After doing work that required me to put together mock-ups, I came to realise that although I knew Affinity Designer, I had gaps in my knowledge with Affinity Photo. Furthermore, I wanted to understand in what contexts one would use Affinity Photo over Affinity Designer. To understand the use cases for Affinity Photo, I needed to have a well-rounded understanding of the tool.
There is a helpful YouTube channel called Affinity Revolutions where they give step by step tutorials for the Affinity suite. With these tutorials as a reference I decided to I set myself another design challenge ‘10 days of Affinity Photo’.
How to Blend Two Images: https://youtu.be/pOBtq484XUQ
My process was, I’d watch a tutorial video whilst recreating what was being created in Affinity photo. After each project the skills I had learnt was documented in DayOne. On a side note DayOne is a beautiful journalling app.
Sky Replacement: https://youtu.be/NERr2Jwd9MA
Double Exposure Effect: https://youtu.be/PjO4HWMikNY
At the end of the 10 day challenge I gained more tools for my creative tool box. I learnt photo composition, photo merging, double exposure effects, lighting, shadows and highlights, masks layer, photo editing, when to use certain effects, and power of the selection tool.
Fantasy Manipulation: https://youtu.be/6jfgHqLqBWU
Having a better understanding of the tool, I discovered where I would use Affinity Photo over Affinity Designer. The biggest difference is that Affinity Designer is a vector based program whereas Affinity Photo is a raster based program.
This means I would choose Affinity Designer if I needed to design a logo or scale a design to a large size as the vector format allows for infinite scalability. However, if I wanted to do any photo compositions, photo merges, repeating patterns, mock ups or photo edits I would use Affinity Photo.
