You have the tools on your left, the toolbar at the top and then a collection of panels on the right, collectively referred to as a Studio. This is because the app starts you off with a lean, uncluttered user interface. Affinity Photo has a wealth of functionality, but not all of it is immediately visible. Let’s talk about one final concept before we jump into editing an image.
selection tools on W)-repeating the key will cycle through these tools. Note that some tools are bound to the same key (e.g. Move Tool V | Crop Tool C | Selection Brush Tool W | Flood Select Tool W | Flood Fill Tool G | Paint Brush Tool B | Clone Brush Tool S | Healing Brush Tool J | Inpainting Brush Tool J | Zoom Tool Z | Here are a few examples of common tools you would need to use: These tools are all bound to a sensible and conventional layout of keyboard shortcuts. ToolsĮach Persona has its own set of tools, but you’ll primarily be using the tools in the Photo Persona to fine-tune image edits using brushwork, cropping, transforming and retouching. Once exported, enabling ‘Continuous Export’ allows these slices to be continually re-exported and updated in the background as you work further on your document.
You have full choice over the export format and other options for each separate ‘slice’. You can hand-draw ‘slices’ or create them from layers and export them individually. If you’ve ever used a certain ‘Save As Layers’ feature, this would be your closest equivalent. Most image editing workflows will not need to use this Persona ( File>Export will suffice for most people), but it’s invaluable for UI/Web design and compositing work where you might hand off isolated layers as images for other software. This gives you detailed, fine-grained control over exporting regions of your document or image. The Export Persona, for fine control over exporting individual layers. You don’t tend to start with a blank document-rather, you open an existing image or RAW file, and that dictates the dimensions and other attributes of the document.
Unlike Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher, your approach to what we might call a ‘new document’ will typically differ for most workflows.
We’re going to look briefly at the user interface, then explore developing a RAW file and performing some non-destructive image edits which we can revisit later.īefore continuing, if you want to download the practice file we’ll be using later for the image edit, you can grab it here:ĭownload Practice File Getting started-new document or open image? Curious at what Affinity Photo has to offer? Not sure where to start and want to know your way around the interface? Let’s take an introductory look and perform a basic image edit.Īffinity Photo puts a large amount of image editing power at your fingertips, but it has a few notable differences to other image editing applications that you should know if you want to make the most of its feature set.