1.2 Affinity Photo Personas

[SOUND] Welcome to Affinity Photo Personas. This is the first installation in our Coffee Break course series on making the switch over to Affinity Photo. In this course, we're going to be looking at what Affinity Photos personas are because they're quite a standout feature in the software, and they really form a foundation of how you're going to be interacting with the software. So, when you have a look at the top left corner of Affinity Photo, you'll see these four different icons here. Each one of these icons represents a different persona. So, what is persona? Well, the way that I like to think of personas in the software is, they're like having multiple separate apps all built in to the one program. Now, first up we have the photo persona, which is what you'll find yourself in by default when you start up Affinity Photo. You'll also have the liquefy persona, you have the develop persona, and you have the export persona. Now if I switch into the liquefy persona, you'll see that all of the tools down on the left side here have changed, and all of the panels down on the right side here have changed. And there's also been changes up the top here, because what happens when you change from one person into another is, it's like loading up a whole new app with a whole new different set of functionality. But the difference is you're still continuing to work with the same file, rather than having to take a file, and take it from one type of program into another as you go through your workflow. Everything is contained within Affinity Photo. So just cancel that for now. And the same thing applies if you go into the develop persona. You have a different set of tools, on the left side, the top, and down the right. The fourth persona that we have is the export persona, and once more you have a different set of tools as you look around the UI. If you're familiar with Adobe's Lightroom software, then you might find this familiar from working with modules. In the same way that you'll switch from one module to another in Lightroom, you'll switch from one persona to another in Affinity Photo. All right. So now that we know what personas are, let's go through each of the four that are included with Affinity Photo. And we'll go through what they're for, and we'll have a look at the tool sets provided with each one. The first is the photo persona, which we are in right now, and as the name suggests, this is for photo editing. And the best way to give you an idea of what kind of photo editing we're talking about is to have a look at the tools. So we're just going to switch into separated mode so you can see the tool set a little bit better. These are your tools here. And just by looking at these icons, you'll probably have a fair idea of what's going on here, because you'll see a lot of icons that are common to just about every pixel art app that exists on the market. So you've got your standard tools like your cropping tool, your marquee selections, fill tools, paintbrushes, erasers. You also have common things like your dodging and burning brushes. You have clone brushes, just like you'll be familiar with from other programs. You also have vector tools like pen tools, and you have shape drawing for vectors, and you have text tools. So if you've used any type of Raster-based graphics app before, you'll already have a fair idea of what you're going to be doing with those particular tools. So generally speaking, you're going to work mostly in the photo persona if you are doing retouching of images, if you are doing photo manipulation, if you are doing any type of pixelate from scratch. Basically, if you are making any major, significant changes to the composition of an image, or if you're creating art from scratch. Now, there's actually quite a lot that you can do with the photo persona, and there are a lot of tools that we won't have the time to cover in this initial Coffee Break course, but we will be looking at each one of these personas in more detail in future entries in this series. Okay, so the next persona that we're gonna look at is the liquefy persona, the second one in the row up here. And the liquefy persona lets you distort, and warp, and create all kinds of weird effects with your images. Now before you choose either the liquefy or the develop persona, you're going to have to make sure that you have a pixel layer selected. These two personas are unable to work with vector art, so if you have some vectors that you want to work with, you'll need to Rasterize them before you choose one of these personas. All right, so let's grab the layers panel, and we'll find a good pixel layer for us to liquefy. All right. So, let's grab the rock here that's sitting in the background. So we'll select its layer and then we'll hit the liquefy persona. And now, we can use any one of these tools that you see down the left side here to liquefy our rock, to distort it, warp it, change the way that it appears. All right, so let's have a look at a couple of these. So here we've got the liquefy push forward tool. And if you hover over You can apply the push forward tool to change the shape of the rock. And as you do so, you'll see this mesh surrounding the object. We'll walk along with it to help you keep track of the changes that you're making. If I don't like what I've done, or I want to change it slightly, back the other way in some areas, I can use the reconstruct tool here. And