Adjusting Photos On Your Mac With Affinity Photo

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to adjust your photos using Affinity Photo.

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So let me show you the basics of applying adjustments to photos using Affinity Photo. We'll start off here in the Photos app. I'm going to edit a photo in Affinity Photo. Now there are two ways to do this. One is to go to the individual photo, click Edit, and then if you click here and you have Affinity Photo installed you'll see an option to edit in Affinity Photo. But you don't actually have to go into Edit to do that. You can just be viewing the photo and go to Image and then Edit With. You should see Affinity Photo as one of the options. Now after we choose this the first time there will be a shortcut that I'll show you in a minute to make it easier the second time. 

So this will launch Affinity Photo and it will open up this image in it. So now we've got it here in Affinity Photo. So let's look at the most basic way to make adjustments. That is to use these automatic controls here at the top. You've got Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colors, and Auto White Balance. So if I click one of those, like Auto Levels, it will apply some automatic adjustments to the photo. I can try each one of these. In anything like this, of course, you can just Undo to get rid of the last one. Otherwise it's applied to the image and it's permanent. Well, at least in this version of it. So I'm going to show you how to go much deeper into Adjustments in a minute. 

But let's say we're done with it and we just want to go back into Photos. What we can do here is we can Save or File, Save, or Command S, and it will save it back out to Photos. So I'm going to Hide Affinity Photo right now, Command H, and this is now the altered version of it. In fact if I go into Edit here and I look I see now there's Revert to Original because Photos always has the original saved. So this is the altered version. If I were to click here I could toggle back and forth between the original and the version that was edited in Affinity Photo. I could always like Revert to Original to go back.

Let's go in and Edit it again. Now this time if I go to Image and Edit With notice that it shows at the top Last Used Application and there's a Keyboard shortcut, Command Return. You can just use that to get to Affinity Photo. So Command Return will take me right there. Now I could apply adjustments. Now I'm not going to use the automatic adjustments this time. Instead I'm going to add an adjustment layer. So the way to do that is over here on the right, you could see where it says Layers, if I click on Adjustment I get a list of all the adjustment tools and I can select one.

So let's start off by just selecting Exposure, which is right here. It's pretty much the simplest one so it's good to use as an example. If I click on it here a few things happen. First, I get this little control here and I could adjust the exposure. Also notice under here I have some Presets. So I can just click and choose one of these presets. Now all that it's going to do, when I choose it, is actually move this here. So you can see how it moved it over to one, or moved it down to negative two. So I can get the same effect here but some of these adjustments are more complex so having a preset can be kind of useful.

So I can move this adjustment to where I want. Let's make this brighter here and I have now two options. One is I can click Merge. That will permanently apply this change to the image. Or I could do nothing. I could simply click the X button here, close this adjustment, and then if I go back to layers I'll notice I have my original image here as the background and above it I have an Exposure adjustment, a layer on top. I have a checkbox next to it. If I Uncheck it, it hides that layer and now I just see my original behind it. So this give the option to try it out with or without. Or I can double click over here and it will bring the controls back up and I can continue to adjust. I can also name this layer if I want by clicking here and if I want I could add a Preset. So I can click here and I can name it, just name it test, and now when I go to Adjustment here and I look under Exposure my Preset is saved. So I could now use that on another photo as well. If I want I could Control click here and Delete the Preset or Rename it.

Now while it's a layer here there are other things I could do with it. One is I can go to the Opacity here, click there, and I can control how much this effect is applied. So all the way down to zero is like turning it off. But if I want something in the middle, maybe halfway, I could go to 50%. I could also, of course, select it and hit the Delete key to delete it. If I wanted to I could select it, control click on it, and choose Merge Down or Merge Visible to merge it in and make it permanent. But there really is no reason to do that if you're just editing a photo from your Photos Library. I could just leave it here as a layer. When I Save this will Save to Photos. I can even see this live. I can move this over here and with Affinity Photo as the front-most app I can choose Save. It will give me the option here to Save Flattened, which is what I want to do. Now you could see it applied here in the Photos app.

