Affinity Photo - Portrait Design - SUPER EASY!

Key Takeaways

today we are going to create a really cool portrait composition hello my friends and let's get started please write in the comments if you want to see more videos like this and the focus in this episode is on how to create really cool images with very very easy technique so basically we have these materials here I found on a page called textures calm these trees or plants and they have already been cut out as is the amazing part about textures calm I will link it in the video description then we have the sunset here and this is our starting picture a very very nice picture of a woman with very cool hair and you can see it's a black-and-white picture and when we start the first thing I'm going to do is I will select one of the trees and use ctrl key to create a group and we will use this because I will now create an adjustment layer for black and white and we'll pull it into the group as the top layer and have all the other layers below that so everything inside of the group will automatically be black and white I will set the green a little bit lower because the tree of course is green and so you can see it's getting a little bit darker in our black and white settings and now what I can do is just rotate the tree and resize it and put it somewhere where I like it as you can see the tree stem is sticking into the hair doesn't literally look good it doesn't look like it's growing out of the hair so what we can do about that is with the tree layer selected click down here on mask layer and then open it and click on the mask layer and use your brush tool with black and 100% opacity and just you can of course reduce the heart and I set it to zero and set the brush to a size that works well for your picture and you can just brushes out as you can see so it has kind of a soft fade into the hair so that's very nice we can now use the next tree just pull it into the group let's see we have it over here I will move it to that side rotate it a little bit maybe resize it a little bit there we go and again I will click on the mask select the mask select the brush and just brush over the lower part of the tree a little bit so we can put it here I think I put away a little bit too much of the tree let's go back select the brush again and make the brush a little bit smaller there we go okay that's better and now what you can do of course is you can hold ctrl and then click and drag this duplicates layer and you can just move around also resize the tree which is a nice trick to have trees that look different but actually they are made with the same material so this is a very nice way to work faster I will show you the same thing here I will just rotate this to the other side and give it a different size and it kind of looks like it's a different tree so this is a very nice trick to make more from the materials you're working with the next one is this plant here I'm not really sure what the English name for that is I'm sure you can tell me in the comments what this specific plant is called I just you know the German name but it fits very well and I like that it looks like a feather and that it also has kind of the qualities of the hairs of these little strings that are sticking out here and look really really cool so this mixes very well and because it looks like a feather it can see here a nice effect that when it's on a on a light background this looks very dark but when I put it on the hair because the hair is darker this suddenly starts to look very light so suddenly you think that this color and this color here from the background is the same but you can see it's not the same so this is really cool it's an optical ushion we can use this to our benefit have this here in the hair and look like feathers that are decorating her face this is really really nice let's resize this a little bit put it over here so this gives a really cool nature look let's put some more over here maybe I don't know maybe up here is nice and we can always like I said we can always use the mask like in this case use the mask tool with the brush to just make this a little bit softer also on the other parts let's see where's the layer this is the layer ok mask and brush there we go now you can see this helps us to make it look like it's coming out of the hairs is really important that it looks like it's growing in this case so there we go ok and this already looks really cool I think I will use one more over here to give it even more structure there we go nice a little bit bigger ok that's nice I'll use another mask so this is a lot of layers actually this picture but you can see the techniques are really easy and this is what I liked about this tutorial and of course you can stick anything you like onto the head it could be buildings or people or whatever it is you can really create fantastically scenes with this really really simple technique and to make this picture more interesting we are going to blend it with another picture from a sunset which is this picture here and we are going to resize it because it has a lot lot more resolution than the other picture the portrait and so we can move it around and I will set this you can see you can do a lot with the colors let's go into let's zoom in here and with the blend modes off the layer you can see you can create a lot of different styles of whatever you fancy whatever looks interesting to you overlay is always something that I really like but you can also use hard light you can see hard light also looks very cool so really play around with the play modes to get something looks amazing for you in this case you can see that we have these whites streaks in the sky that are not too good for our case so what we can do for that is just use the in paintbrush here I will rasterize the background because I'm not going to change if you think you will change your position later on maybe it's better to duplicate so you keep it in the image resolution and then create and rasterize the layer Lorelei's one of them and have a duplicate that is still the original size okay I will resize my in paintbrush a little bit this is too small this is good enough just paint over this and you can see they are gone very easy so of course this is a very forgiving background so this is helping us a lot and it's just to give a cool color impression so this is a very nice trick to do that there we go maybe even remove these down here a little bit doesn't have to be super perfect you can even use this much brush tool to just move around here to just blur this in you can see very easy and let's reactivate the other layers and there we go that's it down here's a little bit that I don't like I'm seeing it right now because this is sticking out here so let's remove this real quick with the in paintbrush there we go that should be and that's gone ah super easy I really like it I love techniques that are so easy like this one thing that we're going to do now is you can see the face is not looking good enough so what I'm going to do is to create a new adjustment layer for or curves you can use both I will use levels in this case and I will set let's see make the face a little bit brighter maybe a little bit more contrast that's like this is good but we don't want to have it on the rest of the picture just on the face so let's create a mask and I will select the mask layer and then click up here on layer invert so it's not used on any part of the picture and then I'm going to use the brush set it to a good size like this is okay and then I will set it to white and this will re-enable basically the effect of the layer adjustment I can just paint over the face and you can see now the effect if I turn the adjustment on and off it's just on the face so that's very nice so I have more detail on the face there is more presence to the face and with opacity of course you can reduce it a little bit if you want or you can still go into the layer adjustments to move this around so this was the tutorial for today if you want to see more of them please comment and tell me so if you like my channel subscribe to it and if you want to support me even more head over to patreon where you can download the file with all the layers you can post your own creations for feedback from me and we can even live chat about questions you have and topics that are interesting for you thank you very much for watching and see you in the next episode bye