Affinity Beginner's Guide — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] Today I'm going to show you how to get started with Affinity, which is a image editing software slash graphic design tool slash text composition sort of tool, which is a great alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, all packaged together in one software.

[00:16] So basically the workflow inside this specific program is going to be very smooth because you can just sort of swap between the three different modes, and it's just super easy to work with. The first thing is, if you do not have this downloaded already, I will leave a link in

[00:29] the description. This is not sponsored. This is just a great tool. And when you open it for the first time, this is the screen you're going to get viewed with, which is just sort of what you want to create for the screen, what you want to get started with. And the

[00:42] first thing we can do in here is, of course, we could choose some of the basic templates that it has to offer, which is up here. We do also have some tutorials if you want to get started with this sort of program. But if you want to create a particular page, we

[00:54] have a couple of different options. The first one, as you can see, is you actually have a plus icon up in the top right corner. And I do want to point out here that this is actually a separate screen. If I were to drag it here, you can see that it is actually a window on

[01:08] top of the actual program, which is in the background. So you could also just close this, and then you just have, you know, the program where you can just go in and say, well, to create a new document or whatever. But inside this black screen here, we can choose different

[01:21] options. We do have the plus icon. If you click this one, you can see that you have all the different modes that you can you know if you want to choose a different format that you want to start creating in but one decide here we have a couple of different document settings so

[01:35] if you want to increase the dpi to let's say you're not creating for screens but maybe you want to create for logo design or you know printed papers and brochures then you might want to

[01:47] increase this one because 72 is typically for screens your digital outputs so to speak but in In this case, since we're doing 1080 pixels for a PC monitor, 72 is quite okay.

[02:02] But otherwise, you can change this to 150 or 300, depending on how much you want to increase it. We can also go down and pick a transgender background. That's also kind of neat, because typically I don't like to have a white background,

[02:16] because that means there's something inside my project. So if partial of my thumbnail isn't covered up by something, then I'm going to get a white color. So I'm just going to have the transparent background enabled.

[02:28] You can also enable arc boards if you want to. We do also have multi-page. This is probably more for InDesign or, in this case, layout mode where you want to create brochures.

[02:40] So you can create multi-pages, margins, bleed, which is used to sort of decide where the text is going to start and what is going to be shown inside the final version of your brochure. But you can enable different options in here and then you can just sort of create presets.

[02:55] So in this case here, I might want to create a preset. So I might say 1920 by 1080 transparent. Just so I know that this is a transparent background.

[03:08] And then I can say create preset. And once I do that and go back inside the home area that we were in before, you can see that now we have a preset which is set to 1920 by 1080.

[03:20] And now you will actually notice that it is set in portrait mode. So we do have a toggle over here for landscape and portrait. So if I want to have it for swings, I can swap to landscape. If not, I can go back to portrait. So we can go back and forth here.

[03:33] So once we have this particular template, you can also see that we have our My Templates tab over here, where we can actually go ahead and create new folders for creating templates and just setting up different categories of templates that we've created.

[03:48] You can also favorite something. So if I go back inside home here and say I want to create a new one, we have all these different presets here. I can favorite, for example, the 1920 by 1080, maybe 4K is something I use quite often.

[04:02] Maybe I want to use a full format in some cases. So I favorite those by clicking the little favorite icon in the top right corner, which is a star. Then if I go back again, you can see that now we have these three inside favorites.

[04:16] So we don't have to look for them every single time. which just makes it a little bit easier for finding whatever preset we want to have really fast once we start out. We can also go back to the site here and just sort of pick our preset So if you do that you can see we opened it up here Now I forgot to click landscape mode so how do we get back again Well in order to get back inside this splash screen

[04:39] you go up to the top left corner and click on the um affinity icon which is called home. You click it and then you can see we open this back up again. So I'm just going to go ahead and swap to landscape mode and then click it again and now we have a landscape mode format. What you can also

[04:56] see here is that once we actually get started in fact the actual program we do actually have two different at least i do have two different documents here i have the new one that i created which is still on titles and i have the old one which is the portrait mode which is also on titles

[05:13] i can actually close this one down by clicking the close document and then we just have one open so once we actually enter the software we have a couple of different things to just want to know about once we get started here because it is slightly different than version 2

[05:27] which is the previous Affinity products that we've been using. You can actually see I have Affinity 2 down here at the bottom. Inside the top here right next to our home button we do have three different default modes that are free

[05:41] then you have something called Canva AI which is the premium version for this particular software here. So essentially you can do Photoshop, Illustrator and And InDesign, if we talk about Adobe products, alternatives, inside this one software, entirely free.