Now let's look at another photo here. Take this one of Jack here and let's edit this one. I'm just going to use Command Return to go back into Affinity Photo. Now let's look at all of the different options we've got. You can click on an adjustment to Close it and not see the Presets. Let's go, say, to Levels here. Here you get a histogram at the top and you can adjust the levels and the Gamma.

Now here's the thing. I'm not a photographer or a graphic artist. So how you use these controls and how you create the best image, well, I'm going to leave that up to you. But I'll show you the technical part. How to actually access these adjustments. 

So here I've adjusted the level and I could close this. I could see under layers I have a levels adjustment layer. Let's go and add another type of adjustment. Let's say Selective Color which would be fun here because you could see Jack's scarf is red. So I could go into here and I could say I want to adjust the reds and change it to something else. So we can make some adjustments here and change the color of the scarf since that's the only red that's here. 

Now let's also go in here and go to Vibrance which seems to be one that's very useful. You could make the colors more vibrant and saturate them. So notice the green there on the lawn how it gets a lot greener there. So now I've got a photo that looks like this. If I look in Layers I've have  three layers here. One of the things I like that you could do is not only turn each one on or off individually but you can select more than one. So I could use Command to select multiple ones or Shift and click to select a range. Now when I check or uncheck them they will all go together. So I can see what the original looks like pretty easily and go back to having them all on. I'll just close this one out without saving.

Let's go to another photo here and let's Edit this in Affinity Photo. I'm going to go into Adjustments here and let's select Vibrance here and make the colors more vibrant. Saturate it like that. Another one here that's interesting is Lens Filter. I can take a color and apply it like it's a filter on the lens. Increase the amount. Change the color so I can make like a blue filter here. Change how much blue just like if there were blue glass on the camera lens. Let me go and delete that one and I want to go and add another one. Now instead of clicking adjustment and looking through the adjustments here I could also click this button here and it kind of creates a shortcut where I can easily get to these adjustments. So I'm going to choose Recolor here and this will basically make the entire thing monotone for a certain color. So, for instance, I can go to blue here. I can reduce the amount there. Play with the lightness and create something like this.

Now in addition to these adjustments there are also Filters. There are two ways to apply filters. So you could go to Filters here and apply something like, for instance, let's do haze removal. Then it's going to try and get rid of the haze here in the scene. You could see it does a good job of it. When using these filters you could preview them using Split View like this. Click here and now you could see before and after. You could drag this line along here. So you could try different things to see which filter looks better. Then when you get what you want you hit Apply and that makes it permanent. 

So here's another filter I could apply. I could go to Filters here and I can go to Unsharp Mask which will sharpen things. So now I can make things a lot sharper here in the image and click here and I could see before and after. So you can see how this makes this photo a lot different. Then I hit Apply. Now there's another way to apply filters. I'll Undo here and I can go to Layer, New Live Filter Layer. Not all the filters are available here. But if you use one of these you don't get the ability to see the split view like that. But you can make the adjustment and it will appear as a layer. Notice instead of being a layer on top of the image here it's one that's applied directly to this one layer. Since we're just editing photos this doesn't really matter because this we don't have multiple layers of images. But we can now turn this on and off here which is the advantage of live filters. You could click here and see all the live filters here as well.

Now, of course, if you want to keep these layers around and continue to work on the image then you're going to want to go and Save As and save a copy as an Affinity Photo document. Otherwise if you just save you have the option to Save Flattened and then it will save it back to the Photos app and when you close this document you loose all those layers and adjustment settings permanently. You just have the new version of it here in Photos. You can always go and Revert to Original if you want. But then you would have to recreate all of those layers with slightly different settings to create a different result.

So I hope you found this useful. If you're already used to using layers in different apps like in PhotoShop you should be able to apply what you know to Affinity Photo now. But otherwise you could just play around with these different adjustments to see what you could do to alter your photographs using Affinity Photo.