#Affinity photo free macros series
#Affinity photo free macros windows

#Affinity photo free macros series

You’ll see that the Macro panel has recorded the series of actions we’ve just carried out. Now that’s done, we can hit the Stop Recording button. This is important even if you don’t change the brightness for this image, because this Macro may be used on photos which do need this adjustment. To correct this, switch to the Adjustment panel and select Brightness / Contrast. You’ll be able to see the graduated filter effect acting ‘live’ on the image in the previous step, and you may also notice that the image is now looking a little lighter or darker than you want. At 100% opacity, the effect is pretty strong, so we’ll reduce that to 50%.Ġ3 Add a Brightness / Contrast adjustment We need to select Overlay mode from the Blend Mode menu and use a simple black-white linear gradient.īy default, the gradient will run left to right, so we need to set the angle (below) to 270 degrees to make it run from top to bottom. All the controls we need are in the Layer Effects panel (to display this, click the gear icon next to the Gradient Overlay option on the Effect menu). From now on, Affinity Photo will record everything we do to the photo.įirst, we switch to the Effect panel on the right and select Gradient Overlay. Now, we’ve opened a sample image, and with the Macro panel displayed, all we have to do now is click the red button to start recording. You can do this by opening the View > Studio menu and selecting them from the list of panels. The real purpose of this tutorial is to show how Affinity Photo’s Macro feature works, and just how easy it is to create, modify and use your own Macros.įirst of all, if you don’t see the Macro and Library panels on the left of the screen, you’ll need to display them. Both this and the Gradient Overlay effect are non-destructive – even after they’ve been applied with the Macro and you’re back in the regular Photo Persona, you can go back and adjust them if necessary. The second part is a simple Brightness / Contrast adjustment layer which is useful for fine-tuning the finished picture. By using a black-to-white gradient at the appropriate angle and setting its blend mode to overlay, this effect will darken the top of the picture and lighten the bottom. The first is a Gradient Overlay effect applied directly to the image. You can’t control the ‘height’ of the graduated area in the way you can by adjusting the position of a real filter, but that matters less often than you might think, and what our Macro lacks in sophistication it makes up for with simplicity and effectiveness. Our graduated filter effect is not terribly sophisticated. The contrast in brightness between the sky and the foreground can vary considerably from one shot to the next, so this kind of control is essential. To show how this works we’re going to create a graduated filter effect Macro, with control over both the strength of the effect and the brightness of the image.

It’s even possible to add user interaction to key steps, so that with just a couple of slider adjustments the effect can be tailored to each individual image.

Version 1.5 brings a whole host of new features, including the ability to record a series of complex image-editing actions as a Macro, which can then be saved in the program’s Macro Library for re-use on other images.

#Affinity photo free macros windows

Best of all, Affinity Photo is now available for Windows users too. It’s often difficult to balance the brightness of the sky with the ground in landscape photography, but here’s a technique for adding drama to the sky and brilliance to the foreground which we can save as a Macro to use again and again.Īffinity Photo is an extremely powerful photo editing application which can transform your images with effects, filters, layers and masking tools, and at a surprisingly low, subscription-free price.