Explore Affinity Photo’s Personas

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Serif’s Affinity suite of creativity apps, recently completed with the release of Publisher, has a quirk not found elsewhere. Each app is divided into sections, known as Personas, which are tailored toward a specific task, and which change the layout of the controls when you enter them. Affinity Photo, for example, has the Photo Persona, for carrying out most image editing; the Liquify Persona, for pixel-bending effects; the Develop Persona, for processing raw image files; the Tone Mapping Persona, for creating HDR images; and the Export Persona, for busting down file sizes and fine-tuning compression ratios. Vector graphics app Designer has something similar, while Publisher acts as a keystone, tying the others together, integrating them into its Personas, so you don’t need to leave one app to use another.

That’s a lot for one app, but they’re functions that, in other programs, would be filters or complex dialog boxes. It’s an intelligent use of the space afforded to the interface to split them up, enabling you to focus on the task at hand, and perhaps even saving time, because you can organize them into a seamless workflow. Here’s how they work.

1 Raw files

Developing raw files in Affinity is like using Lightroom. Go to “File > Open” and choose your file. If a raw image is detected, Affinity opens it in the Develop Persona. The tools are similar to those in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, but if you ever wonder how something works, there’s a handy tip at the bottom-left.

2 Develop tabs

Apart from cropping, you can largely ignore the tools on the left. The real action is on the right, where you’ll find sliders—as in Lightroom. But there’s a neat difference between Serif’s and Adobe’s products—adjustments are organized into groups that can be switched between via tabs, which can also become free-floating windows. The “Basics” and “Enhance” sections contain tools such as “Exposure,” “Shadows,” and “Highlights.” There’s a lens corrections tab, with profiles for one-click correction of popular lenses, plus check boxes for the removal of chromatic aberration, colored fringing, and vignetting. Sharpening (or “Detail Refinement”) and noise reduction live in the “Details” tab, while controls for monochrome conversion and split-toning live under “Tones,” along with the curves graph.

3 Overlays

You can paint an adjustment on to your raw image using the “Overlays” tab, and the three Overlay tools on the left: paint, erase, and gradient. Creating a new Overlay enables you to select an area you want to adjust separately from the rest of the image using the Overlay Brush or Gradient, using the eraser to tidy it up, selecting it in the “Overlay” tab, and making an adjustment in another tab. Blend it in with the rest of the image using an opacity slider. To edit the entire image, switch back to “Master” [ Image A].

4 Photo Persona

To finish developing a raw file, press “Develop.” After some processing, you’re taken to the Photo Persona, Affinity’s main image-editing interface. This is a layered image-editing app akin to Photoshop, but most of the simple tweaks, such as levels or color saturation, could have been taken care of at the Develop stage. In Photo, these are added as Adjustment Layers, or there are auto versions hiding in the “Filter” menu. The “Adjustment” palette on the right houses edits such as “Brightness/Contrast” or “Hue and Saturation.”

>> You can also add text to your photo, splice in sections from other images, or run filters on it. We chose to run the “Haze Removal” filter on our seascape, opening up Affinity’s split view to see the difference the filter was making with a before and after view [ Image B].

5 Lighting

We can also play with the impressive “Lighting” filter to change the way the hazy fall sun dapples

across the bay. Find it in the “Filter” menu, and prepare for a surprise, as it looks nothing like the filters we’re used to. It places a new light source, enabling you to choose the parameters that make it up. We’ve only got the sky selected here, so brightening one corner and making the light bright blue gives the impression of a sunlit summer sky, rather than the overcast, windy, vergingon-cold conditions we shot the photo in. Again, the before and after split view is useful if you want to see exactly what you’ve changed. The vertical terminator can be slid left and right to cover and uncover the image as you want [ Image C].

6 Export

Once you’ve finished in the Photo Persona, save your file as a layered .afphoto file, to preserve it in a state you can return to later for further editing. To create a small but highly detailed file for sharing online, you can switch to the Export Persona, which has a host of options. Export is based on slices— you can carve an enormous composite image up and export parts of it as individual files. It also preserves the layer structure prior to export, so you can export individual layers as files [ Image D].

>> There’s a “Slice” tool on the left you can use to select areas of your image to export as files, if that’s what you want. To export layers, select one in the “Layers” panel, and choose “Create Slice.” There’s an “Export Options” panel at the top-right in which you can set the file type, bit depth, and compression level of the files you’re creating. When you’ve finished, open the “Slices” panel and either click “Export Slices (N),” where N is the number of slices to export all selected slices, or do it one at a time.

>> You can export a single file from the Photo Persona using “File > Export.” You get a choice of file types, resampling methods, and compression ratios, but the whole Slices thing is no longer a complication.