How to perfect a portrait in Affinity Photo for iPad with Drue Photo

[Music] hello welcome everybody my name is Drew I go by Drew photo I first want to say thank you affinity for having me here I feel so honored I am a portrait photographer product photographer a photographer here are some of my work and today I'm going to go over my workflow as a portrait photographer so we'll be going over how I retouch color grading and some tools that I really enjoy in affinity so without further ado let's go ahead and jump into it now I use affinity photo on iPad I've been using it for over four years now which is kind of crazy to think but it is my daily driver this is how I edit all of my photos all inside of affinity so once you have opened up affinity photo we are going to tap on little plus button up here in the top right and import from photos now so how I get my images to my iPad is I have a USB c2 SD card reader that I import my photos into usually directly into the Photos app or into Lightroom to organize the photos and back them up and then from there I bring them into affinity to edit and fine-tune and make it look beautiful so we're just going to take a raw photo from my recent shoot with my girlfriend and this when you first bring it in it's going to pop it into a kind of like a raw formats where we can go in and adjust the photo itself this is totally gonna depend on the photo itself and how things look but I will show you what I do some little things that I think are kind of fun but we're going to go up to this little circle here and it's gonna be the basics and this is what we're going to do most of our stuff now I don't know why but I love doing this I love taking out the black point and bumping up a contrast I just think it looks really really nice sometimes it so keep in mind and if it doesn't obviously feel free to bring down the Black Point a little bit but it gives it this nice little pop and based on a lot of my work that is kind of the Edit such style that I'd go for and we're gonna bump up the exposure just a tiny little bit perfect I think it may be like there we go something like that maybe give it a little bit of vibrance to pop the yellows and the greens and the blues a little bit of the red not too much though and I want to bring hmm maybe the highlights down just a tad perfect so we can see with the split button down here at the bottom we can look at a little before and after just in the raw this is before we even fully take it in which is awesome I think it already looks pretty nice so we're going to tap on develop and first thing that I always do is I hop into the layers tab up here in the top right and I'm going to tap and hold and duplicate this layer I always like duplicating the layer just because I enjoy having that kind of first untouched image at the very bottom that way I can always go back and see what it looked like before all of the edits now one of my favorite tools to use in affinity photo is going to be over here on the left side it's gonna be under where this clone stamp tool is or the clone brush tool is it is called the inpainting brush it is my favorite I use it all the time this is I call it the lazy brush because I'm lazy and we're going to go in and take out some blemishes and real thumb here is we're gonna try and take out things that are unnatural things that you know would go away with time so don't take out moles or scars or anything like that unless the subject asks you to and you know all of that the inpainting brush basically it's an automatic heel brush and it will try to grab areas surrounding the area that you want to fix and fill it in and make it look super pretty so we're gonna take out just some red spots all that fun stuff nothing nothing crazy crazy now my kind of rule of thumb for this too is as far as the brush size I try to keep the brush size the same size that's kind of the area that we are attacking and so we're just gonna keep it kind of small here for these little spots on her arm also keep in mind the in painting brush is not perfect by any means it's not going to do everything for you perfectly but it does a really good job some tips for that is if it doesn't work the first time try it again and if that doesn't work I try to undo it and then maybe try it from a different way or a different pattern and all that stuff and usually it does like I said a very good job so we're gonna move up here to her cheek take out that little flower we're just gonna take out some of these splotchy areas hopefully my girlfriend's not too mad about us izumi and on her face take out something like the shadowy stuff that doesn't make sense and like I said this really just depends on the image that you're working with and all this stuff we got to get this bad boy in here but yeah you can see how well this works I want to take out maybe some of the wrinkles on the forehead a little bit nothing too crazy I'd like to try and keep it somewhat natural as much as possible maybe take out some of the red in her eyes just a little bit and like I said you can see how it's doing the same thing but we're gonna try some different little patterns to fix that up just a little bit there we go perfect okay let's see I'm gonna take out this little spot right here cuz this is uh this is the dandelion that's just poke it out in front of our face and it looks a little odd probably gonna take out this one too beautiful you can see how well that works just taken that out really really easy now I usually like to zoom out zoom back in that way if I you know missed anything I feel like I can kind of see it a little bit better from far away but it looks like for the most part we've got pretty much everything and take out these little spots real quick but I think it looks good and you can check out over here in the layers tab you can tap on your layer and now we can see our little before and after of the stuff that we've fixed up and that's the first step that I typically always do here in affinity is I try to take out the little things the little things with the in painting brush remember that in pin brush it's the best tool in my opinion on this app now from here I