How to Blend Two Images in Affinity Photo

one of the most magical things about photo editing is the ability to combine two images together in this video we're going to take this swimmer and give her a whole new kind of swimming pool it's gonna be a lot of fun I'm sure you're gonna learn a lot let's get started if you'd like to follow along with me I've included a download link to these images in the video description one of the hardest parts of compositing is choosing the right photos to put together when choosing your photos be sure to keep in mind that the best photos to combine will have similar lighting and similar perspective let me show you what I mean the images that we chose this street and the swimmer were both taken straight on to the subject because they weren't taken above or below at any weird kind of angling these pictures are going to be great to combine together to get started combining these images well first take this swimmer picture and copy her onto the street to do that I'll press command or control C then we'll come over to our Street tab and press command or control V to paste her the swimmer image is a lot bigger than our street image so we'll just zoom out and resize her press V for the move tool and now we can resize our swimmer to make sure that she fits into the street image I'll press command or control 0 to zoom all the way back in now that we have our swimmer at a more appropriate size we can begin to resize and adjust her and put her exactly where we want in this street image but how do we know where to put her in the street image when we can't even see the street well a little trick around that we can lower the opacity of the swimmers layer so we can see her and the street and put her exactly where we want her I'll come over here and lower the opacity and now we can see the street and the swimmer when adjusting your swimmer image make sure that she stretches all the way to the sides of the street image if we have her ending here the water won't flow all the way to the edge of the image so let's just make sure that she stretches all the way to the edges now that we have the swimmer positioned where we want her we can bring the opacity back up and now it's time to select our swimmer so we can remove her from her background and put her in the street image let's come over and select the selection brush tool and now we can begin painting over our swimmer the most important thing that we want selected and this part of the picture is her head a little bit later we'll go back and add in more of this water so it's okay if she's not selected perfectly around her shoulders with her head selected let's go ahead and press refine in the context toolbar so affinity can refine our selection and make it look even better now that she's been refined I'll press apply in this dialog box and now with this selection made we can mask her from her background I'll come and press the mask icon right here and now she's been removed from her watery background and put into this more asphalt II background I'll press command or control 0 to zoom all the way back out and I'll also press command or control D to deselect I'm going to paint back in some of the water to do this I'll select the mask then press B for my brush tool and now I'm going to paint back in the water make sure that you have an opacity and flow set to 100% and that your hardness is set to 0% I'll also make sure my color is set to white so that we can see the water that we're painting back in now I'll just go ahead and paint a little bit around her and I'd say that's looking pretty good the next thing I want to do is continue to paint water around to the edges of our photo but I want this water to begin to fade out as it goes to the edges of our photo to make this hot then I'm going to select the swimmer layer and then duplicate her layer by pressing command or ctrl J we now have a duplicate copy this top copy I'm going to leave as is and I'll go to our bottom copy select the mask layer and continue to paint water to the edges of our photo right now you might be thinking why did you do placate it it looks exactly the same but no worries I'll fix it right now the first thing we're going to do with this bottom layer is select the background layer and we're going to change the blend mode so that we can see the asphalt texturing lending in with these waves so I'll change the blend mode from normal to hard light the next thing I'm going to do is lower the opacity of this layer I think this is looking so good and it's blending out into the street wonderfully there's just one thing that's bothering me about this you can see around the edges that this isn't blending very smoothly you can clearly see where the opacity is 100% and where we've begun to fade it out to fix this I'm going to go back to our top duplicate copy and select the mask and then I'm going to gradually paint out the edges of this mask to do that I'm going to make sure that I'm painting in black and then up in the context toolbar I'm going to lower the flow and now I can begin gradually painting out the edges to make it blend a little bit better with our faded out waves that's looking a lot more blended I think it's great but there's another problem we need to fix look at the street now look at the water do you see a problem these colors do not match at all it's very clear that she's in a watery puddle and I want to change this to fix this first I'm going to group these layers so I'll select this layer while holding down shifts I'll select the other then press command or control G to group them now I'm going to apply an h SL adjustment to this group I'm going to place the HSL adjustment inside the group since it appeared on top and now our adjustment will only affect the girl and her water to make this blue color a little more like asphalt I'm going to select our science and then I'm going to bring the saturation all the way down to make sure that I don't have any blue remaining I'll also select our blues and bring that saturation down as well look at what a difference this has made I'm going to check this off to see our before and here's our after and I think this is looking so good you could stop here if you wanted to but I'm going to add a few more things to make this composite photo a little more realistic the first thing I want to do is apply a blur to our background so that the swimmer stands out a