explained… Live filter layers
photographs from the ’70s, or architectural photography from the ’30s. With that in mind, a person in period clothes or an art deco building could make for interesting subjects.
Once you’ve got a photo you think will work well, open the unedited version in Affinity Photo. If it’s a raw file, the Develop Persona will open – resist doing anything here and just click the Develop button towards the top-left corner of the window to switch to Affinity Photo’s default Photo Persona.
Non-destructive editing
All of our changes are going to be executed as layer adjustments, meaning each change will be overlaid on top of the original, untouched picture, which will stay available in its unedited form at the bottom of the layer stack. There are multiple benefits to this, not least of which is that you can return to your original image at any time. You can also try creating multiple adjustments that do similar things, toggling different ones to see which effect you prefer.
For this kind of work, it’s best to first save your image in Affinity Photo’s native format. These files, while very large, preserve your image’s layers and its history of edits, which enables you to go back and forth as you wish. You should only create a JPEG file, for sharing or printing, once you’ve finished editing.
Affinity Photo provides plenty of suitable tools for black and white photography, and, as with many photo editing techniques, there are several ways to get the job done. Here, we’ll use Affinity Photo’s dedicated black and white adjustment layer. Click the Adjustment tab, which is the one next to Layers, and then click Black & White to bring up the channel mixer.
Here you can choose from Affinity Photo’s Default, Cold or Warm settings. It may be that one of them is perfect for you, but getting to grips with the channel mixer could mean great things for your black and white photography.
The colour image you opened is composed of a handful of colours – Photoshop uses RGB (red, green and blue) channels, but Affinity Photo adds CMY (cyan, magenta and yellow) channels for good measure when you open its dedicated black and white channel mixer. Put simply, the mixer boosts or reduces the brightness of each colour channel when you drag the relevant slider. When you work on your image in full-colour mode, this produces pronounced colour casts; in monochrome mode this can enable you to boost the brightness of specific areas of your image without resorting to tone curve tools or simply changing shadow and highlight settings.
When you’re happy with your changes, close the mixer. You’ll see that your image