1.2 Quick Tips for Affinity Photo

[MUSIC] Hey this is Kes Bracy welcome to Affinity Photo Quick Tips. In this short coffee break course we're going to go through four really cool little things that you can do in Affinity Photo that you might not spot when you first jump into the program. First up is saveable history. When you save out a document in Affinity Photo you can actually save every single one of the steps that are showing in your history panel which is this panel here at the time of your saving. So this is super helpful when you're reopening a document and you realize perhaps that the last thing you did in your last work session was not quite right or you want to be able to share your document with other people and have them go through your history as well. Now the way that you activate this feature is to go up to the file menu, and then just look for a save history with document, and you're gonna check that. And you'll just get a little warning just letting you know what save with history is gonna do, and just hit yes. So now, we'll just do a couple of things on the canvas here to get a little bit of history down. Just warp that around a little bit and we'll just erase some of the sections here so we have a few lines of history now coming out in our panel here. So now, we're going to save this file, and then we're gonna close it down. Now if we reopen this document there you can see that our history has been preserved, and it's still there when we reopen the file. The next tip we're gonna check out is that you can actually search for stock photography in line inside Affinity Photo, and the way to do that is to look for this stock panel here. And there are a few different services that this connects with, so we have Shutterstock, Deposit Photos, and 500 Pixels, and you can just search for anything that you need in this little field here. So let's say we need a picture of a laptop for whatever reason. You can run a search here. And then we'll have a series of laptop images that we can select from. From there you can go ahead and double-click, and it will open up the stock image for you inside the service that you have selected to search in. Tip number three is that in Affinity Photo you can actually get live previews of every blend mode so rather than having to pick out a blend mode, select it, and then see the effect, pick out another one, select it, see the effect. You'll see how the blend mode is gonna look the moment that you hover over it in the select list. So if we choose our blue circle here here are our blend modes and now as soon as we hover over them You can see that we have a preview of all of the different effects. So this applies anywhere that you have blend modes in the software. So that's just one example but we can also see the blend mode previews in effects. So we have an outer glow. That's it on screen right now, but we can change the blend mode and just like with our layers we'll see a live preview making it much quicker and easier to select the blend mode that's gonna work for your artwork. Tip number three is that when you're working with either non life filters or with the develop persona it's possible to set up a before and after view. Now with each of these types of processing once that processing is committed that alters the pixels in whatever you're working on and you can't go back and tweak your changes later. So to make sure that you like what you see, you can use these before and after split views or side by side comparisons to help you make sure that you're generating the type of results that you want. So let's check out an example. So under filters we are gonna apply a Gaussian blur, and this is gonna blur our image out. Now what you wanna look for are these three little icons here. Now this second one gives you a split screen before and after view like this. So now, as you apply the effect you can quite clearly see the difference before and after, and this is a slider, so you can have a look at any part of the document you need to. Alternatively you can have a side to side comparison, so showing you the entire image after, and before. And then if you just wanna go back to your single view you can just hit the whole circle here. Now the same thing applies if you are using the develop persona. So if we move into the develop persona you'll see up here we have the same three icons. So we can go into split view with the slider or into side by side view. So those are four quick tips for working with Affinity Photo. A few little things that will help you along the way that you might wouldn't otherwise realized were there. I hope you'll join me in the final video where we'll just quickly have a little talk about what's coming up next in the make the switch to Affinity Photo coffee break course. I'll see you there.