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Layers are one of the most powerful features in Affinity Photo, yet for many they can be rather a tricky feature to master. In this project we’ll explore a host of essential layer skills, from compositing to tonal adjustments, masking, retouching and more. We’ve crafted a simple composite image here, replacing the rather dull sky in the original image of Lindisfarne with a more dramatic sky from another shot – several years ago the winning entry of the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition was later disqualified for similar sky editing of the famous Northumberland landmark.
Like stacked pieces of clear acetate, layers allow you to build up an image from several different elements. These could be pixel elements – like the separate sky and land blended here – but they can also be other things like tonal adjustments, which affect all the layers below. So they’re not just essential for composite images like this, they also allow you to craft images to your liking while keeping each element or adjustment independent from all the others. This means you are free to go back and fine-tune individual layers at any stage, or take your image in multiple directions.
After using a selection to isolate the original sky here, we’ll use a layer mask to hide it then drop in another image. Once done, we can then use adjustment layers to perfect the tones, a retouching layer to remove the people and also a filter layer to add a vignette to the image.
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