Enhance your flower photos with essential edits and creative effects in Affinity Photo
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Flowers and plants are perennial subjects for beautiful photos, but to make them look their very best, it helps to know a few editing tricks in Affinity Photo. In this project we’ll look at a range of tools and techniques – from essential edits like sharpening to selective colour boosts – that can be used to benefit almost every flower photo you open.
Once done, we’ll take our effect one stage further and add creative colour sprays using Affinity Photo’s excellent array of brush tips. We can sample colours from the flower using the Brush and Clone Tools, then create all manner of spatters and sprays around the frame. Our edits and effects can each be applied to a separate layer, so we have ultimate freedom to go back and change a setting, or remove it completely at any stage. This ‘non-destructive’ workflow gives us licence to try out different things and take our photos in all kinds of interesting directions, safe in the knowledge that we can retrace our steps whenever we like.
You’ll find a full walkthrough in the accompanying video, and a starting photo to use. But why not head out into the garden and shoot your own? Find out more at affinity.serif.com/photo
After
Before
1 Basic tonal adjustments
It’s best to shoot flower photos in raw, as the file format captures far more colour data than JPEG – this gives you greater headroom when it comes to editing your flower photos. Once opened in Affinity Photo, the raw file appears in the Develop Persona. Here you can perform essential tonal tweaks, then head to the Photo Persona for further enhancements. Colour Balance Adjustments
Sometimes flower photos are dominated by one strong colour, like the pinks here. A Colour Balance Adjustment Layer helps to shift the colours one way or another. It’s helpful both for removing colour casts, and also for toning down dominant colours. Its greatest strength is in the option to balance colours in midtones, shadows and highlights independently of one another. 4 Paint to sharpen
Flower photos almost always benefit from sharpening to crisp up delicate details. The Sharpen Brush is especially useful for flower photos: it lets us paint in sharpening just where it’s required. With flower images, we only really want to sharpen the in-focus areas. Merge a copy of all layers with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Alt+E, then paint with the Sharpen Brush set to Unsharp Mask. Tidy up the petals
Up close, flowers can be surprisingly messy: bits of pollen and other imperfections can distract from their beauty. Thankfully, Affinity Photo offers a host of retouching tools. Use the Inpainting tool to remove distractions, and use the Clone tool to tidy up. Both tools can be set to ‘Current Layer and Below’ in the options, so you can retouch non-destructively on an empty layer. 3 Make local colour boosts
A selective colour boost can help your flower photos pop. If you’ve shot in raw format, first boost Saturation and Vibrance in the Develop Persona. Then, in the Photo Persona, add a Vibrance Adjustment Layer, increase Vibrance and Saturation, then click Ctrl/Cmd+I to invert the mask and hide the effect. With the Brush Tool, paint in white to reveal the colour boost. 5 2 6 Creative splash effects
For a creative twist, try adding splashes and scattered colours. Grab the Brush Tool then go to the Brushes Panel (View > Studio > Brushes) and select a brush from the Sprays and Spatters set. Make a new layer, Alt-click to sample colours from the flower, then paint to add drops of colour around the edges. Try using the scatter brushes in combination with the Clone Tool to scatter several colours at once.