Affinity Photo - Photo Letter Font Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends and welcome to another affinity photo tutorial today actually the episode was gonna be about Grunch maps and how to use them to improve your photos but we have something really cool to celebrate because I started my patreon account and I have my first supporter for my account and as a shout-out to Linda and of course if you support me you get a lot more say in the choice of topics and another benefit is that you get the original files the affinity photo files with all the layers so you can look into it or even use it as a master file for your own creations so this episode is for Linda thank you very much for supporting me and we're gonna do a photo letter phone so what this means is that we have two photo sticking out of the font and we do a little bit more in this episode we also replace the background with a nice sky and we do Paulo great map on top of it so we match the colors a little bit better and so everything looks nice and smooth if you know me you know that I really really like to work non-destructive so I work a lot with masks it makes life easier especially if you do something for customers because it never happens as a customer is satisfied on your first design you always have to go back change something so you really want to preserve the original files and the original material that you're working with in your files and for this it is best to be non-destructive so we're gonna work with maps today and with blending modes of the layers which is really nice okay so I'm will go ahead and delete everything except of the urchin of files there we go so we have this lady here on the horse with a not so nice background and then we have a really cool sky with yeah really cool skylight okay so let's combine this first what we gonna do is we go down here to a tease dick text tool and everything by the way everything is gonna be very smooth very easy that we do today we can you can follow it step by step there is nothing here that you can't replicate as a beginner maybe you have to watch the video several times but that doesn't matter it's always good to learn and if you make some mistakes that's the best way to learn at all so um let's go here say right and select it again I set it to black so it's a really big font so we have a nice view on the picture are we going to use so there we go okay now we need the horse again and for the horse what we want to do is let's let's hide other the font for now we want to select just the horse maybe make it ah one second let's blend in the font again and set it to maybe 50% and resize the background in a way where we think this is kind of the best match we want to use for our design let's see what's a nice look maybe like this is this good the horse coming in here and this is sticking out a little but I don't think this is maybe push it over a little bit more there we go I think that's kind of nice I think this should work okay so let's leave it like that hide the font again and select the layer with the rider let's call this rider the layer and let's call this other layer sky it's always a good idea to name your layer so you know what is what and now we're gonna go to the paintbrush tool no I'm sorry we gonna go to the selection brush tool and we're not gonna select the background we're gonna select the foreground this time because we need the rider it's more important this time so let's select this roughly make the brush a little bit smaller maybe so we go into the smaller parts there we go down here also I don't think we need this part downy actually okay now we go to refine and of course we have to help we have to help affinity photo a little bit let's go again to the selection brush tool click on refine and now we can draw let's say this is the foreground so we have to help a little bit because she has a white dress and the background is white also so of course affinity photo has a little bit of a hard time to decide which is foreground which is background so we're gonna help its by selecting down here either foreground or background there or matter to go over here how do you pronounce it say your mutter or mate or I don't know it's really having a hard time with this but we can fix this later on it's not such a problem actually we can paint it out I just want to save some time here to prepare this so this works pretty good click here then let's use this one let's go around these edges because they don't seem to be that good actually there we go okay this we have to separate this one it's important didn't actually work did it we have to do we have to see if it worked and the final selection okay let's go with this again it's a bit of back and forth on these kind of things but I think that's okay [Music] you can scroll are you consumed by a holding ctrl and using your mouse wheel so you can zoom into it and with space if you hold space you get the hand you can move around so you have a better look at what's going on so for example here we have a little bit of problem still let's hear a little bit mm-hmm not really doing a great shop at the moment I think we will do this with the paintbrush later on okay let's leave it at that for the moment okay so I click on apply and then we have a selection let's click on ctrl 0 so we see everything and then we click on mask down here mask layer good so now we click on ctrl D to deselect all this it's actually nicely selected over here let's zoom in and see it's actually not that bad actually did a good job ok ok I like it this is maybe not the best thing here but I don't think it's much of a problem we can select the mask and then take the brush and set it to black because this as you can see if you pay if you paint black on a mask it will hide everything that you paint on so let's paint in here a little bit just to hide this there we go okay and maybe had this - I don't know what this is but I don't think we need it for the look of the picture okay that's good enough I don't think we need this part down here let's check with the phone no we don't need it at all so that is not a problem um the next thing we're gonna do is we gonna duplicate the rider layer let's duplicate it and then we are going to pull it into the font actually and the reason for that is because