little bit more to do this I will first go down to our filters and then go all the way to the top and apply a Gaussian blur filter right now it's been applied inside the group so I'm just going to remove that and put that on top I'll close up our group and then double click on the Gaussian blur filter so I can begin to adjust it I'll bring the radius up to about 5 pixels and then I'll check on preserve alpha to make sure that we don't have transparent edges on our image I'll close out of that and now I'm going to apply a gradient mask to gradually bring this blur into the photo so that our subject is in focus and her background is blurred if you want to learn even more about gradient masks we have a whole video on how to mask like a pro and I'll leave that linked in the video description I'm going to go over and select our gradient tool and then I'll click and drag to create a gradient and then I'll make sure that this color is stop is black so that the swimmer stays in focus now I can adjust these gradient stops or the midpoint to make this blur look exactly how I want and if you think it's a little too intense you could always double click and decrease the blur or even lower the opacity of your filter layer the next thing we're going to do is one of the most important things that you can do in compositing your photos and that's adjusting the lighting to make it look like this swimmer was originally in this photo if you look at the swimmers face you can see some very clear lighting on the left side of her face and shadows on the right side of her face we want to mimic this effect in our street photo to do this I'm first going to start with the shadows I want to apply a curves adjustment to darken the right side of the photo so I'll come over to our adjustments and apply a curves adjustment then I'll bring down the spline I also want to add some blues to kind of give it a cool shadowy look so I'll go to our blue Channel and bring up the Blues I'm going to apply another gradient mask so with the gradient tool still selected I'll go ahead and click and drag and make sure that this gray color stop is now black and now you can see the before and after and what a difference it's made just adding a little bit more shadowing to the right side of our picture the next thing we're going to add is that lightness that we can see on the left side of her face to do this I'm going to select the ellipse tool and click and drag to create an ellipse now this ellipse I'm going to turn it into a ball of light so to do this I'm going to select our gradient tool and start from the center and click and drag to the side and then the color stop that's on the side I'm going to change that color to a color that's similar to the lighting on her face so I'm going to change it to an orange II color and then up in the context wheel bar I'm going to change the type to radial we now have a beautiful ball of light but I want to blur this out a little bit more to make it look more natural for this photo to do that I'll return to our layers panel and this time instead of a live filter I'm just going to do a layer effect to keep our layer studio looking nice and clean I'll check on Gaussian blur and then I can bring up the radius and us a little hidden trick for you if you ever want to blur something more than what this slider goes up to you can click in this box and type in whatever you want I'll go ahead and close out of this box and now you can see that we have a beautiful orange ball of light but I want this ball of light to brighten everything that it's touching right now it's just turning everything orange so I'm going to change the blend mode I'll come up to our blend modes and change it from normal to screen and you can see what a difference that's made now it's really brightening up that area in our photo I'll select our move tool now and adjust this ball of light and now I'm just going to lower the opacity because I think this looks a little bit too intense I'll bring it down to around 50% here's our before and here's our after I'll go ahead and select our curves adjustment as well here's before our lighting adjustments and here's our after I think this is a great difference in making this picture look a lot more cohesive like it belongs together another thing we can do to make this picture look a little more cohesive is change the coloring to warm up the entire image to do that I'm going to go back to our adjustment studio and apply a selective color adjustment in the selective color adjustment I'm going to change our color to neutrals so that we're affecting more of the colors in this image then to warm up this image I'm just going to bring down our cyan to about negative 8 looks good then I'll bring up our magenta and I'll bring up our yellows a little bit as well here's our before and here's our after and I think this just makes it all look a little bit more warm and nice the last thing we're going to do is I'm going to right click on the Selective color adjustment layer and then I'll come down and press merge visible we now have a pixel layer that has everything that we've done it throughout this whole video and it's put it all together so we have all our layers combined here and I'm going to change the blend mode of this layer to give our whole image a little bit more punchiness and this is a trick that you can use on any image so this is a good tip let's go over to our blend modes and I'm going to change this to soft light and then this is looking a little too punchy for me so I'm just going to bring down this opacity to about 30% and here's our before and here's our after with a little bit more punchiness now I'm just going to hold down shift and select all of the adjustments that we made here's our before and here's our after with all of our lighting and coloring adjustments if you want to get better at compositing photos then you'll really need to perfect making selections we have a great selections tutorial that you can check out over here in this tutorial you'll learn a great technique for making super accurate selections thanks for watching my friends and I'll see you in the next affinity revolution tutorial

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 320,613

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, blend, composite, two photos, merge, combine, fantasy

Id: pOBtq484XUQ

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019