Quick Compositing (Affinity Photo)

hello and welcome to this session on quick compositing in affinity photo my name is james and i'm the product expert for affinity photo i'll show you a series of quick techniques you can utilize to take several individual images and blend them together to make one final image now for this i'm using some images from a photo bashing pack photo bashing is a little bit like using stock imagery except all of the photographs are sourced from the same location and typically with the same camera and lens combination so it's really easy to blend these different images together and it's great for practice or just throwing together creative ideas as well so i'm going to start with this image here as my base background image then i've chosen this image here for the foreground so we're just going to extract the foreground from this image so let's just drag drop it into affinity photo offer it anywhere over our current document like so to place it and then we need to move across to the layers panel here to see our layer work by the way just out of preference i will switch to medium thumbnails as well okay so to position this composite layer we can use v for the move tool and then just move it around i like to turn on snapping so then i can snap to the vertical middle point of my document okay and then i can just bring this up until i'm happy a great tip actually is to use the number keys to quickly set opacity of the layer that you're working on so 5 for 50 opacity then i can just choose with more accuracy where i want to position this layer and as it turns out i think i'm happy with it just about here then 0 to get back to 100 opacity and now what we need to do is add an empty mask layer so to do that we can hold alt or option whilst clicking on the mask layer icon then we need to paint back in to the areas where we want this image to show so b for the paint brush tool control an option on mac or ctrl alt on windows and click and drag to set the width and hardness and then on color we just need to make sure we're set to white so x to toggle over to the white color here and just brush in like so now if you go too far that's not a problem just toggle to black so x again and then just paint back over to hide these areas okay that's our foreground in now let's replace the background so i've got another image here a similar composition but slightly different so let's just drag this in offer it over the top here v for the move tool let's snap this into place then once again we'll use our opacity trick so 50 capacity or whichever value you find works for you and we want to line up this lake with this lake roughly in terms of the horizon line there we go that looks about right so then 0 to set it back to 100 and this time we'll add a full mask so just click mask layer don't hold alt or option b for the paint brush tool we're set to black and we're just going to subtract away from these areas here like so okay we've gone too far here so make the brush smaller x to toggle across to white and just paint back in over these areas okay looking good now you'll notice with this image if i use v for the move tool you can see because of the bounds here i've actually got some information outside of my current crop so if i wanted to i could actually expand the height of my composition to do that i can use c for the crop tool i can check reveal up here and this shows me the areas outside of my current crop so let's move this up and hit return there we go i've got more sky okay so now let's make this composition a bit more interesting and put a castle in so this image tonally is different we're going to have to work around that not a problem and also i'm going to drag this in but i'm not going to place it i'm going to open it as a separate document so to do that we just offer it anywhere over the interface and not the document like so okay once that's loaded we will use w twice to get the selection brush tool here use my modifier to increase the brush width and then i'm just going to brush in and create a quick selection of the castle and the surrounding areas now generally speaking even though we're not going to be using these areas i will include them in the selection it's always good just to have a bit of you know extra room or extra play for when we're doing some additional masking now we have a bit of an issue here we have some sky detail peeking through here which we need to exclude from the selection and also we've got these chimneys and perhaps some other little incidental details as well this is where we use selection refinement so we click refine up here it's already matted these areas for us that's great we don't have to do any work there the chimneys we just need to drag over them to map them and then we'll just do the same for these little crosses at the top here and i think everything else including this foliage is pretty much good to go so let's just drag over these chimneys again see if we can't get a slightly better result there we go okay now the other important thing is the output we want to choose new layer or new layer with mask because these two options perform color decontamination and that is where the color from the background is disregarded so what we don't want is like a bluish or whitish halo around the edges of our cutout so to avoid that we want new layer or new layer with mask we can click apply and then we will have our cut out let's just rename this call this castle and then we can copy this so command c on mac control c on windows and paste it into our main document so v for the move tool let's position this where we want it i might scale it up slightly as well and let's just drop it somewhere around about here i think although we can always move this after the fact if we're not happy okay now let's tackle some masking let's add a mask layer and b for the brush tool set my color to black and just paint in here okay now we've run across a problem we're using a nice soft round brush which is fine for you know masking away these areas but when it comes to more intricate detail a soft round brush just doesn't look very convincing for blending so what we want is something more textural and luckily we have