move into what I call local dodge and burn I'm also going to provide you guys a macro that will set up the macro or it'll set up the local dodge and burn like I do and there's so many different ways that you can do it there's a lot of tutorials out there as well on it but I'm going to show you how I do it so over here in the little play button where our macros are I have this retouching macro and it is dodge and burn now what this does to explain this a little bit is these are 50% gray soft light layers and what that means is if we take our paint brush and we color in light over the image it's going to brighten our image and if we do the opposite with black it's going to darken our image right I have it in four different layers you can have as many layers as you want I to break it down in kind of the spots that I like to tackle in my image local is where we are going to fill in shadows on the face kind of flattened light a little bit more or just kind of like form it a little bit more around the face to make it make sense a little bit it'll make more sense once we go into it a little bit more dodge and burn is going to be basically our it's gonna be our digital makeup right it's gonna be where we're accentuating highlights where we're popping things were adding a little bit more contour some more shape to the face and all that stuff I also have catch light in eyes just because those are two things that I like to dodge and burn as well I like to brighten and darken the eyes a little bit to give them a little bit more pop and shine and the black-and-whites layer here this is just a placeholder so we can see some of these areas on the skin better it's not how the final image is going to look it's just simply there to help us as a tool to lift up some of the shadows on the face and some of that sort of thing so let's hop into the local layer here so the local like I said is where we're going to fill in shadows a little bit let me show you what I'm talking about I'm going to make just a little layer here so I can show you guys exactly what I'm kind of talking about here so for example some of these like darker shadowy areas on her face like here for example maybe this spot here right here this little thing maybe a little bit here some of this shadows and it's maybe here but these are kind of the areas that pop out to me at least where I can just lift them up a little bit to make the the skin look a little bit smoother and one rule for this sort of thing is that you don't want to go too crazy with certain areas right you don't want to make it look too unnatural like when I first started doing this stuff like baggy eyes I would completely get rid of and it would look really unnatural at times and so just be aware of that and try not to go too overboard unless that's the look that you want right so but this is what we're going to basically go in and kind of fix up so we're going to make sure that we're selected on the local air we're gonna want to brighten stuff up right we're gonna want to brighten some of these shadowy areas on the face and we're gonna want to make sure our flow is at 1% that is just going to allow us to slowly raise up these shadows that way we don't do too much at a time now kind of rule of thumb with this as well as far as the brush size kind of the same size as the area that you're working with right and we're just gonna start going over this area now this is the fun part of the editing process this does take some time if you are used to you know doing some really quick edits and all that stuff this is not it's not this is not a short thing it does take some time but it's kind of relaxing you know and it's gonna look like you're probably not doing anything I know right right now it probably doesn't look like I'm doing anything except for just brushing over the face yeah but I promise it is doing stuff and we'll see that what it does here in just a second once we get through everything but like I said keep the brush kind of the similar size of the area that you're attacking that we're wanting to lift up and we're trying to like I said to we're just trying to match the light around it right with these shadowy areas we just want to make sure that it's matching the surrounding light of the face we don't want to get too too intense with it but we do want to help out a little bit like for example this one we should be able to see the difference so we're just gonna lift up that shadow how to make it match the light around may make it kind of fade into the light right same here with these little spots perfect and I've started I mean some people get really really into this I have started to kind of hold back on that just a little bit I do like the more natural feel not like so perfect that people can tell it's perfect but really really nice to where people think it's real as far as the skin and everything like that that's kind of my goal when I'm doing this I wanted to look really nice but not so perfect that people can tell that it's not real but to each their own and like I said I've got friends that do this amazingly and it's so freaking it's so nice and it's definitely a look and it looks amazing - so do whatever your heart desires fill that up a little bit more I feel like I'm doing like Bob Ross painting you know just lift the shadows here just a little bit just right here you know nice fluffy shadows now get rid of those I can hear the birds chirping in the back it's really really nice let's uh attack this just a little bit just a little bit here also keep in mind the darker areas that you're trying to fix up the more this is going to do to them so just be careful when you're working with darker areas on on the face or the skin because it's going to brighten a lot faster and so mmm-hmm almost done I think as far as what I want to do with this okay let's see so this is the before and this is the after so you can see especially down here how we lifted up the shadows on the skin and I'm gonna figure out this filter so you guys can see a little bit more little before and after so you can see that we basically just lifted the shadows off of the skin makes it look a little bit