Tutorial 3

James Paterson uses a combination of tonal tools and compositing skills to turn sunlight into moonlight and show off key layer skills in Affinity

Use our free start images to turn photos from day to night

Like Photoshop, one of the biggest benefits to using Affinity Photo is the layers feature. Use of layers allows you to combine a range of images and effects to completely transform the look of your photos. We can even change day to night! In this tutorial we’ll look at how this is done with a simple combination of layer skills.

We’ll begin by making a tonal adjustment to transform the bright blue sky into a moody night-time backdrop, altering the colours to cool things down and darkening the midtones to plunge our subject into darkness. We’ll use the Gradient Map tool for this, which lets us map a range of night-time shades onto the tonal range of our image. It helps here that the original photo is shot in hard sunlight as – with colours altered – we can make the sunlight look almost like moonlight instead, which has a similarly hard-edged quality.

To finish things off, we’ll drop in an image of a starry sky, then fit it into the backdrop, thereby transforming the blue backdrop into an atmospheric, star-filled evening scene. This is done by first selecting the blue sky with the Flood Selection tool, then converting the selection to a layer mask in order to constrain the stars to the area of sky on the layer below. An ability to combine photos with layer masks like this is one of the cornerstones of image-editing in Affinity Photo. Master these skills and you can merge all kinds of photos and selective effects for endlessly creative results.