Search the Community

It's a bush effect. you can buy it on Affinity Store, Frankentoon - Concept Master (Nature B - 260).

Good morning folkies! A new eejit is here just for you (just you!) Meet eejitus sunflooweris - a creature who is friends with nature and all creatures great and small. Like a ray o’ sunshine However, wrong him or it’s friends and you’ll see it’s not-so-sunny side!! George P.S. Forgive the selfless self promotion, but I would LOVE to have you visit the eejits Patreon page. I upload loads o’ exclusive sketches and posts. Plus there are some FANTASTIC rewards posted out to members each and every month. Gee it a look over at www.patreon.com/eejits

Welcome to the club! Wildlife photography offers lots of such moments… one has to appreciate luck! Great take and cool rendition!

I love seeing wildlife pictures, to be brutally sincere, I don't care a bit even if they have not even been saved or edited with Affinity's, as I'm not from Affinity's staff or a forum moderator... I just like the pics... :D I bet a lot think like me.... (hence the huge amount of views -yet no posts: When I admire a landscape, I usually don't talk, just look and enjoy... ;) - in Kodiak's posts ...)

This is my first Pine Grosbeak taken using a new Jobu gimbal with my Nikon D800e + Sigma 150-600 S combo. The gimbal makes it a joy to shoot fast moving wildlife.

I agree with Kasper-V. The colours, composition and level of detail are great. It's also very nice that you have taken the time to make all of the birds different, rather than just making copies. The only thing I would add is that it might be better if the clouds tapered to a point at the bottom of one side to make it look like they are being pushed along by the wind, rather than just being static. I think that would add a little more "movement" to the image. As an extra added detail, you could try and find out whether flamingos would - or would not - fly into the wind as that could tell you which side of the clouds to taper (tapering the side into the wind). All-in-all though, nice work.

Thank you!.. I am sure anybody is capable of creating images like this..It's really just practice and technique....and a lot of patience being prepared to spend a lot of time with the details.. I am quite a fan of natural patterns/textures which helps..especially when creating brushes or vector patterns (not that they were used for the initial project!..it is usually the reverse) There are quite a few books on the subject like 'Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way it Does' by Philip Ball but I just tend to use images from Pexels or Unsplash for ideas and textures...it's free! .The 'ball plant' is actually based on a Melon image!...... It's useful to acquire an understanding of how vector files are layered and constructed. Complex objects built from the same repeating technique: a. Vector Object b. Fill (Solid or gradient) c. Overlay with textured pattern (This can be vector or raster based...a real advantage of using Affinity Apps) d.Add tints and graduations to enhance the look e. Add additional layering with transparency (and consider proximity objects for shading) f. Repeat...a lot!... I suppose that's where the patience comes in...and it does not always work first time. When vector files become too complex you can resort to file embedding to to make things easier. Especially when you can edit the embedded file without influencing the original. This is useful for adding extra shading (in the embedded file) and simplifying the layer structure as it can get a bit busy without proper organisation...

Not sure if this is open for others to post photo's or not, the description is kind of vague. But thought, "Hey, why not show a landscape taken with a long lens" Seeing as long lenses are usually used for wildlife or for portraits that require that extra punch. Anyway, this was taken at 300mm using a tripod. DTRPano by Greg Murray, on Flickr

• Thanks RamaBot! It is 1221 as of this morning… groovy! This observation was brought to me before, maybe even in a other thread and I addressed that saying: "As a photographer —and on this forum more a wildlife photographer— I use AP's inpainting, healing, and clone brushes to remove debris or anything that is not contribu- ting positively to the final rendition of a picture. Most of my post-production is done in Capture One (great RAW con- verter but not a pixel editor). For pixel editing, since I do not use ANY adobe products anymore, my chosen app is Affinity Photo… very pleased with the results so far! ;) As SrPx wisely put it: —"To each his own, but 819 views is already a deep reverence to your work.... :) Take it as silent, deep compliment... Words do not always say everything... Glad you like them!

• Thanks for your comment Aeros4 Here are some important points… Take good care to capture your subject, recording properly all its data within the DR of your sensor. Read the RAW file to fully restitute the recorded data with fist correct DRL, and then WB. These two steps should reveal most of the quality of your cap- ture… and are the base of my cooking. Now, the tricky part! One has to restore and render an organic image recor- ded by a mineral sensor. This is the seasoning part of the "cooking" where tasteful tweaks will do their magic… like micro contrast and micro saturation, mid-tones ta- ming and others. My workflow, for studio sessions, location works and wildlife, aims at the "closest to reality" look of the capture. I hope that helps! DR = Dynamic Range DRL = Dynamic Range Levels = black and white points setting. WB = White Balance

Thanks and welcome for that! …the drake, yes! Males have, generally, more spectacular plumage bird wise. Still using Capture One v10 as RAW converter for all my PP and Affinity Photo as pixel editor. I render to the strict quality that was seen. I would never manipulate a wildlife shot but I do use AP to clean debris that do not contribute to the visual quality of a take.