smoother not a splotchy and all of that fun stuff now the next step is to move into the Dodge and burn which I kind of saying earlier it's basically digital makeup if you want to get better at this it's gonna take practice also looking into makeup tutorials is phenomenal it will help out so so so much because you know brightening highlight darkening contour lots of people if you know anybody that's into makeup they can help you out a ton with dodge and burn believe it or not especially with portrait retouching and so we're gonna do something right I'm gonna actually bump up the flow to about 2% just so I can get a little bit more of an effect on that I'm going to turn on our black and white layer just so I can see it a little bit better and we're gonna attack the forehead a little bit brighten it up now we're gonna move on to the nose and we're really trying to attack highlighted spots that are pretty much already there we just want to pop them out a little bit more and we're gonna do the lips a little bit brighten them up just somethings like nice little glossy parts I'm going to do the the top right here a little V action and we're going to do just a tiny bit all right here let's actually add right here in the eyes and right there below the eyebrow now we're gonna switch to black I'm actually gonna change my flow back to 1% it's a darken it just does a lot more than the highlight and we are going to basically go around the hairline and the face I'm gonna go down the jaw a little bit I'm gonna tack some of these shadows over here in the hair just to make it look like it's popping a little bit more from where she's laying what laughs now we're gonna get those eyebrows make them brows pop we're gonna attack the lip and and I kind of relate this to when you first learn how to draw a sphere in our class we're really just trying to shape areas of the face right we're trying to make our face from a circle to a sphere we're trying to give things a little bit more I guess life or dimension to the to what we're what we're adjusting um let's see try think if there's anything else that I want to go for maybe a little bit more there maybe a little bit more on the hair cool okay so a little before and after you can see the difference here as well before and after now something that I do like to do like say say you went too overboard with the dodging burn you're like this is way too much I I don't know what to do I overdid a certain area right now if you've overdone a certain area on your layer you can just switch your color to 50% gray I go into the glue the gray sliders here and 50% and you can put it up to whatever amount of flow that you'd like and you can just go over the area that you may have gone a little overboard on it will fix it because the layers are already 50% so if you drop back in it's going to go back to normal another thing that you can do is you can tap on these three little dots with the circle and layers and this is going to bring up your layer options to where you can drop your opacity down maybe you just went a little overboard and you want to bring it down a little bit that's an option or say you didn't do enough and you can just take that layer and you can duplicate it sometimes you know like maybe let's just get crazy with it four times and you can actually select all of them at the same time tap on the layer options button here and do the same thing and bring down the opacity and put it to a spot that you enjoy obviously I feel like I did not need to do that so I'm gonna go back here and actually take out those three because I think this looks great now we're gonna jump into catch light and we're gonna change our color to white one percent flow is fine and we're gonna bring down our brush size and we're just going to go over the little catch light in the in the eyeball and I enjoy doing this because it makes the eye look a little bit glossy err more like a marble in my opinion and it just looks really really nice in my opinion it's totally up to you as far as what you enjoy but I think it looks really nice and same thing with this right so you do too much you can always come in here you can drop down the opacity if you don't do it much you can duplicate it I do that all the time all the time now with the eyes what we're gonna do is something pretty much the exact same we are going to brighten our eyeball the inside we're going to avoid the outer line we're going to do the same on this side brighten it up just a little bit and then we're going to switch to black and we are going to and we're going to on the sides and darken it a little bit a little bit up here too this is just going to give our eyeball a little bit more shape to the eye and same thing like I said you can say if it's too much you can always bring it down bring it to a spot that you like etc all of that stuff now I'm gonna go ahead and group all these because I am done let's go ahead and see what that before-and-after is going to look like so before and after and you can see all the little adjustments that we've made and it looks pretty nice now you can obviously depending on where you're uploading this photo and all that stuff for social media needs this is plenty right you really don't need to get into much more detail other than that now if you're going into you know it's being printed on this you know billboard or whatever you're gonna have to go deep into it and fix up quite a bit but this is perfect for social media reasons now after this this is typically when I jump into D the color grading aspect of it and so I'm gonna show you guys a quick fun way that I call it great there's a lot of different ways you can color great keep in mind so don't feel like this is the only way to color grade there are so many different ways that you can and feel free to look there's so much information out there that you can find for this stuff but one fun way that I have found on affinity is by using a gradient map now gradient maps are if you've never used them before they look really really weird because you can see what it has done to our image right now what it is to explain it a little bit is the very far left side