Up close and Persona

Like any great photo-editing app, Affinity Photo offers scores of powerful tools to enhance images. One of the app’s best features, however, is how it sorts all of them into easy-to-understand groups. The Persona feature lets you easily switch among task-specific toolboxes that are focused on the different ways you might edit a photo.

You pick a Persona by selecting it from the Affinity Photo menu or clicking the corresponding icon at the top of the app window. Here’s a look at what each of the Personas let you do, and how they prevent option overload.

This is Affinity Photo’s default Persona (unless you open a RAW image). It offers the most common editing tools, like cutting, painting, erasing and highlighting. One of our favourites here is Inpaint, which lets you easily remove distracting objects or people (the app smartly and seamlessly fills in the deleted areas). Inpaint is also useful for repairing damaged physical photos that you’ve scanned.

This is the best place to start if you’re working with a RAW photo, as it lets you adjust exposure, contrast, colour saturation and similar settings to create a base image to work with. It’s also the mode you use to remove small blemishes from a photo.

Here you’ll find a host of tools that take advantage of Affinity Photo’s powerful warping engine. Use it to alter facial features, create bizarre landscapes or make some scenes more dynamic. With a few clicks, you can make a photo seem hyperrealistic. Who knew huge crashing waves could be even more dramatic than they already are?

This one’s ideal for working with high dynamic range (HDR) photos: images created by combining multiple shots taken with different exposure settings into one image. In theory, both the foreground and background of a HDR photo should be perfectly exposed and balanced. But when they’re not, Affinity Photo helps you get the settings just right with a wide selection of presets.

While you can export an image from within any Persona, the Export Persona has a special set of tools for this task. Designate objects, object groups and layers as slices, and then export each slice in multiple sizes, resolutions and formats. You can also save your export settings as presets for future projects. These features are particularly handy if you work with a client who requires images, or parts of images, to be delivered in multiple formats and sizes.

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