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What better way to send season’s greetings to friends and family than with a homemade Christmas card? In this project we’ll show you how to craft a vibrant festive effect in Affinity Photo, bringing together snowflakes, colourful bokeh and eye-catching sparkles with simple layer skills, before capping it off with a Christmas message. To speed up the process, we’ve supplied a range of images amongst the project files that we can bring together with simple layer skills. We’ve also included our furry friend for you to practise on, but of course the idea here is to use your own festive portrait. Try shooting a person or pet in a Christmas hat or carrying a present, then follow the steps to transform it into a merry masterpiece.
We’ll begin here by cutting out the subject, which is a simple task if we use a combination of Affinity Photo’s Selection Brush and the Refine command. After removing the original background we can add a new one of bold green. From here, we can blend our bokeh photos and sparkles to add depth and colour to the effect. Then comes the snow. Thanks to a handy brush tool setting, we can paint a blizzard of snow in seconds. There’s an ‘Ink Spatter’ brush tip that handily looks like flurries of snowflakes, especially if we blur it slightly with the Motion Blur filter. Finally, we can add a line of text using Affinity Photo’s text tools. These might be little-used by photographers, but they create a surprisingly powerful addition.
Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder
