Project four: Affinity Photo A portrait balancing act
James Paterson shows how to craft balanced portrait compilations and create your own layouts in Affinity Photo
One of the best ways to show off a series of photos is as a compilation like this. It works especially well for portraits, as it gives you the opportunity to show a range of expressions, crops and angles. Compilations are great for printing out large and displaying on the wall.
A series like this will work brilliantly as a canvas or wooden block, but even if you plan to print out each photo individually and put it in a multi-mount frame, the technique shown here can still be very valuable for working out the balance and cropping of your various portraits.
There’s real skill involved in building a balanced compilation. It’s about selecting photos that work well together, then arranging and cropping them into a whole. Here, for example, the top left and bottom right images balance with one another, while the top right and bottom left horizontal frames have similar crops. It’s worth thinking about while shooting the portraits, as you can plan ahead as to which frames might fit with each other.
When it comes to building the compilation, Affinity Photo offers a range of useful tools. We can use the grid and shape tools to plan our layout and sizings, then we can add images to the shapes to craft our compilation. This means we can move the photos around inside each aperture, which lets us fine-tune the cropping of each image until they all fit together neatly. These are editing techniques that are invaluable not just for portrait compilations, but for all kinds of editing tasks.
Create a document
Go to File>new and use the Layout options to choose a size. Here, we’ve set a 30x30 inch square at 300 DPI. Next go to View> Show Grid, then go to View>grid and Axis Manager. Click Basic and set divisions to 1 inch. Go to View>snapping Manager. Check Enable Snapping and Snap to Grid.
Place your portraits
Next up, go to File>place, then navigate to a folder with your photographs (it’s a good idea to copy your chosen pictures to a new folder beforehand). Use the Place command to drag boxes over your layout and roughly place each image in the area where you’d like it to go. You can tweak these later if you want.
Fill the boxes
Go to the Layers panel and drag a photo layers on top of the corresponding shape layer you’d like it to fill. Drag it just below the shape layer until a faint blue rectangular overlay appears, then drag to the right so the overlay shifts right. This will put the image inside the shape layer.
Build the layout
Grab the Rectangle tool from the toolbar. Drag a square that’s 10 inches by 20 inches (the measurements display when dragging the size). Get the Move tool. Hold Alt and drag the shape to make a copy. Reposition and resize it for a second window. Continue Alt-dragging to build a layout.
Fine-tune the crops
Repeat to add image layers below each of the shape layers. Once done, you can click on each layer and use the Move tool to finetune positioning, or drag the corners of the bounding box to resize the layers.
Add an outline
In the Layers panel Cmd/ctrl+click to highlight all the shape layers. Click the FX icon and check Outline. Choose a colour and radius for the outline. Next, make a new rectangular shape layer to cover the frame. Click FX again and choose the same outline settings. Set Alignment: Inside and Fill 0%.