hi i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft in today's video i'm looking at the
affinity photo overlay tools you'll find two of these in the affinity
photo develop persona which are the gradient and brush tools
these seem to cause people lots of problems so i thought today was time for
a video to help sometimes it's possible to apply all the
adjustments you need to make your raw file
look great with just the basic panel controls
but sometimes you'll find there's areas that are just a little bit too bright
or too dark and that you need to enhance just those areas
this is where we can use overlay tools to make targeted adjustments to the
image when you look at the overlay studio
panel you'll see there's a master overlay
the overlays panel lists all the overlays that you've created in the
image that you're editing so you can select and work with them the
default is the master overlay which refers to the entire image that you're
editing so when this is selected you're applying
any changes you make to the entire image now let's add an overlay to target
adjustments onto just the sky in the top half of the image
if you look at the bottom of the overlay studio panel you'll see that there's two
icons we can use these to add new overlays and
then draw our selection onto the image one icon is to add a brush overlay and
the other is a gradient overlay i'll start by demonstrating the gradient
overlay after clicking the icon to add a new
gradient i can select the type that i want to create in the toolbar
you should also notice that the gradient overlay tool
in the tools palette is now selected this is the other place that you can
select to add an overlay from for this example i want to select the
skype so i'll use the linear overlay but there's also a radial and elliptical
overlays to draw the gradient i click on the
image where i want the gradient to start and then i drag down with my mouse to
draw out the overlay as i do this you'll see a ruby mask over
the area that i'm selecting notice the area above where i first
clicked is solid red the graduated area is then between that
and where i've dragged to with the mouse when i release the mouse button the
gradient is completed in the overlay studio panel you'll see
the newly created gradient overlay you can also continue to adjust the
angle and size of the gradient by clicking and dragging the adjustment
handles once the gradient is in place i can move to the basic panel where i
can apply an adjustment to the overlay as soon as i make a change the red mask
vanishes and i don't know of a way to redisplay
it in the current version of affinity if you find that you need to check the
area selected again by the overlay try using the exposure slider instead
this can help you at least roughly see the area that you've
adjusted
something else to watch out for is that when you want to add another overlay of
the same type you can't just draw on the image or
you'll end up just changing the position of the current overlay
instead you need to click the icon to add a new overlay in the overlays window
alternatively you can click on the master layer and then
draw any new overlay when it comes to applying adjustments to
an overlay you'll find most of the tools in the basic studio panel are available
for editing the exceptions currently are the clarity
slider in the color profile you also can't add any of the adjustment
tools in any of the other panels with an overlay now let's create another overlay
but this time i'll add a radial gradient to the center of the image
now when i click and drag i add a circular selection from the point that i
clicked to the point where i dragged you with the mouse
look closely and you'll see a marker in the center of the gradient line
this shows where the gradient starts if i move this towards the center of the
overlay it makes the graduated area larger
and if i move it outwards it makes the graduated area smaller
now let's change this to an elliptical gradient i can do this by just changing
the gradient type in the drop down at the top of the interface
notice that the elliptical gradient has an additional control to adjust the
height as well as the width of the area
now let's look at the brush overlay which i can use to paint a selection of
the rocks in the background we can then use this to lighten that
selection slightly with the brush overlay tool i can
control the hardness of the brush and i can also select the edge aware
option the edge aware control is perfect for
selecting the edges of the rocks but not the sky
if i make any mistakes i can then use the overlay arrays tool to clean them up
now do be aware that this only works with the brush overlay
you can't use it to remove parts of say a gradient overlay
now for a couple of final points you can apply any development presets that
you've created for the basic panel to the master overlay without affecting any
of the individual overlays the other thing that's often overlooked
is that you can adjust the strength of an overlay in the overlays panel by
setting the opacity
now if you're an experienced user with other raw developers like capture one or
lightroom you may find the overlays in affinity quite
restrictive these are rather basic and crude selection tools in comparison
but you can still use them effectively hopefully serif will develop them
further in the future because the image quality from the
affinity photo develop persona is superb i hope you found today's video helpful
if you have please share it with others also if you have any tips of your own
please add them in the comments below i'm robin whalley you've been watching
lenscraft i'll see you next week for another video