this is the second lesson of an intense course to help you learn affinity photo fast in this
video we'll look at saving and exporting images and using adjustment layers to edit your photos
as with the first lesson i'm only covering the essentials of image editing with affinity photo
please don't skip ahead because you'll probably miss something important if you haven't watched
the first lesson i'll include a link to it in the youtube information for this video
i'd also recommend you watch that before continuing with this lesson
something that confuses a lot of new affinity photo users is how to save your images you can
save the photos you're working on in the file menu by selecting either the save or save as options
these open the save dialog where you can navigate to the folder that you want to save your work to
it also allows you to enter the name of the document that you want to save if i move to
the end of the file name you'll see that it has an extension of af photo this is a special kind of
file format used by affinity photo and as far as i know only affinity products can read it you'll
also notice that there isn't an option to save the image in any other format but before we look at
how to produce jpeg or tiff images there are some special benefits you need to know about using the
affinity photo format when you save images in this format you can save all the layers masks channels
and even editing history for your image this makes it a non-destructive format so you preserve all
your editing work for the future if you remember the first lesson of this course we said it's best
to avoid destructive editing and that applies to saving your work as well if instead we save this
image as a jpeg file we would lose all the layers and masks you can see in the layers studio panel
you might also remember that we looked at the history panel which displayed the editing history
of our image by default the editing history isn't saved by affinity photo but you can turn this
feature on in the file menu you'll see an option save history with document when you select this
affinity photo shows a warning that anyone opening the file will see your editing history if you're
doing editing work for a client you might not want them to see this which is why there's a warning
but as we're doing the editing work for ourselves it's very useful so we'll click yes to accept it
then when we save the image the editing history is saved in the affinity photo file
now as useful as the affinity photo format is it doesn't help you share your photos on the internet
for that we need to save images in formats like jpeg tiff and png
the way we do this is by selecting the export option in the file menu
you'll then see an export dialog where you can choose the image format you want to export i'll
click the jpeg option as an example of how to use the dialog at the top of the dialog you can see
the size of the image to be exported this defaults to the same size as the image you're editing
because this example is a large image i'll reduce it to 1200 pixels on the long edge now notice this
lock icon between the two fields if i click the icon it toggles the lock open and closed
when the lock's closed it locks the aspect ratio of the image which we covered in the first lesson
now if i change the size of one side of the image affinity photo automatically changes the other to
keep the same aspect ratio if you don't lock the aspect ratio you can change the height and width
of the image independently which stretches it the other setting we can change in the jpeg dialog is
the quality the lower the quality the smaller the image file in terms of space it occupies on
the disk there are some useful presets for this in the drop down preset list but you can also adjust
the quality slider directly if you want to access more advanced settings click the more button to
open a second dialog after selecting your settings click the export button to open the save dialog
now you can enter the name of the file to export the image to notice that there isn't
an option to change the image format because we've already chosen to export a jpeg file
to use a different format you need to select it in the export dialog as a first step i'll then click
save to export the image as a jpeg now let's talk about layers because the image you see on screen
has already been edited when i click the icon to the left of the group you can see it expand to
show several different layers the group is like a special folder holding a collection of layers
together it can be helpful in organizing your layers when making a lot of adjustments because
i've edited this image using multiple layers i can turn the individual layers off to hide them the
background layer in this image is a pixel layer which you can see in the bracket after its name if
i right click on that layer with my mouse we see a pop-up menu where i can click the duplicate option
this produces a copy of the background layer which was my starting image i'll just turn
on the other layers again so you can see the finished image what i want to emphasize is that
the order of these layers is very important some layers like pixel layers can hide other layers
watch what happens when i drag the duplicate background layer we created to the top of the
layers panel it hides all the other layers below it so that you see that layer and not the effect
of the other layers if i hide that layer you can then see all the other layers below it again it's
important to understand this because you often get unexpected and confusing results if you don't
i'm now going to add an adjustment layer which i can use to edit this image there's a useful
icon at the bottom of the layer studio panel which displays the list of available adjustment layers
i'm going to pick the levels layer at the top of this as it's one of the most useful
you can now see the new layer added above the layer i had selected
as i'm sure you saw in the list there are lots of different adjustment layers whilst they all have
uses you don't need to understand them all at least not initially but i'd recommend you learn
how to use levels vibrance and the black and white adjustment layers the curves layer is also
very important but you can do many of the same things with the levels layer unlike the pixel
layers adjustment layers don't prevent you from seeing the layer below them in the layers panel
instead they apply an effect to the lower layers you may remember we talked about the histogram in
the first lesson and that it represents how light or dark pixels are in the image if we
look at the levels dialog we can see the histogram representing the lower layers in this image notice
that this histogram doesn't extend all the way to the left of the range and that there's a gap
this tells us that the darkest pixels in this image aren't black as this image was shot in the
evening and has a lot of deep shadows you would expect that at least some of the pixels were black
let's fix this using the levels adjustment layer when i click and drag on the black level moving it
to the right you can see a marker move across the histogram what i want to do is move the marker so
it just touches the left edge of the histogram when i do this you can see the image getting