[05:59] And if you want to have AI tools, then there's premium. And the next important thing we have to talk about are the different workspaces, because this is such a great tool, because you can just swap between the different workspace modes immediately inside one software,

[06:15] which is something we've sort of been looking for for many years now, because this is something that we wanted to have, but we just couldn't have it yet until now. And essentially, Pixel up here at the top, if you go right next to the Home button,

[06:29] you can see this is the one that is actually highlighted from the beginning, is basically Photoshop. And then if we go to the left here, which is Vector, then we go into Illustrator, and then if we go to Layout, we go to InDesign.

[06:43] I'm doing this because I'm trying to compare to if people come from Adobe products, what this might be considered, you know, similar to. If you go back inside Photoshop mode or Pixel mode, I'm going to start using Adobe terms now,

[06:57] then I can drag in a photo from a folder and just drop it here. If I scroll back out by holding Control and then the scroll wheel, or Command if you're on Mac, I guess, and then you just sort of pick the image and just sort of scale it down.

[07:11] If I hold down Control, you can see that we scale from the center. If I hold Shift, You can see that we just sort of scale from a corner in a warp mode. And I'm just going to go ahead and hold down control. So we scale it down to something like this.

[07:25] Just so we have some, so we can actually see what is going on here. Once we have a photo in here, we can actually get started on changing things, working with different tools inside the software. But before we do that, I do want to show off one more thing,

[07:39] which is up here next to our workspaces. and that is actually that we have something called Studio Manager. If I click this one, you can see that we get a couple of different options here. So if you do not have the premium version right now, maybe you want to get it later,

[07:54] so, you know, essentially you would not be using the premium feature, you can actually hide it. If I toggle it off, you can see we no longer have Canva AI. It's just sort of gone from up inside these different options up here.

[08:06] We can also toggle on color grading, if that is the mode that you might be using quite often. So essentially, if you want to change the look and the coloring of the image, you can toggle this on.

[08:18] And once you click that, the software is just sort of going to give you all the tools that are best for that sort of task. And again, you can also, in your own way, customize this by creating a studio at the bottom here.

[08:30] So let's say you do a lot of color grading and maybe vector art, like just those two things. you can go inside create studio and if you put together your own little workspace here because

[08:42] you can do that by dragging in your windows and removing tools from the sidebar different things then you can go in here and just sort of name it something and then say clone from something else

[08:54] and then you want to choose a color an icon a small description what is this workspace exactly and then you can create it. And in that sort of way we now have a workspace that we have created ourselves and customized But that a little bit too much for now We just going to go ahead and cancel here

[09:12] There is one more thing I want to show up here, which is something called Vector Mode or Vector View Mode and Pixel View Mode. Let's go ahead and drag this image to the side for a second. This is actually something that you do need to know about as well, depending on what kind of work you might want to do inside this software.

[09:27] So to better demonstrate this, let me go ahead and draw a square using the rectangle tool that we have down here. I'm just going to draw a square. And I set the border width to 1.3 beforehand, just so you can sort of see what exactly this does.

[09:41] It could be something else as well, doesn't really matter. But if I were to go ahead and zoom in to the border here, I'm going to go way in, because I want to go all the way in and see all the small fine details.

[09:55] you can actually see that the border looks a little bit weird. It's kind of like there's some transparency going on here. It isn't one pixel line, it's just sort of bleeding out a

[10:07] little bit. If I go to vector view mode, you can see that it sharpens. If I go back to pixel, you can see that it looks like this. And essentially, vector view mode and pixel view mode

[10:20] is for working in different types of projects. So let's say you're doing logo design for example. Well in that case you might want to have very fine sort of mathematically calculated lines

[10:33] inside your project because in order to infinitely zoom in on something because this is very tiny, I'm zooming all the way so we can see pixels right now, then if you go into a pixel view mode,

[10:46] it is basically just calculating this based on pixels. It's not really calculating anything. It's just sort of drawing, and just like any image you would take with your phone or something, if you zoom in far enough, it's going to start getting pixelated, right?

[11:00] Because there's only so many pixels inside your phone. But when we work with vector formats, it sharpens things because we work in mathematics. So it's basically calculating how the lines are going to look,

[11:12] which means that when you zoom in, it is going to recalculate how the line needs to look like again and again and again, because you zoom in, and it's going to keep maintaining a crisp sort of look to it.

[11:25] Again, if I take another tool here, like this one, just to sort of draw a shape, you can also see if I go back to pixel mode, oh, okay, well that looks very pixelated, and again, that's because I'm zoomed way in, but if I zoom out here,

[11:38] and also because I'm in 72 dots per inch mode right now, then you can see that, well, that's not too bad, but, oh, then we zoom in and it looks really bad. And that's because we're not in vector mode.

[11:50] So typically, if you want to create logos and such, you want to start probably creating inside vector mode and then to see how this is going to be outputted inside a monitor or, you know, once you export this,

[12:03] well, okay, so how is this going to look like when exporting? Okay, so it's going to look like that. With that, let's go ahead and just take a look at this photo over here. So, essentially, if I want to start image manipulation, that would be inside Pixel Mode,

[12:19] which I'm inside right now. And, you know, we can see the different layers over here, the size, so if you go to the right side over here, and again, you can change these as much as you want, so if you don't want to have the navigation at the bottom here, you can just move it up to the top here, and then it's at the top there.

