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When it comes to editing portraits, a few simple techniques can take your image in all kinds of interesting directions. In this project we’ll explore a range of edits you can make in Affinity Photo. Most of these are carried out in the Develop Persona, which is the workspace for Raw editing. This is the place to process and enhance your Raw photos before taking them into the main Photo Persona for further editing, if necessary.
Straight-out-of-camera Raw files tend to look a little flat and dull. But this is because Raw is meant to give you the best possible starting point for editing. Raws contain greater dynamic range and colour data than jpegs, and we can use the tools in the Affinity Photo Develop Persona in order to harness all this extra data.
This is why, as a rule of thumb, it’s best to take a Raw image as far as we can using Raw development tools, and only then open it into the Photo Persona for any further editing required. While the Raw tools in the Develop Persona lack the depth of features in the Photo Persona, there are still several powerful features, such as Curves and Overlays. We can use these to enhance our portrait, make local adjustments and to boost the colours.
We’ve supplied a portrait for you to try out, but it’s better to use your own, and it needn’t even be a Raw file. You can edit JPEGs or TIFF files in the Develop Persona too, just click the icon at top left to open any image into Affinity Photo’s Raw workspace.
Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder
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