I'll paint over these things that I want to remove. Next, let's think about the lighting and coloring of this side of the page. First the coloring... I want to change it so this water is the same color of blue as this side of the page so that it looks like this water is continuing to flow over here. To make that happen I'm going to add a new pixel layer and then with my paint brush tool I'm going to sample colors of the blue side of the page and paint them over here. Now to make this blend gradually I'm going to lower the hardness and lower the flow so that I can gradually paint these colors over. So we'll hold alt or option and click to sample the color over here and then I can just paint it in over here. If you're having a hard time blending, lowering the flow is a great way to gradually paint With that painted in I wanted to snap to the edges of our beach selection, so I'm going to close this group for the beach and then click and drag it underneath so that it becomes part of the group. Then I'm going to change this layer's blend mode. I want the natural texture of the water to peek through but I also want the coloring to peek through. I found that hard light does a great job of keeping that coloring here. And we can also lower the opacity. I'm also going to grab our eraser brush and I want to gradually erase the blue coloring off of these rocks. So I'll lower the hardness of my eraser and the flow and now I can paint that coloring away to make the rocks look a little more natural. I'm also going to lightly paint away the coloring from the very edge where the white foam comes in to shore. All right, there we have the before and after with that coloring and I think that blends a lot better but we do have one more thing to add to this page and that's a shadow like we have over here. So I'm going to add a curves adjustment to bring a shadow into this area. I want it to be dark but not so dark that you won't be able to see where the page is bent inward. Then I'll invert this and then using my brush tool I'll press D to return to my default black and white colors and then I'll press X to paint in white. Because this curves adjustment is part of the group, all of our painting stayed inside of this beach layer. With all of that finished I'm going to close up this group and then I'll rename it beach. So now we have our surfer and our beach. I want to add one more element into this composite I'm going to come up to our tree image and then I'm going to bring this tree over into our book image. So looking at the lighting of this tree it's hard to tell where the light is actually coming from. The lighting is pretty even, so luckily, because the lighting is so even, we can actually add shadow to this tree afterward to make it easily blend into our beach. Now before we can paste it into our document I want to get rid of this white background. So to do that I'll select the flood select tool, turn off contiguous and then click in the white background. So right now the background is selected. If I press command or control shift I, now we have the tree selected and I'll press the mask icon. So now I'm going to press command or control D to deselect and then we can bring this tree into our image. I'll copy it and then paste it into our book using the move tool. I'll move this tree into place. I've decided the best place for this tree is behind this rock right here so to get rid of this extra stump here I'm going to select the mask and then paint in black to remove it. We'll bring up the hardness and the flow to do that. I can see this white line here appearing so to make sure that's not showing up I'm going to select my eraser tool with 100% flow and I'm just going to get rid of that. I'm also noticing some slight haloing over here on our surfer layer, so I'm going to open up our surfer layer mask and I'm just going to erase that as well. Sometimes that extra can just happen as you're compositing but I think that's looking good now. All right back to the tree. I want to adjust the trees lighting to make it blend in better with the rest of the image, so to add some more darkness to this tree I'm actually going to take our rectangle tool and then click and drag out a black rectangle over our tree. So we want the field to be black and to have no stroke so if you have a color here just select this and then press on this no stroke icon. So now we have a black rectangle and what I want to do is add it to our tree group so I'll close up this group and then click and drag the rectangle underneath the group. So now our rectangle layer is locked onto that tree layer and I'm going to lower its opacity to bring back some of that tree detail but I want it to stay looking pretty dark. I'd say that's looking really good and it looks a lot more natural. As a last touch for our tree, I'm going to close up our group and select its layer and then add a new pixel layer so that we can paint on a shadow for our tree. I'll press B for the brush tool and then with full flow and a little bit higher of a hardness I'm going to paint in black to create a shadow for our tree. So I'm curving over the rock and then I'm just going to paint outward like this. Then I'll select our eraser tool and I'll erase any extra we have hanging off. Now I'm just going to lower the opacity until it's matching the shadow over here. Perfect, let's take a look at that. Before. After. I'm going to select the shadow and this group and then press command or control G to group them together. I'll rename this group 'tree'. We've now finished adding elements into our image. Let's take a look at what we've done so far. We've added our surfer the beach and now our tree. This is looking so good, so now as a finishing touch I'm going to add a few overall adjustments to make this image look better. First I'm going to select this top layer and then I'm going to come to our adjustments to apply a brightness and contrast adjustment. Then I'll go ahead and brighten this up and add a little extra contrast. So while I like this brightening, I do think these whites are looking blown out over here. So to fix that I'll come to our blend ranges and bring down the highlights node. I think that's looking much better. It's brightened the image without blowing out those highlights. And as a final, final touch I love a good golden glow especially on a beach. So to add that little extra warmth just to the centre of the image, I'm going to add a lens filter. Then I'm going to add a gradient. So by clicking and dragging from the center we're making it so that our lens filter is on a gradient. I'm going to make this gray color stop black so now it starts in the center and fades out. Right now it's linear. I'm going to make this a radial gradient so that the warmth is all in the center and fades out toward the edges. All right I think that's looking so good with all of these adjustments done. Let's see a complete before-and-after of this image. Nice. With our composite effect complete, I think this is looking so good. What a beautiful daydream. Wasn't that so fun? This composite turned out great. If you'd like to try it for yourselves, you can find the link to these images in the video description. Thanks for watching and have fun making your own composite.
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Channel: Affinity
Views: 39,572
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Affinity Photo tutorial, creating a fantasy composite, using Affinity Photo, how to blend images, blending images, Affinity Photo, Affinity Photo tips, photo editing, fantasy art tutorial
Id: kci6vDPGz-o
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 37min 24sec (2244 seconds)
Published: Fri May 15 2020
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