[12:32] It doesn't really matter. You can move around and do different things and have this look exactly like you want it to inside the program. But let's go back to layers for a second and talk a bit about the different layers.

[12:46] So right now we have one layer, which is the photo I dragged in. You can also go ahead and go to the bottom here and create a new pixel layer, which is essentially just a new empty layer inside this program. So if I click this one, you can see, oh, right now there's an empty layer.

[12:59] And I can start drawing it. And if I draw, I don't actually draw on top of the image, I draw on top of the layer, which means that if I untoggle it here, I'm not actually ruining the image, which is non-destructive workflow.

[13:14] And that is one of the reasons why a program like this or Photoshop or something similar is very good for doing professional work, because you don't destroy the image as you're actually changing it. Same thing with the coconut, I can untoggle it here to hide and see it.

[13:28] We can also lock it by going to the lock icon up here and then you can see we get a small lock icon That basically means that now I can actually I can actually choose the photo and drag it or do anything to it It just sort of locked in place and I can touch it And if you want to delete a layer you can click it

[13:47] Then you can go down to the Delete Trash Bin Remove Layer icon, click it, and then you can see it goes away. You can also group layers together and so forth. So there's many different tools inside the layer panel. But essentially, you just sort of want to make sure that you don't destroy the original image

[14:03] as much as possible when working inside a program like this or doing any sort of professional work because, uh-oh, you have to change the original image slightly or maybe replace it entirely, and now you've ruined top of it.

[14:15] But now we're not going to continue talking about these different modes down here because that is more for a separate lesson, but on the left side over here, you can actually see that we have many different tools. And these will actually change depending on which mode we're inside right now.

[14:29] So if I'm inside vector mode, then you can see we have vector-based tools. If I go inside Pixel Mode, then you have Photoshop-based tools, basic image manipulation tools, right? So what we can do is we can choose these.

[14:42] We can do something. I can select things. Many different tools. And these do take a little while to get to know because it is sort of a small learning curve to just know what exactly each tool does. You know, there's many different tools we can use in here to sort of tweak our photos and make them look like we want them to.

[15:00] But let's go ahead and go inside color grading, which I did actually toggle on inside our little studio selector here. If we go to color grading, you can see that now we're inside color grading mode, and I can go ahead and adjust the brightness, you know, I can adjust the contrast to make things

[15:16] pop a little bit more when it comes to the differences between lights and shadows, highlights, shadows, we can also tweak those, hue we can change to change how that looks like. If you want to reset something, you just click these little reset adjustment symbols on the

[15:31] right side. So if I click those, you can see it get reset. We can also adjust the white balancing so things don't look exactly like they need to. Let's say a white wall doesn't look white, then you can adjust this in here to make it look how you want it to.

[15:44] We can also go and adjust the sharpness. So you can see we can sharpen the image. I don't know how clear it is inside, but if I do this, you can see that it gets sharper and then it gets unsharper. There's also a Clarify mode to bring out some of the details.

[15:56] You can see the coconut here, the details inside the center. You know, it's super unclear, clear right now, if I just buff it up. You can actually see all the small details. Then you can also sharpen to make it even more sharper and clearer.

[16:09] Now it sort of gets a little bit too much, but you can just sort of see what I mean, right? So we adjust a little bit, make it a little bit sharper. And then once I'm done with the photo, I can just sort of drag it to the side, have it over here at the side, go back to let's say Layout mode, which is for creating text.

[16:25] So the highlight, maybe I want to create some text with this area, right click, insert filler text, because I don't have some actual text right now. Settings just sort of increase the size so it's a little bit larger,

[16:37] and then we just kind of, you know, continue working from here, go back inside Pixel mode. So as you can see, we can do many different things in here. things in here. I'm going to stop going off-road for a second because this video doesn't need to be longer than it has to. And I want to share one more thing with you, which is the fact that

[16:53] a lot of people experience crashes with this software because it does not handle hardware acceleration as good as other software out there. So what you can also do if you experience a lot

[17:07] of lagging, let's say your mouse cursor all of a sudden starts to get really slow because your computer is like thinking really hard go to edit at the top here go down to settings go down to performance and then toggle off enable open cl compute acceleration that will at least in my case

[17:24] stop it from crashing that is sort of like the final tip here for people who might experience the same thing but in this case here it just sort of makes things a little bit more smooth and it

[17:36] doesn't over try and get slow and different things, right? So this is essentially an introduction to this particular software, how to get started,

[17:48] how to input things, how to start a new project. And with that said, let's go ahead and end it here. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next time.

[18:06] Thank you.