welcome to this third lesson of an intense course designed to help you learn affinity photo
fast in this video we'll look at a few of the many tools in the affinity photo tools palette and how
to use them as with the first two lessons in the course we only cover the essentials because you
don't need to know all the tools but it does mean you mustn't skip ahead or you'll miss something
important if you haven't already watched the first two lessons of this course i'd recommend you watch
them before continuing i've included a link to them in the youtube information for this video
when you open affinity photo you'll see the tools arranged in the panel on the left of the screen
this is the tools palette in the photo persona if we switch to a different persona you'll see
a different set of tools each persona displays the tools that are suited to helping you work in that
persona because most of our editing is being done in the photo persona we'll be looking at those
tools if i double click below the palette you can see that it opens as a floating toolbar which i
can then move around the screen if i want to put the panel back in the sidebar i can double-click
the panel title now it is possible that your version of affinity photo will display different
tools to mine one of the reasons for this is that you can customize the tools in the palette
you can do this by clicking the view menu and then the customize tools option this opens a
dialog where you can click and drag tool icons to add them or remove them from the panel to
ensure you have the same tools displayed as i have click the reset button at the bottom of the panel
you can then click the close button you select the tool that you want to use by clicking its
icon with your mouse when i hover my mouse over a tool icon you can see a tooltip appears with
the name of that tool you can also see there's a letter in a square bracket after the tool name
this letter is a shortcut key to selecting that tool for example when i press the m key
on my keyboard it selects the marquee tool for me and when i press h it selects the view tool
now look closely at some of these icons and you'll notice there's a small gray triangle in the bottom
right this tells us that there are multiple tools grouped together in this position of the toolbar
when i click the grey triangle it expands to display the other tools in that group
i can then click the tool that i want to use whilst there are a lot of tools in the toolbar
there's only a few you use on a regular basis the rest are useful but it's better
to learn the others when you need to use them rather than trying to remember everything now
let's look at some of the most used tools starting with the view tool when i move my
mouse pointer over the image with the view tool selected you'll see the pointer change to a hand
i can then click on the image and drag to reposition it on the screen you might wonder
why we want to do this but it makes more sense if we enlarge the image to 100 magnification
now we can use the move tool to reposition the visible area of the image on the screen
incidentally a great shortcut to fit the image to the available preview area is to double click the
background layer in the layers studio panel the next tool we want to look at is the move tool
this is a great tool for selecting objects and then resizing and repositioning them in the image
when i select the tool you see a blue box appear around the image with small crosses in the corners
and along the edges these crosses are the drag handles which we can use to resize the object
when they appear as a cross it means they're locked and we can't change them
as i have the background layer selected with the tool if you look in the layer studio panel
you can see the lock there's a small grey padlock icon on the layer when i click it it unlocks the
layer and the cross is changed to circles now i can resize the background layer by clicking
and dragging the handles i can also click and drag the object to reposition it on the document let's
undo that now and i'll lock the layer again with the lock option in the studio panel our next tool
is the crop tool which we can use to remove or crop out part of the image when i click the tool
you'll see a crop overlay appear on the screen which we can use to select part of the image
for example you can see a couple of photographers standing on the rocks to the right of the screen
by clicking and dragging the edges of the crop overlay i can cut them out of the frame then i
can click the apply button to make the crop now one of the great things about the crop 2 in the
photo persona is that it's non-destructive watch what happens when i click the crop tool again
as before you see the crop overlay but you don't see the missing area of the image that was removed
that is unless i click the reveal option this shows the area that was previously
removed by the crop tool so that i can resize the crop area to include it again
there are other things you can do with the crop tool as well but we don't have time to cover them
here if you want to know more about how to use the crop tool i'll include a link to another of my
videos in the youtube information below the next tool to discuss is the paintbrush which we use
in a lot of photo editing in fact affinity photo has several brush based tools which
all have similar controls to the paintbrush when you learn how to control the paintbrush you also
learn how to control these other brush tools after clicking the paintbrush icon you can see
its controls appear in the toolbar along the top of the interface these controls allow you
to change brush characteristics like the size of the brush as well as the opacity flow and hardness
now notice that when i move my mouse pointer over the image it shows a preview of what would happen
if i click with the mouse then if i don't move my mouse for a couple of seconds the preview vanishes
this is a feature that you can turn on and off in the affinity photo preferences so your brush may
not do this to demonstrate the brush let me first add a new empty layer to the image by selecting
the layer menu and then new layer you can see the new layer appear in the layer studio panel