something like that that ships with affinity photos so let me just go into the brushes panel up here go across to the masking category and here we have a couple of textured brushes and these are great because i'll just show you quickly they randomize they have like a randomized texture nozzle and it's great for getting a more textural feel to edges where you're blending away i've gone too far there so let's use x and paint back in okay and then i can just go across these areas with my color set to black you can see here okay and it just helps blend these layers in a little bit more convincingly than we would have been able to if we were just using a nice soft round brush okay all right now we might come back and revisit that masking i'm not sure yet it depends what happens when we do some more tonal work on the whole document but for now we want to blend this castle in tonally with its surroundings so i'll show you a couple of different techniques to achieve this one is to use a curves adjustment with channels so let's add a curves adjustment drag that and clip it into the castle layer so to do that we want to offer it to the text to the right here you can see i get that horizontal blue bar when you get the truncated blue bar that's the one you want and now on the channels panel we want to isolate each channel individually so let's isolate red by clicking on it and we want to go for our red target here on the curves adjustment and i'm just going to bring this up but our goal is to match the contrast so you'll see by bringing this down i can match the contrast of the red channel of the castle layer to the surrounding areas don't just match to the immediate area but also look at the overall image as well you know does the contrast work in terms of the overall scene is the question that you need to ask okay let's do the same for green so green on the curves dialog composite green down here we can see this needs some attention so let's bring this node up again and also just bring this down i have to bring this down further than the red channel to make the contrast match and then let's do the same for blue wow that's a big difference so now we need to do the same for blue and bring that down as well until it looks roughly like it can match the surroundings so now this is here the big reveal the big moment when i reset the channels so we can see all of them hopefully yes there we go the contrast and also the colors somewhat look much more believable so let me show you the before and the after there we go okay another little technique that you can also employ is to use something like a gradient map adjustment so let's add a gradient map above the curves adjustment this looks absolutely hideous by default but don't worry what we want to do is we've got the dark tones the midtones and the highlights here and we want to map these to similar tones in the rest of the image so let me choose the red color here go into my color dialog and color pick something dark basically let's choose a dark tone over here that assigns it to my color picker i just click that to assign it to my stop okay and then for the green let's pick a nice reddish mid-tone something like this assign it and for this particular layer there aren't really any meaningful highlight details but all the same for you know for any workflow you would want to do the same for the highlights so let's get the blue and color pick off a nice bright highlight of the sky and assign that okay now with the gradient map what we want to do is set the blend mode to something like color you can experiment with this by the way but i tend to go for color that's obviously far too strong so now what we need to do is use a very low opacity so let's try 20 okay and i really need to zoom in to show you this difference let me show you the before and the after oh that's so subtle let's try 40 opacity but now you see that's too strong it doesn't look as believable so let's just stick with 20 so that's a really subtle change but it just helps you know every little adjustment you can make contributes to the overall believability of your composition okay moving on then let's do some more tonal work and when we do some alternate work this will also give us a better idea of whether we need to revise our blending for the castle layer so let's add a curves adjustment so command m on mac control m on windows and i'll just create a couple of nodes here and i'm just going to push these tones up for something a bit more dramatic there we go it's perhaps looking a bit too dark so let's bring this bottom node up slightly like so there we go okay i think that looks all right let's tweak the colors now so my preferred adjustment for color work is selective color it's you can do very dramatic alterations with it but at the same time you can be really subtle with it as well it's incredibly powerful so on selective color for example if i've got the reds selected i could increase the cyan contribution and that actually kind of mutes the red tones somewhat which you might prefer you know you might want to really kind of drab dark looking image let's try bringing the yellows to the left as well if we switch across to the yellows we might take some of the yellow contribution out and that gives it more of a kind of a reddish magenta-ish tone i perhaps don't like that so i'll be very careful with that slider but then probably the most dramatic thing we can do is tint the black tones so for example if i bring cyan up on the blacks and yellow down i end up creating this kind of blue tint or color cast over the entire image okay so you know we can close that down and then if we decide that perhaps that's a bit too strong don't forget that as well as just going back in and changing the parameters we can also control the opacity of the layer so let me type 5 for 50 opacity and you can still see before and after that you know we can kind of make some very subtle adjustments there here it is at 100 opacity perhaps that's almost too drab for me so let's try 60 there we go that's a nice middle ground now the next thing i'll do is reshape the tones in the image somewhat basically this is like non-destructive dodging and burning so if i add a pixel