Andy05

Well, it seems like you didn't want our help at all. At least you either simply ignored what we said (which would be just rude), or you can't understand such simple instructions which we offered. I'm not the one to judge which alternative is true here.

You posted the brush panel. So what? That was as meaningful as posting an image of the Empire State building or a tree in a forest. You simply ignored our tips. Well, that's not our problem, isn't it? Seriously, install a brush pack, and use it. That's no rocket science!

I was about to write the same in my last reply as I started to think you'd try to troll us. @R C-R's and my instructions couldn't have been easier or more clear, really.

I don't know what you can see in your affinity apps. All we tried to explain is, that you need to import some hair brushes (special brush forms/setup which are used for painting realistic looking hair) in order to paint hair properly. There are tons of inbuilt brushes, but neither of them is any good for painting hair. Import a hair brush set, pick one of those imported brushes, paint hair with that. Simple as that.

Please, read what @R C-R and I wrote: There are no inbuilt hair brushes. Let me be more precise, there are no inbuilt brushes for painting in hair. (As some of the inbuilt brushes mimic analog hair brushes.)

What Old Bruce said. If you'd add one line to the first page's bottom, that'd be an orphan, which you try to avoid... So, the app is doing the right thing and moves the line/paragraph to the next page.

Nope. Neither do they work on image layers. Two of the most common mistakes done when the plugin won't work. I can confirm, it works without issues under APhoto 1.10.4.1198 (Windows 10) on a RGB pixel layer.

There aren't any inbuilt hair brushes in Affinity photo (unless you use a small dot brush and start painting in single hairs). Try to import a brush set like the one I've mentioned in one of my previous posts. Select one of the brushes from that imported category and paint in hair with them.

In addition to what @R C-R already said or asked, I used a graphic tablet for painting in the hair. I don't know how good that'd work with a mouse. If you have to do similar tasks pretty often, it might be worth buying one. Even a cheap or used one from one of the known brands, like HUION will do the job so much better than the best gaming mouse. It'll be a game changer for a lot of design/graphic tasks in the Affinity apps, like refining a mask, soft blending of objects and suchlike.

Yes, I just painted the hair in. There are special hair brushes available (some might even be for free). A lot of the Photoshop brushes will work pretty well in Affinity. I haven't tested these, but they look pretty close to those I'm using. I just sample some altering colours (darks/mids/highlights) of the hair and paint in some hairs to fill the areas and also around the edges as that's usually better looking as the masking on difficult backgrounds. The different colours, which have been sampled from the original hair, make it look natural.

I'd just paint in manually some hair to cover those spots. Like in this "quick'n'dirty" attempt, I added just a couple of brush strokes:

True. And it's even worse, if you have multiple options (or you can't decide easily) for finding the correct spot picking the mid tones. In Photoshop, you just need one click per try. With this workaround, you'd have to go through all the curves manipulation process for mids for each try...

Sure, very professional "journalistic research"... *sigh* What version did they test "in 2021"? They moan about one couldn't save the workspace (which one can for quite a while now) and that there's no lens based correction (which there is in RAW development for ages, probably since the first release?). It's not that I want to argue about their review in general, but if you test 2021, take the latest version, not one from 2020.

In addition to what was said already, I'd like to mention that images like the one you've shown here (geometric shapes and solid colours) might be better saved as PNG. Neither quality loss nor artifacts due to compression, but still maintaining a small file size—probably even smaller than JPG.

Found some (in exchange for data/login via facebook, google etc.): https://de.depositphotos.com/free-images.html Sorry for posting the German link, but the page re-directs me to this language version all the time and I can't be bothered to change my browser's settings just for this.

Ah, ok. I thought you'd be against any possibility of assigning shortcuts to the numpad, just because some people might not have any. But also for loading/saving .afshortcuts, I don't see a big problem here as shortcuts assigned to the numpad could simply be ignored on systems without.

What? YOU (or anyone else without a numpad) can just ignore the option to assign—personal—shortcuts to them. What's your problem? No keypad, no extra options to assign (more) shortcuts. It's not like you have to assign anything to them as that's obviously not possible, if you don't have any keypad. But if someone feels the urge to assign something weird e. g. "numpad 5" to "save as", why would you need that option too? It's a personal taste, but it'd give those who have a keypad some more keys to assign convenient and quickly accessible shortcuts to. Nothing more, nothing less. I, for one, would love to assign brush size +/- to the +/- keys on my numpad. BTW, speaking of horrible shortcuts, the current standard setup for changing the brush size is... inconvenient... to say the least for people with a non-English keyboard layout (like here, with a German layout).

Uhm. That doesn't make any sense to me. I'd go exactly the other way round to make sure that my edits are done in the best quality possible rather than scaled by an AI's guessing. First enlarge, then edit. Edit: Unless they refer to their own products' edits. Of course, then it's denoise first, then resize.

That's exactly what I'd have done in order to make this illustration "work".

Yes. But unlike Topaz sharpen AI and denoise AI, the Topaz gigapixel plugin is not compatible with affinity photo (it won't show up in the filters' list at all).

Green screen portraits.

The shadows below and on the deer are still a bit off, which might not be too obvious, but that's something a viewer of the image will notice unknowingly. See the (harsh) shadows of the trees in the background. That's how the shadows are cast on that image. A bright light source is coming from the left, casting pretty strong and defined shadows. E. g. he shadow of the antlers on the forehead are revealing a different (read: wrong) angle.

What are the settings for he exposure adjustment layer? They need to be (quite a bit) in the negative area in order to make it work for this image. If it's too low (or zero even), it can't work. Before inverting the layer, the whole image should be very, very dark (focus solely on the hair's colour, which needs to be darkened, ignore the other areas).

In addition to the suggestion already made in this thread. If you add an exposure filter, it's already containing a mask on its own. So, I'd create an -X exposure filter, invert its mask (-> now, having no effect on the image at all as it's all masked out), then "paint in the exposure" onto the mask with a soft brush in white until I get the result I need. Painting with white on the exposure layer will reveal only these painted-in parts of the adjustment.

You might want to check out Fontbase, which is a really good tool, even in its free version. Works well together with Affinity apps, you can enable and disable fonts on-the-fly in Fontbase, the apps will recognise this. Also, it's possible to live observe font (sub)folders, develop font groups for projects etc. The downside is that you might have to sort your fonts once in various subfolders (Serif, Sans-Serif, Decorative, Script and so on).