I can put, gradually, I can put it back to how I began. So alternatively, you have the liquefy push left tool, which works in the same way, but basically just on a different axis. And, of course, you can also undo your changes, rather than always having to use the reconstruct tool. And then, you basically have the same theme with all the rest of your tools. So with this one we have a twirl effect that we can apply. We have a pinch effect, And, you can just get creative with how you apply each of these types of liquefy effects. And you'll notice down here, we also have something that looks like an iceberg, and something that looks like a flame. Now what you can actually do is, you can freeze certain areas of your image so it makes them immune to liquification. So, if we paint over the bottom half of our rock here, now if we use one of the liquification tools, that bottom half is not going to be affected anymore. And conversely, if we use the thaw tool, now we can thaw that section out. And the whole rock will be subject to the changes once again. So then when you're happy with the changes that you've made using the liquefy persona, you'll want to hit apply, and that will be permanently added to the pixel layer that you're working with. So just be mindful that that is a permanent change, so it's probably a good idea to make a duplicate of whatever layer you are planning to liquefy, so you always have that to fall back on if you need to later. So for our purposes, we're just going to hit Cancel. Okay so the next persona we're going to look at is the third in our list, and it is the develop persona. And that is this one here. So we're going to develop. Now this persona is for you if you are a photographer and you need to work with raw image files. I am not going to go into very much detail here because we already have another excellent free course instructed by Shamera Young, that goes into everything that you can do with this persona when you're working with raw image files. And that course is called Raw Processing with Affinity Photo, and I'll include a link to that course in the notes below this video. But just to give you a quick overview this persona will allow you to correct things that are not quite right in your image. So, it'll let you do things like correcting lens distortion and perspective. It will let you remove red eye, so we have a dedicated red eye removal tool here, for example. It will also let you get into working with your white balance, your exposure, contrast, brightness, sharpness, and all of those different types of things. So to summarize, the develop persona is all about taking raw images, putting them through your entire post production workflow, correcting anything that is wrong with the image, and making the necessary adjustments to get the image looking how you need it to be. And just like with the liquefy persona that we looked at a moment ago, when you've made the changes that you want to make to your raw image, you go ahead and hit the Develop button here to commit your changes. Or if you don't want to commit your changes, just hit Cancel. The last of our four personas is the export persona. So we'll go to that by hitting this little icon here. And the way you work with the export persona is something you might be familiar with from other applications. You're basically slicing up your image into little parts and then exporting those parts, either all at once, or individually. This is your slice tool, and you just draw out slices wherever you need them to be to break down your image. And once you've done that, you'll see the slice that you've just created that appear in the slices panel over here. From here, you can rename the slice to something else, and whatever name you give the slice is the name that the resulting image will have. And then, you can hit this button here to export one slice at a time, or you can check the box of multiple slices and then export them all at once. And you'll notice here that we have a resolution section. So if, for example, you are needing to export retina ready images at the same time as regular resolution, then you check your two times box. And then when you export any one of these slices, you'll get your double resolution images, as well as your single resolution images. Now if you select slice straight off the canvas here, then you'll also notice you have these export options along the top. So you have two different ways of going about it. So these options up here are basically the same as hitting this little button here. These will allow you to export the slice, or slices, that you currently have selected, either at one times, two times, or three times resolution. And then to set the actual specifications of your image, you want to go up here into the export options section. So you can choose from all the standard file types that you would expect to see. You have your pngs, your gifs, and what have you, and you can set all of the quality and encoding details in here. So that's all the essentials of the export persona, and that was the fourth and final persona that you find in Affinity Photo. So, that wraps up our Coffee Break course on Affinity Photo's personas. Please join me in the final video, where we'll just quickly recap what we've gone through, and I'll let you know a little bit about what's coming up in the next installation of our Make the Switch to Affinity Photo Coffee Break series. I'll see you there.