recently i did a quick poll of some affinity photo users 97 percent of respondents admitted to being
confused by affinity at some point in this video i'll explain some of the common problems and how
you can avoid falling into the same traps the first area of confusion for most new affinity
photo users is the personas there are five of these which you can access through the icons
in the top left of the toolbar each persona is designed for a specific purpose for example the
liquify persona has tools for distorting objects or areas of an image what many new users find
confusing is that the layout of each persona is different but somehow vaguely similar then when
they look more closely they find the studio panels and tools in each persona are very different
when you're new to affinity photo this can make it appear far more complex than it really is
what you need to understand is that each persona displays only the tools and panels for its design
purpose notice in the liquify persona that the tools relate to deforming areas of the image which
is the purpose of that persona what you don't see are tools like the rectangular marquee tool
from the photo persona because you don't need them equally if we switch to the export persona
you don't see tools from the liquify persona there but here's the thing whilst the different personas
in affinity photo are helpful you don't need them most of the time in fact you can do all
your editing using only the default photo persona the only exception is if you want to edit a raw
file rather than an image when you open a raw file in affinity photo you'll find yourself
automatically in the develop persona rather than the default photo persona that's because the
develop persona is the only persona where you can edit a raw file but again this is a source
of confusion for users now there is another area of confusion which happens when trying to access
the different personas let's say you want to edit this image using the develop persona when i try to
open it i get an error message saying that i must select an rgb pixel layer before entering develop
that's because affinity photo can have different types of layers in an image but only pixel layers
can be edited in some of the personas pixel layers are the ones that contain an image or part of an
image and that are made up of pixels another type of layer is the adjustment layer like curves layer
and this doesn't have any pixels if you don't have a pixel layer selected before switching to
the develop persona you get the error message to avoid the error message select a pixel layer to
edit in the layers studio panel before switching personas now let's look more closely at the
affinity photo persona layout chances are your copy of affinity photo doesn't look like mine
because mine's been customized for this video when new users see these differences
they often jump to the conclusion that it's due to the version of the software that i'm using this is
a mistake and it's more likely the difference is down to changes you can make to your own interface
if we look at the affinity photo view menu there's a studio option with a complete list of panels
this is where we can hide or display different panels by clicking them notice the tick mark to
the left of some of the panels in this list that tells us these panels are visible in the interface
if we click one of these say the assets panel it's then hidden in the display but it isn't only the
individual panels we can hide or display the areas to the left and right of the screen which hold the
groups of panels can also be hidden these are called the left and right studios using the view
menu we can hide either the left or right studio area which then hides all the panels dock there
this flexibility can cause a lot of confusion for new users but perhaps not as much as the
next feature affinity photo allows us to arrange the visible studio panels by clicking and dragging
for example i can drag the macro panel and dock it with the histogram at the top of the screen
and if you're wondering why my histogram panel is on the left and yours is perhaps on the right it's
because i've moved mine i can even drag panels to form new groups in the left and right studios
fortunately if you find yourself in a mess you can reset your interface to the default
in the view menu much of what you see in the affinity photo interface is customizable
please don't make the mistake of thinking your software must be a different version
it's more likely to be that a setting's been changed the color studio panel is a great example
of this by using the list at the top of the panel we can change the slider options and each
looks different but even that is at the end of our choices there's also a menu to the
top right of the panels where we can select other options for the current panel if i pick the wheel
option rather than the slider view the panel now looks completely different with all these options
for customization i doubt anyone watching this video will have the same layout as me
now let's look at the toolbar along the top of the affinity photo interface
does your toolbar look like mine perhaps yours is showing the text as well as the icons or perhaps
you just see different icons to me that's entirely possible because i've customized my
toolbar for the features i use most you can easily do this yourself by right-clicking the toolbar and
choosing the customize option you can then drag and drop the icons for the features you want to
arrange them in the toolbar if you decide you want to reset the toolbar there's a default toolbar set
at the bottom of the dialog you can use just drag and drop this as you would with any other icon
let's now turn our attention to the filters because these are another source of confusion it's
probably best to demonstrate a common problem by sharpening the image with the unsharp mask filter
i'll start by selecting the consolidated image layer because the filter only affects pixel layers
if you try to apply it to an adjustment layer like the curves layer it doesn't do anything
now i can apply the filter by clicking the filter sharpen menu option i'll move the factor slider to
the far right to make it easier to see the effect now notice these icons to the bottom right of the
dialog we can use them to help judge the effect of the sharpening for example i can switch to
the split screen mode when i'm happy with the filter settings i can click the apply button
this applies the adjustment i made directly to the pixels of the layer what many users fail to
realize is that this is a destructive edit meaning you can't change the settings you've applied
let's try opening the unsharp mask filter again in the menu to reduce the strength of the sharpening
when the dialog opens it looks like it's remembered my settings so i'll reduce them
and click the apply button again but what's happened is that i've applied additional
sharpening to the image not reduced it you can see this if i move back through the editing history
the problem occurred because i use regular filters from the filter menu these filters directly change
the pixels on the layer and once applied you can't refine them if you want to adjust your settings
you need to use a live filter layer rather than a regular filter you'll find the live filter layers
in the layers menu which contains many of the same adjustments as the filters menu then when i choose
the live filter version of the unsharp mask the adjustment controls look the same which can also
be confusing the only immediate difference is that we don't have the comparison icons at the bottom
left of the dialog and there isn't an apply button if i make an adjustment and close the dialog
the live filter layer appears as a new layer in the layers studio panel you can see it attached to
the layer it's adjusting then when i double click the live filter it opens the dialog and this time
i can adjust my settings if you don't understand the difference between live filters and regular
filters affinity photo can seem very confusing it's also easy to make a mistake by applying the
wrong type in most cases it's better to use a live filter rather than a regular filter because it's
non-destructive and you can continue to adjust your settings the next area of confusion for users
is one we touched on earlier which is the tools palettes in the different personas besides each
persona having different sets of tools there are two more problems you can run into the first is
that some of the tools are grouped but you only see one of the icons from the group if you look
below some of the icons in my tools palette you can see a small gray triangle when i click this
rather than selecting that tool affinity photo shows the other tools from the group i can then
select any of these tools and that icon then appears in the tools palette this is one reason
your tools palette might look different to mine but there's also another that can cause confusion
there are many more tools in each persona that are displayed and you can customize this display
click the view menu and select the customize tools option to see the complete list you can then click
and drag tools to add tools to the palette as well as clicking and dragging to remove them you can
also arrange the tools into multiple columns using the drop down at the bottom of the panel
if you find you get into a mess with the tools you can click the reset button at the bottom
ultimately it's the customization and flexibility of affinity photo that's confusing new users
now if you want to know how to take more control over your affinity photo layout you need to watch
this video next it explains how to create your own custom layouts that you can quickly switch between