layer pick up the paintbrush tool cross on my brushes panel i just need to make sure i have a nice soft round brush on the masking selected and then just increase the brush width somewhat make sure i'm set to white so x to toggle across to white there and this pixel there i can set the blend mode to overlay and then take the opacity down to maybe something like 25 percent and this enables me to just brush into certain areas to accentuate these areas and then i can quickly use x to toggle across to black and then i can just remove the emphasis from other areas by darkening them like so so let me just show you the before and after for that because it's actually quite dramatic when you see it here's the before and the after okay you know what the image is still looking a bit too kind of drab and dark i might want to brighten it and sometimes you know you don't always have to use curves don't overlook brightness and contrast because it's incredibly powerful in its simplicity if you just want to brighten everything you can just use the brightness slider and then as a result if it perhaps looks a bit too washed out we can add back in some contrast you know some some drama some punch like so that's perhaps a bit too bright so not a problem i can just take that back and sometimes you know simplicity is really all you need by the way at this point this castle is perhaps looking a bit too reddish maybe so another little technique we can use if i just go back into the child layers for the castle layer here is we can use a white balance adjustment i use this all the time because it's just incredibly useful and quick to change the temperature of a layer's tones so i could just drag this to the left slightly like so and perhaps also experiment with the tint okay and again that's just really subtle here's the before and the after you can barely see that but in the overall composition it does make a difference now finishing touches let's add some atmosphere some haze i've got two dust cloud layers here i'm just going to drag this in place it over the top like so v for the move tool just bring it down here and set the blend mode to screen but i kind of want to stretch this out a little bit so i can actually stretch or do none aspect correct scaling by dragging the top bottom left or right nodes and i can hold command on mac control on windows to resize around the center so that gives me a really quick way of just stretching from the middle there we go let's set the opacity to maybe 40 and then we'll add another dust cloud on top of that just drop that in like so and do the same thing set the blend mode to screen position it down here and then stretch it out all the way like so opacity down to 40 and that adds some nice kind of a suggestion of like hovering mist let me just show you the before and the after maybe that's too strong so with both layers selected let's do two for 20 opacity then let's add some kind of mist going up towards the top of the image and for that i will use a fill layer so layer new fill layer i use these all the time they're incredibly useful they are non-destructive vector fill layers and when you create a fill layer you have the gradient tool selected for you so now i can just draw out my gradient like so and actually for the bottom node i want to set that to pure white and the top node i want to set to pure black like so and then set the blend mode to screen okay and you can play around with the positioning of these nodes as well but now all i need to do is just take my opacity down to maybe 20 and as you can see if i just hide this by using the view tool which is h on the keyboard you can see i just add this nice kind of misty haze over the sort of the foreground of the image here okay i think we are probably about done one final thing i will do though is non-destructively again add a live clarity filter this child layer is by default so let me just drag it out here and double click it again to get back to the settings i'll bring the strength up to 100 this adds a load of drama and intrigue you know it kind of enhances structure or texture but we don't want it over the entire image so with clarity selected i will use invert so command i on mac control i on windows b for the brush tool and then i just need to make sure i'm on white here and i can paint back in over the areas where i want that clarity to apply okay let me just quickly show you the before and the after okay and i think i'm done maybe just one final curves adjustment to tweak those tones again like so but again i might come back to this at a later date that's the beauty of completely non-destructive editing in affinity photo is that we can save this document just collapse all of these so you can see you know come back at a later date and you know everything back to our very first operation is just there on the layer stack here's our final composition and you know i'm going to save this and i might come back to it later and i might go oh no what was i thinking you know it's too bright the castle doesn't look right you know i've got the tonal blending wrong that type of thing it's amazing because you can just come back with a fresh perspective you know take a break from what you're doing because you know it's quite intense when you just sit here editing and then come back and you know make any revisions that you might need to because everything is here ready to manipulate you know for example i could go in to these two dust cloud layers and perhaps they're too strong i might take the opacity down to 10 for example just little changes that make a big difference here anyway that is me done so thank you very much for watching i hope you've picked up some useful tips and techniques thank you and take care you

Channel: James Ritson

Views: 20,831

Keywords: Affinity Photo, Photoshop, Workflow, Tutorial, HowTo, Guide, James Ritson, Compositing, Layers, Photobashing, macOS

Id: HaWv3oWrYZE

Length: 22min 15sec (1335 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lorechaser]

Good video. I learned a few new tricks for blending images. Thanks

[u/rabaraba]

Great video! Big fan of the guy, he explains really well.

[u/TheFantasticFuture]

Very instructive video, thanks