in this example you can see that the layer has been selected because it's highlighted in blue
if another layer was selected instead i would need to click the new layer because i want to
paint onto it using the brush tool watch what happens now when i click and drag with my mouse
notice i'm painting a line that's hiding the image below it the line also has a hard edge to it
this hard edge is controlled by the hardness setting which is currently set to 100 percent if
i change that to 50 and draw another line you'll see that it has a softer edge then if i change it
to zero percent you'll see the line becomes even softer also notice that this softening of the edge
causes the line to become thinner even though i've not changed the width of the brush if you find
you want to change the width of the brush you can either use the width slider in the toolbar or use
the square bracket keys on your keyboard i prefer to use the square bracket keys because you can
see the brush size respond press the left square bracket to make the brush smaller and the right
square bracket to make it larger now let's look at the opacity and flow settings in the toolbar
so far i've been painting with these set to 100 but watch what happens when i set the flow to 10
to paint a line the line appears to be transparent so that you can see the image below it
then as i paint backwards and forwards over the same area the strength of the line builds
up until it's as dark as before let's now set the flow to 100 and the opacity to 10
as before when i paint a line you can see the background image but this time if i
paint backwards and forwards over the same area the strength of the line doesn't change this is
the difference between using opacity and flow the flow continues to build up as you move the brush
over the same area with the opacity there isn't any buildup in the paint it's only when i release
the mouse button and then click and paint a second time that we see the density of the paint increase
i'll just set the opacity and flow back to 100 now because i want to show you how to change the paint
color one way to do this is in the swatches studio panel where you can select one of the colour
options in the drop down now i can click the color that i want to select to use with the paint brush
another way to change the color is using the color studio panel here we can dial in the color
using the rgb sliders for example i can create the strongest possible red by setting the red
slider value to 255 and then the green and blue sliders to have values of zero it's also possible
your color studio panel doesn't look like mine that's because you can change it to use different
controls like the color wheel using the wheel you can rotate the marker to pick the color that you
want to use you can then move the second pointer inside the triangle to change the saturation and
luminance of the colour now although i've painted lots of lines i haven't damaged the original image
because i've been painting onto the layer i added this allows me to hide the layer by clicking the
visibility tick mark which hides the lines if i painted directly onto the background layer
it would have been a destructive edit because i would have changed the image pixels instead
i can now remove the lines by hiding them or even by deleting the layer now let's look at
a couple of tools you can use to hide or remove unwanted objects in an image these are the clone
brush tool and the healing brush as with the paint brush tools these are destructive tools
that change the pixels of an image this means we should always work with them on a new layer
like with the paintbrush tool as before i'll start by adding a new empty layer using the layers menu
and then the new layer option now let's zoom into the area where we see the two photographers
standing on the rocks i'll start by selecting the clone brush tool you can use this to copy from one
area of an image and paint that onto another area but before i try to use it i need to change the
option in the toolbar drop down to be current layer and below this means the brush will copy
from all the layers in the image and not just the one that i have selected in the layer studio panel
we'll go more in depth on layers in a later lesson but for now just be sure that it's set to current
layer and below the next step is to pick the area i want to sample by positioning my brush over it
i then set the sample point by clicking with my mouse whilst holding down the option key on my
keyboard if you're using a windows pc that's your alt key after setting the sample point i move the
brush to where i want to copy the sample to in this example it's over one of the photographers
as i do this you can see a preview of what will be copied which helps you to line it up
with the other detail in that area then when i click i can paint in the change
i can then repeat the process by sampling another area and painting that over other areas of the
photograph the problem with this repair though is that you can see the edges of the cloned area
one way around this might be to use a softer edge to the brush just as with the paintbrush tool we
looked at earlier you can change the hardness setting for the brush which helps to blend your
changes another option is to switch to using the healing brush tool this works very much like the
clone brush except that it tries to blend the area you copy with the new area as before i need to set
the brush to work with the current layer and below i can then sample a point in the same way as i did
with the clone tool and use it to paint over the area i want to repair with a couple of carefully
chosen samples i can blend the repair into the image then when i zoom out you can't see the areas
even been repaired but if i hide the layer where i made the repair too you can see the photographers
again now please don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss future videos in this course if the
next video has already been published you'll see it here now and you should watch that next if not
watch this video where i remove unwanted objects from a photo it's surprising what you can achieve
using a couple of simple tools thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video