this color here is the darkest part of our photo so everything all the darks in our photo are now red the green is the mid-tones of the photo so everything all the mid-tones in the photo are green and the blue over here is the brightest parts of the photo so everything that is bright in the photo is now blue and you can kind of see that if we take this off you can notice how skin her shirt all that stuff is all blue the shadows kind of surrounding her behind her hair all that stuff are red right so what this allows us to do is it allows us to get kind of fun with colors and as far as like a filter or look that you want to go for now there's different types of color grading different colors that bring across different motions or feels and all that stuff and it really depends on the image that you're working with right the image that we're working with it's in a flower field so it's nice and kind of warm feeling and all that sort of stuff right and so we'll probably lean try to lean maybe more towards the warm side of things although I'm a real big sucker for red and cyan so we might just do that and see if we can adjust from there so what we'll do is we're gonna go into our gradient and we're gonna change our shadows I'm gonna change it to an orange or more of a brown actually is what we're gonna change it to a nice little brown it was just dark orange right and then we're gonna change the the blue here we're gonna change it just to a cyan or a light blue I'm gonna make it a little bit softer that way it's not so intense what else I like to do is you can tap on this plus sign and it's going to give you kind of like an in-between color of the two here and what's cool about this is you can drag this over to lean one way or the other I'm going to make it to where the basically the scions are just hitting her skin all right about there so I know this looks super weird it doesn't look that great right now but if we go into our layer options which is the three little dots with the circle up here right above our layers we can change this to a soft light layer and you can see that gives us a nice filtery looking image right you can see that it has made it look a little bit nicer in my opinion it's still a little bit too much but like we've done with everything else layer options opacity and we can bring this down I like really really subtle adjustments I usually find the sweet spot between 20 23 percent in my opinion you can obviously do whatever you'd like whatever looks good to you now something else I want to show you guys because I feel like this can help you get even more nitty-gritty with your color grading if you'd like I'm gonna put this back up to 100% just so we can see kind of the changes that I'm talking about but here in the layer options underneath everything right underneath master here you're gonna see this source box now this box is awesome I love the source box I use this all the time with things this is very similar to what we were talking about earlier where the left side this is going to be the darkest part of our photo the far right is going to be the brightest part of our photo and then everything else in between right now the very top is 100% opacity the very bottom is 0% opacity so you can see in the image here when we bring this left side down all the areas that are being affected in darkest parts of the photo are being taken away the same on this side if we take this over here all the highlights and the the brightest parts of the photo you can see the effects are being taken away you can see that nice cyan that we put in is being brought out now this is awesome because it allows you to basically you know if it's like oh I think that the the shadows are a little bit too much maybe I put too much color in the shadows or you know maybe in the highlights you can take those out maybe in the mid-tones you can bring that down right you can do something like this where it makes it a little bit more even you have in this possibilities with this which is why I really really enjoy it and I love messing around with it just to try and get a cool little what else is fun is you can also tap on this box here underneath the trash can and that will give you very very precise options right you no longer have the curve it is very precise thing so you can you know get really crazy with it if you would like it's really up to you but what we're gonna do is I'm gonna change this back to the 23% opacity because that's kind of where I liked it I like going back and forth like this until I get a good spot that I like and then what we're gonna do is I'm actually going to zoom in so I can see a little bit more and I'm gonna take out just a little bit in the mid-tones leave like the highlights and the shadows because I like them right now but I want them to ease in a little bit more so I'm gonna leave it probably right there mmm cool looks like we're ending at about 28% 30% on this but yeah let's see what that looks like a little before and after it's very subtle most of my stuff as far as color grading is very very subtle adjustments nothing too crazy I don't like going too overboard with the color grade unless it's a it's a look that I'm going for right but keep in mind grading Maps it's a great way that you can create you know filters whatever what else is nice is once you have finished maybe you worked on a gradient map that you really really like you can tap on this ad preset button here in the bottom left and we can name this let's do red / cyan and we'll do affinity since we're doing this for the affinity tutorial and hit okay and that what's great is here in the adjustments which is the square with the three little circles here and if you tap on adjustments it's gonna bring up all the different adjustments that they have an under gradient map it is now gonna have our preset that we just made so now we can just tap on that it brings it up automatically the same opacity that we had and everything so you can have a whole list of gradient maps that you've created in the past and everything like that it's it's amazing it's awesome so once we have finished basically our our retouching our color