we want to have we want to use the font as a cutout let's set the font to 100% again so we want to use the font as a cut out for our picture but we also use the rider at the same time so this gives us both I'm together and now what we can do is we click on the mask layer of this rider and click on the brush again make it a bit bigger and now we can just paint out everything that we don't need and you can see here that if I paint here the letter is still preserved maybe height um the other rider picture zoom in a little bit and then we paint over this there we go maybe bigger brush there we go let's hide everything that we don't need and it's not a problem if you paint into the into the font because we have the other picture in here so that's the cool trick about this let's hide this here there we go okay and now if we enabled the other rider again that's inside of the font we have this so this is a perfect combination so you have both now and the only thing you have to do now is take the sky and just pull it in here into the font also sorry was not the right way to do it let's see it put it behind the rider and there we go we replace the sky it looks even better than the father I prepared actually I really like it's really nice you can do one more thing and that is you select both of these layers by clicking one and then click hold ctrl and click the other and then click control Chi so it's grouped and now everything is a group and you can just move it around without a problem how we see something up here happening we don't need this but it's not a problem for us but just we just go to this mask layer of the rider and we paint this part out there you go see and this is really the benefit of being non-destructive you can change things later on if you see something that you don't like so basically we are pretty much done with this now we put a collar great over all of this and for this we're gonna do another mask yet so select the group and then click control and click the layer so this is creating a selection and then you click on the mask layer so this is creating a mask for the group but we don't need it for the group so take this mask and pull it out there we go can close the group again and press ctrl D to deselect and now we're gonna go over here to the rectangle tool and just draw a rectangle over everything there we go I already have the color grabber can we can do another one so now we just take the mask and pull it onto the rectangle and then take the rectangle and pull it over our group let's call this collar map there we go and we can set this to a nice blend mode maybe soft light you can experiment with the blend modes I always say that it's because it's really important to experiment with design decisions you can go up here to get a gradient you have here these different color choices so color is just one color but gradient is a blend mode from one color to another color and if you click these big points here you can select the color that you want to have so now we have a really a choice of what kind of thing we want to have so blue maybe try this on a bit more red okay so let's see and here with the opacity you can see how much of an effect you want to have on the colors and because this is now influencing the background and the rider you get a closer how can say fitting of the color they match better it's a really easy trick to get colors to match a little bit more softly oops that was not intended sorry control set to reset that we have actually to select both the column map and the group now let's put this in the maybe a bit higher than the middle by the way if you see this arrow here you see there's a little step this is not an error in the picture it's an error of the display I don't know there's something a little bit off infinity so if i zoom in you can see this is gone there's not really a problem it's just displayed wrong I don't know why so now we're gonna do the other font we were writing find your adventure there we go click and we can go up here to the font I select that one that was called Hittite high tide it's a demo by the way if you use fonts I will if you in the in the download file that I provide for my patreon supporters I will also have a text file that tells you where to download the fonts that I use and sometimes they are for commercial use sometimes they're just for personal use and so really check out the license to see if and how you can work with the font that you download to not get in trouble you know I also provide the download links to original photo files where again you have different kinds of copyrights mostly I use files that have a Creative Commons licensing so you should be able to use it for commercial purposes but really check that out make sure that that is possible okay I think we are basically done with our design and what you can do in the end is you can select all layers like I did right now and then I'm ctrl G so you make another group and so everything is neatly sitting in one group and you can move it around and you can resize it oh by the way I forgot to make a shadow for our Rider and the font let's do this real quick I select this group let's make it let's call it rider + font okay go to the effects layer go to the shadows and see what kind of shadow do we want to have maybe like this that's kind of nice little bit less maybe not too hard it's a soft scene so maybe have a soft shadow it's one thing by the way this is one thing I learned if you do print stuff you it's it's so easy to go too hard and the shadows always set it less shadow than you think you need because in print it's always darker than you from the shadows oh really goes soft under shadows well I think we are done it was really quick I think we had 17 minutes in so I was really cool I think it looks amazing and I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and was easy enough for you to follow and thank you again Linda for supporting my channel and if you want to support and click on the link head over to patreon and see the different benefits that you can get it's just one dollar per month for now because this is early supporter and I want to see how this works out if people actually want to have that and these benefits so thank you very much for watching and see you in the next episode good bye