Create miniature effects and reduce haze

Expand the toolset in Photos by adding extensions from Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo adds a range of extra editing tools to Photos

Apple’s Photos app is designed to help you import, organise,

fix and share your shots. As a result, it’s an effective ‘one-stop shop’. However, while Photos enables you to fix common problems with colour, composition and exposure, it lacks some of the more sophisticated tools found in other apps.

Powerful and versatile, Affinity Photo enables you to perform a wider range of edits than you can with Photos’ built-in tools. For a one-off purchase (£48.99), Affinity Photo provides many of the functions of Photoshop without an ongoing subscription fee.

As well as running as a standalone app, Affinity Photo adds a range of extra editing tools to Photos. So, you can enjoy using more powerful tools from the comfort and familiarity of Photos’ workspace.

Explore extensions

In our walkthrough, we’ll show you how to import Affinity Photo’s extensions into Photos and then produce a creative and distinctive looking image. Our scenic example photo suffers from cold, drab colours. The tones in the distant trees are washed out due to atmospheric haze.

We’ll demonstrate how to use Affinity Photo’s extensions to selectively adjust the contrast of the trees to reveal more colour and detail, and tease out the scene’s ‘golden hour’ colours for a more attractive look. We’ll also increase the midtone contrast to reveal more delicate texture in the brickwork and create a picture with more punch.

After enhancing the shot’s colour and tones, we’ll show you how to use Affinity Photo’s creative Miniature extension to selectively blur parts of the image and mimic the effect of a tilt-shift lens. This selective blurring creates the narrow depth of field you see when viewing a photograph of models or toys, which helps make full-size subjects look like miniatures.