darker what the black level does is make the pixels in the image darker until the darkest pixel
then turns black if i move the marker further to the right it turns all the pixels in this area of
the histogram black and we produce shadow clipping when i turn the layer off and on you can see the
improvement to the image by correcting the black point now i can do the same with the white level
i'll move this to the left until it meets the edge of the white histogram if you're wondering
what the different coloured histograms are they relate to the colour channels in this image
this is an rgb image meaning that each pixel is made up of a combination of red green and blue to
produce its color the white histogram represents the brightness of the image pixels rather than
their color when i move the white level to meet the white histogram you can see that i'm chopping
off part of the red and green histograms if you look at the histogram panel at the top
of my screen you can see that i'm now clipping those channels in the highlights in the first
lesson i explained it was best to avoid clipping because you can lose detail in the image with this
image the clipping is in the brightest areas of the sky and it doesn't look to be damaging
the image at all i will though reduce the white level slightly to make the sky look a bit better
if i turn the layer off and on you can see the improvement now if you're thinking the image looks
a little too dark you can adjust the gamma level to correct it when i move the gamma slider to the
right it darkens the image and if i move it to the left we lighten it all the time this is happening
the black and white points in the histogram are unchanged it's the rest of the pixels in
the histogram that we're changing a value of 0.95 seems to produce a reasonable brightness if i turn
the layer off and on you can see the adjustments improve the contrast and the color but without
making the image too dark when i'm finished making the adjustment i can close the dialog
as mentioned layers are non-destructive which means we can turn them off and even delete them
to remove their effect we can also double-click an adjustment layer to reopen its dialog
notice this displays the same settings as when the dialog was closed this allows us to refine
the settings if we later think the effect is too strong but we can also reduce the strength of the
effect without changing the settings in the dialog all we need to do is select the layer in the layer
studio panel and reduce its opacity you can think of the opacity of the layer as controlling its
transparency which in turn affects the strength of the effect when the opacity of the layer is at 100
the effect is at full strength if we reduce the opacity it lessens the layers effect on the image
by the time the opacity is at zero percent it's the same as hiding the layer
now let's add a second layer to this image but this time we'll make it a vibrance adjustment
this allows us to increase or reduce the intensity of the colours in the image the vibrancy dialog
has a vibrancy slider and a saturation slider the difference between the two is that the saturation
slider affects all colors equally where the vibrant slider is more limited most of the
time you only need to adjust the vibrance slider so let's increase the vibrancy in this image by
moving the slider to the right you can see this has a limited effect on the colors in the sky and
on the rocks to show you the difference watch what happens when i use a saturation slider instead
the effect is much stronger and seen across all colours in the image now a common mistake made by
affinity photo beginners is to use this layer to convert coloured images to black and white
when i drag the saturation slider to the far left it does remove all the colours from the
image whilst this produces a black and white image we don't have much control over the effect
that's why it's better to make black and white conversions using the black and white adjustment
layer let's add a black and white adjustment layer by clicking the icon at the bottom of the
layers panel you can see in the black and white dialogue that there are several coloured sliders
these relate to the colours in a colour wheel being red green and blue as well as yellow cyan
and magenta the default position of the sliders is at the center at 100 percent by moving the slider
right or left we can make the colors lighter or darker in the image watch what happens when i move
the yellow slider left and right you can see it changing the yellow areas of the image making them
darker or lighter one way to use this dialog is to move each slider left and right to understand how
it affects the image you can then work your way through the sliders deciding the settings for each
if you decide to start again click the reset button to reset the sliders to their default
position but there's another way to use the dialog when i move my cursor over the image you can see
that it has an arrow with a small horizontal line below it i can use this to click a point in
the image with my mouse to sample it then whilst holding down my mouse button i can drag left to
make that area darker or right to make it brighter as i do this you can see the sliders in the dialog
are responding also like other layers we can reduce the opacity of the layer to allow colour
to begin to show in the image again let's group these layers together we can do this by selecting
them in the layer studio panel i'll click on the top layer and then holding down the shift key
i'll click on the lowest layer i want to include i can also pick individual layers by holding down my
command key or ctrl key on a pc and then clicking the layer you can see i now have multiple layers
selected which are highlighted in blue then when i click the group layer icon it groups
the selected layers together if i expand the group you can see the individual layers again
as with the individual layers i can turn off the group to hide all its layers with a single click
now there is a keyboard shortcut that i want you to learn and burn into your memory it's shift plus
option plus command plus e or if you're using a pc that's shift plus control plus alt plus e
when you press these keys together you create a new pixel layer in the image which consolidates
all the other visible layers in the layers panel you can see the new layer is a pixel layer
and identical to the other visible layers the more you use affinity photo the more useful you'll
find this keyboard shortcut and please don't look for it in the menu because it isn't there
you can though replicate it using the copy merge feature in the edit menu after clicking copy merge
you can paste the clipboard to create a new layer in the image let's delete these layers now by
selecting them and then clicking on the dustbin icon at the bottom of the layer studio panel
as we've been working through this lesson you may have noticed several distracting cars in the image
if we compare this with the edited image you can see that i've removed the cars in that one i'll
show you how to do this in the next lesson using affinity photos clone tool and healing brush tool
don't miss the next lesson in this course it's going to be an extremely useful one