I presume, Aeros4, that you have experience in wildlife photography with such a comment! Yes Kodiak, but my first love is representational painting of animal and human subjects. Increasing my skills in photography, also helped me better understand the dynamics of light, (this is what I see in your work, like Mathis, you paint the light) so it was a symbiotic path forward, I am very excited with the release of the Windows version of AP. I especially like the inpainting feature. This is a major event, a company like Serif has long been needed to provide healthy competition and has changed the landscape for everyone in photography and all forms of image making. I wish them all the success their business model deserves. I look forward to seeing more of your very inspiring work. Bon chance Monsieur. Flickr......https://www.flickr.com/photos/aeros4/sets

• I presume, Aeros4, that you have experience in wildlife photography with such a comment! :) Thanks for your appreciation!

I knew of shooters trying their best to make their own life miserable but I never heard it could go so far! :( The T-stop is a measure of the light that is reaching the sensor, used in video production. The ƒ-stop, used by photographers, is a relative mea- sure of the light going through and is lens dependant. Most of the bird/wildlife shooters I have met don't even bother with that stuff as the subject and the light condi- sions have all our attention. On the other hand, I am just a photographer with no tag like birder or else… just trying to do everything the only way I know: the best I can! —"…a user-related thing"? May well and legitimately be but in my case, nothing is worth more than the ultimate rendition of the RAW data and Capture One Pro is the converter closest to ​what I was looking for since I work in the hight end of publishing/printing. Maybe someone someday will outperform my actual set of tools but Affinity RAW is not yet there I think … too close to the lightroom approach! So I understand you perfectly!

Most of the bird/wildlife shooters I have met here are 'scoping' (using an iPhone mount on a scope) and claim it is mostly because of the difference in T-stops. A scope, they say, just lets in that much more light. Is that something you have tried; any opinion? ... Admittedly, I sometimes still compare the RAW conversion from Aperture with that of AP and often prefer that of Aperture; but this could be a user-related thing.

I love drawing wildlife and have found Affinity for Windows Beta fantastic for doing this type of work. I am so impressed. I have done a lot of drawings but only now plucked up the courage to put one up here.

I love this! great detail. im working on some landscapes/nature illustrations at the minute.

Ah, a nice little touch. (I wonder if that breaks the “physical distance is irrelevant” nature of this kind of map but I don’t have any particular problem with it. It’s your map and you’ve done it your way. Nothing wrong with that.) That’s okay. I don’t really have a better suggestion. That’s fine by me. Hmm. So how do the streetcars get to stops ‘up the line’ - e.g. Triftweg - before they can get to August-bebel-platz? Or, in other words, how would someone get from Theater to Triftweg? Or, to put it in a bit of a silly way, is there a really busy streetcar factory near Junkerspark and a massive stockpile of empty streetcars near Dassau? I’m probably missing something obvious aren’t I? Not a problem. The map does what you want it to do so that’s all good. Would slightly increasing the tracking in “dessau” make a difference?

• These may just well prove my perversions to get close, trying to observe and discover more, see better… always closer. As I said before, I am not a birder. I'm just a photographer who likes to see how light is revealing (in this case, through swans) Mother Nature's "nature". A simple and commun bird under Her light turns into a sculpture, a magnificent visual pleasure, an eye candy… to me! I don't have the words in English, so I will show you what I mean… C&C welcome… as always! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

thank you so much for your insights, i used affinity designer since i like to do minimalism and vectors are perfect for that because of its nature and how clean they're. The original image is a cup of coffee that i did for myself but what i really want is to make it blend with the background so you can stare at it and wonder, kinda silly haha

Thank you Smee. Remember, all my work is printed. So what you see on screen is not what you see in print. If you ever do any of your own printing, you'll see this time and time again. This is why most apps have a "sharpen for print" option (which I don't use by the way). The image appears über sharp as a converted, scaled down JPEG in sRGB. But, I print from a full-res, uncompressed, TIFF or RAW (if no edits are needed) in Adobe RGB, not that color gamut has any bearing on sharpness, I'm just explaining my process. What I see in print with regards to edge sharpness is not the same as what is seen in this jpeg. Remember I wasn't posting this in an attempt to know why my image was so sharp. I was posting to express my excitement in ditching Adobe officially and building a workflow with Capture One Pro and Affinity Photo. Take a look at the other images I posted. Look at the sharpness. Right OOC the image is insanely sharp. Even with a negative value on clarity, the sharpness is intense. This I understand is the nature this particular lens, and it requires some work to soften. BUT, I'd rather have an image be too sharp and be able dial it back, then have one too soft and be SOL.