grade the final steps for me are really popping things that maybe I want to give a little bit more you know to so let's say for example let's do go back to our adjustments and we're gonna do HS l HS Elle's hue saturation luminance and it allows us to tackle specific colors in the image that we want to maybe change up give a different look and we're going to mess with the yellows I really like the yellows I don't even know if we're gonna really do too much with them but I do want to show you this adjustment because it allows you to do some pretty crazy stuff right I'm gonna lean them a little bit warmer more towards the orange just a tad and give them just a little bit more saturation maybe a little bit luminance to get more of a like a soft yellow look and boom and you can see that before and after they're nothing too crazy but just a little bit to give it a little bit more of a pop it looks really fun now what else I like to do is obviously curves layers curves layers are awesome I love them if you're unfamiliar with curves let's go over it real quick same sort of thing that we are going with on the source tab with the opacity right far left is the darkest part of your image far right is the brightest part of your image over here if you lift up you're going to get rid of the darkest part right where we can see that we're fading it out if you bring it more in you're gonna darken it and on this side if you bring the brightest parts down you're going to get more of a gray and if you bring it in it's going get really nice and bright now with my work I really like to keep it kind of poppy and crunchy is what I call it so I'm gonna actually bring this in just a little bit to give the highlights and the whites a little bit more of a pop and I'm gonna bring down the contrast just a tiny tiny bit this area right here is pretty much the shadows is what we're working with here and I'm gonna bring it down just slightly and this is one of those things that it just depends on the image that you are working with and I'm actually going to tap this because I don't want the curve cool well check that out and minimal very very subtle adjustments right nothing too too crazy and then one last thing that I want to do that I want to show you that's kind of fun to mess with is is making changing colors of eyes or adding some colors to the eyeballs so you're going to make a new layer a new pixel layer and we're going to zoom in on these eyeballs now we're gonna go to the color wheel which is the circle with the the color in it and I want to choose a blue because her eyes are nice and blue and paintbrush make sure that the color here at the bottom matches the color that you want I'm gonna change the flow to 100 really really really tiny brush here and I'm just gonna make little adjustments little little dash is a blue that makes sense she also has a little bit of like yellow / orange in there so we're gonna do that as well but we're gonna go over up to the other side the little blue blue and yeah we're gonna get this a little bit of like orange that she has here - yeah a little bit of orange and same on the side a little bit of orange now this is gonna look super goofy right but what we're gonna do is we're going to hop into the filters which is right underneath the adjustments so it's this little filter option here and I'm tap up where it says all filters and I'm gonna go to blurs and there is a great thing called Gaussian blur and you're gonna want to make sure that we're affecting obviously the pixel layer that we just made and we're going to basically mesh this color together blur out the color get it to a spot where it just looks a little you know not so dotty like we were doing and hit apply now you can see that our eyes look like she's an alien from outer space that's not really what we want and so we're gonna make sure we're selected here layer options tap on normal and we are going to go down to color and that is going to make those eyes look super cool and same thing take your opacity and drop it down to a spot that you like now I don't like going overboard with the eyes too much and so I usually keep the opacity pretty low what else is cool is you can also come into the source tab like we were doing earlier and you can take this out of the highlights a little bit that way you're not affecting your cache life voila so let's see mmm a little bit of a before-and-after look love here in the birds but yes so there is the final image as far as exports and everything like that I just tap on this right up here in the top left it's a little document with the three little dots and we're gonna hit export now I usually export JPEG for social media use it's just going to be the smallest file for the nicest quality and I have the best quality preset set up and I just save it directly to the photos from here so we can just do save image and that will save it for us and we can take a look into it real quick and boom that is our final image here with all the fun edits that we have done and so yeah that's that's the that's the drew photo workflow and yes I appreciate you guys hanging out if you hung out with me that long you guys are awesome thank you so much affinity for doing this this is incredible it's amazing that you are doing all this and all the information that people can learn it's awesome this is a great time if you are looking into a new editing program or anything like that affinity is awesome and I mean look at all the tutorials that they provide for you guys and all the professionals that use this it's just it's a good option for you guys so this is the best opportunity to grab it and learn right now with all this stuff coming out so yes thank you so much I hope you guys enjoy it I hope you guys learned something and yeah this is been drew photo peace out [Music] you

Channel: Affinity

Views: 22,924

Keywords: Editing a portrait in Affinity Photo, photo editing tutorial, portraiture, colour grading, retouching tips, photo editing tips, using Affinity Photo, Affinity Photo, photographer tips, Drue Photo

Id: TTpK5MGsBBc

Length: 48min 42sec (2922 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020