BOOST RAW PORTRAITS

James Paterson shows you how to use the Develop Persona in Affinity Photo to enhance portraits

When it comes to enhancing your portraits, a few simple techniques can take your images in all kinds of interesting directions, and in this issue’s video tutorial we’ll explore a range of edits you can make in Affinity Photo. Most of these are carried out in the Develop Persona, which is the workspace for raw editing. This is where you process and enhance your raw images before taking them into the main Photo Persona for further editing, if necessary.

Raw images tend to look a little flat straight out of the camera – this is because raw is designed to give you the best possible starting point for editing. Raw files contain greater dynamic range and more colour data than JPEGs, and we can use the tools in the Affinity Photo Develop Persona in to make the most of this extra data.

This is why, as a rule of thumb, it’s best to take a raw image as far you can using the raw development tools, and only then open it into the Photo Persona for any further editing that’s required. While the raw tools in the Develop Persona lack the depth of features of the tools in the Photo Persona, there are still several powerful features, such as Curves and Overlays, that we can use to enhance our portrait by making global and local adjustments.

We’ve supplied a portrait for you to work on, but you can also use your own, and it needn’t even be a raw file. You can edit JPEGs or TIFF files in the Develop Persona too – just click the icon at top-left to open any image into Affinity Photo’s Raw workspace.