Hi Smee, A critique is by nature, informative. Problem isn't information, it's information based on one's own opinion and nothing more, and on top of that an opinion that wasn't asked for. Perhaps if you read her post again? " However the sharpening of the skin (or makeup) is a no go". This was assumed and incorrect. " so think twice before touching sharpness and clarity. Especially on portraits". Again, assumed and incorrect. Her entire reply to my post was a critique. Her reasoning to me seemed to be one of superior knowledge in a subjective medium where her own opinion should be taken as gospel. If I'm wrong, then so be it, wouldn't be the firs time. Also, this is not a personal dig on Jowday. I don't know her, she may be the greatest person on earth. My issue is with this phenomenon on the internet and specifically with people in the photography community who feel the compelling need to offer advice, or to "educate" others when no such advice was requested. I'm far from alone in this feeling, and it amazes me that it exists in the first place. I speak my mind, I'm brutally honest but I don't offer advice unless explicitly asked to do so.

Thanks for the interest. Biome Initiative Maintaining awareness and support for preservation of the world’s last ancient biomes. This Photo-Art was developed to encourage imaginative thinking whilst raising awareness upon the growing issues relating to climate encroachment through mass consumption. The forest background represents the last eco systems that will need to be protected, encroachment beacons have been activated but the old guardians are dying off. The compass represents 360 degrees of awareness, connectivity to like minded groups. The young woman in the space helmet represents the wish to breathe free clean air. The purple tears represent sadness as consumption overrides commercial restraint. The technical aspect represents synergy with technology and nature. As an Australian living at the door step of one of the last ancient forest biomes I feel a certain amount of shame. We are ranked as one of the world’s richest countries yet our environmental record is atrocious, we want to change that. CjF

Hello @John Rostron I have Open Camera on my phone (currently Galaxy S8) along with several other camera apps. I tend to use the stock camera mainly however after reading your post(s) I thought I'd blow the cobwebs off Open Camera and have a play with it ... It's very capable! Not far from where I live is a kind of derelict area that was going to be developed into a multi townhouse complex however 'neighbourhood power' won the battle and the area will be turned into a nature reserve (mainly for the benefit of the Koalas that are native to this neighbourhood). The light was crap this morning when playing with the app however here's some test images that are straight out of Open Camera/Galaxy S8 (no post editing deliberately so you can see what the originals look like). The desk and weeds in front of the building are .png that I converted to .jpg (as I don't know if .png are able to be uploaded to the forum). The other two are in camera .jpg. I exported all from APh at the original pixel size with a 85% quality to reduce size. The HDR mode is quite good however I found (with these images) the in app finals were a little bit lacking in contrast (to upload without some post editing).

Interesting! Thank you for your comments...It would always be difficult to directly compare two different illustrative mediums..Oddly for the 2017 Challenge I found the sketches to 'evolve' over the 31 days...tending to take on the appearance of pencil sketches like 'juicy' rather than 'ink' with greater reliance on shading/lighter tone Also, the originals were mostly completed in Sketchbook Pro which has a 'smoother result' if that is the right word for sketching with the Wacom Pen. Resorting to a sketch was the only way I could complete the challenge and not all drawings would be suitable for re-working as vectors. The drawings for 2018 Challenge, which unfortunately I haven't completed yet (6 to go)! were entirely done in AD. I tried to move away from the sketch appearance as it was not really the objective of the Inktober Challenge. These are much more detailed and 'darker' I tried to mimic or get much closer to some original paper based ink drawings...using Isograph's rather than the sketch like appearance of 2017. I am not sure I would agree concerning the vector conversions...I think it is just the nature of the medium. There is a tendency to create flat or 'glossy' images using vectors and I have been trying to get away from that and explore integrating texture into detailed vector objects...which can be quite time-consuming and can have mixed results. That said I really like the method shown recently on Affinity Spotlight for Christi du Toit here Here are a couple of others I have not converted Inktober 2017 Word Prompt 01:Swift Inktober 2017 Word Prompt 30:Found