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B&W conversion with Affinity Photo & Silver Efex Pro 2

Good afternoon everyone, I have recently joined the forum in the last 2 months and this is my first post. I'm not new to photography but have taken a liking to Milky Way images and struggling with the editing side of things. I am seeking any help or guidance on a technique or a 'how to' guide when editing in Affinity Photo. I've uploaded an image that I recently took, it is a panoramic consisting of 2 lines of 9 images with each frame a stack of 2 images. I took the original images in RAW/NEF and the above is a converted JPG. For some reason I'm just not that happy with the edit I have done and hoping someone more experienced can offer some words of wisdom. Thanks. Tom Kit used on the night; NIKON D750 Tokina 16-28 f2.8 Taken at 16mm and f2.8 ISO 6400 13 second frames Shutter release cable to avoid any shake Manfrotto tripod with Neewer ball head

A short two frame burst at 1/4000 shutter speed, ISO 3200 and f/11 and the landing of this little female hummingbird shows more sense of motion.

Earlier this summer I took some photos of snails and modified them a little with Affinity Photo. Here are the results. With the first one I only edited the um.. "home" on the snails back a bit plus darkened the upper or more distant background using a gradient layer. The second snail got a little more dramatic change as you can see. I made the um.. "hut" green and the body a bit luminescent. Affinity products have really helped me advance as a photographer by motivating me. It's soo much more fun to take photographs, when you know you can make something fantastic (in more than one sense of the word fantastic) out of them. L.P.

Another one. The clematis flowers have all started going to seed, and some of the heads are getting quite fluffy. I'd intended to make another merge or two, but the camera battery ran out! Technical stuff: Canon EOS750D camera, Canon EFS 60mm (96mm equivalent) macro lens, f/2.8, ISO 1600 (because I forgot to set it to 100 before i started!); thirty photos. I have the camera set to save CR2 (Canon Raw) and jpeg; for quickness, I made the first merge from the jpegs straight out of camera then adjusted white balance and vibrance, saved the afphoto file, then reduced the size and ever so slightly sharpened the image. (For some reason I get an error trying to upload the first file, but this slightly compressed version works.) Although I set the white balance and vibrance to give what i thought was the same result, as you see the two pics are quite different. I think I prefer the first one, but that's just me. And maybe a more contrasting background next time?

Hello : ) I draw cartoons as a hobby. A long time ago I worked as a 3D Motion Graphics Animator in the television commercial industry. I was firmly entrenched in Adobe products along with Maya. After I retired I started drawing using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro as I couldn't afford to buy the Adobe suite. A few years ago... 5 maybe?? I discovered Affinity and immediately bought everything I could get my hands on. I love how well Designer, Photo, and Publisher all work together seamlessly. If I could have bounced back and forth between apps as I can now while I was working, my life would have been SO much easier. I'm in the process now of shifting from creating my illustrations in Photo to Designer... with help from Photo when I need it. The goofy image below is mostly Designer with help from a Photo custom brush for the broken shell pieces.

Hi Everyone, Long story short, i'm a big fan of film photography. Mentioned this to my dad and he gave me his Pentax Spotmactic he brought new over 50 years ago. All i've done with the images is load them into Affinity and use the Auto colours, tones, contrast and white balance. The photo of the dog (Naboo) i did load into the Develop persona and lower the highlights, whites and blacks. Have to say, for a 50+ year old camera i'm really happy with the results. I used Kodak Portra 400 35mm film and the scans provided to me by Asda were in JPG format, so don't leave much room for improvement. The 2nd n 3rd image are from Nottingham, the rest are from Bristol.

As an excercise today I Animated my own Paper Drawing of 40 Years (!!) ago when I was five years old 🙂 Wanted to practise animating, but also using Photo again after a long time only working with vectors. To refresh the workflow and knowledge of Photo a little bit and doing some raster work again. Long live the Affinity Photo Clone Stamp, non-destructive vector masking and the great exporter which directly exports to Spine, which is just wonderful! 😀 The video is also a seemless loop btw! 🚶‍♂️👍 drawing-83-def.mp4

Cropped a little bit the layer, duplicated it, then Levels, Curves, Exposure, Brightness adjustment and Gold Punch, Subtle Yellow/Blue and Enhaced Yellow macros by James Ritson (different levels of opacity).

A small butter-fly having a moment of rest. I clipped the image, I added Levels, Vibrance, Curve and Selective Colors adjustment only for the right wing and for the body.

Moon in the night of 13th July 2022

I made the sky a little more dramatic with a Curves adjustment. Before I duplicated the layer and I put it in Soft Light blend mode. I played with the opacity.

Just lips recoloring and some small skin retouching (with frequency separation filter). I added a Curve adjustment, and a little dodge & burn.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CfzCDhersiN/ .

Before and after a small photo manipulation.

The Bible says that only people like children can enter heaven. That means children are pure and innocent. However, the damage to children in Ukraine war is very sad and tragedy. I don't understand why so many children should be hurt by one person's atrocious decision. This photo manipulation expresses the sadness and small comfort the damaged children. Stand With Ukraine !!! "Stairs to Heaven" speed art : https://youtu.be/VlBMoJfCsdU

After playing with the TARDIS acronym, I developed a magic square style layout with the word TARDIS written bidirectionally on the outside of the square. Then using Affinity Publisher I created a table with eh letters written into each cell. I chose an illustrated caps font and saved the finished product as an SVG. This I later imported into Publisher and using an upscaled image of a wormhole from Pixabay as a background, I placed the word square with a white square behind it onto the page. I added a shadow to the white square and ran the auto levels on the background in studio link Photo persona. This was done on an A0 size document. Rotating the square slightly in an anticlockwise fashion seemed to give it a subtle artistic flair. Then using the rescale option in Publisher I created subsequently smaller versions A1, A2 and A3. The resultant landscape poster is shown in JPG form. This is A3 size. This reduced viewed version created in Photo. I would definitely have this on my wall. I have ordered the A2 poster version from Vistaprint. Looking forward to seeing the final product. This has a new logo to avoid breaching any BBC logo creation rules.

Although I work in vectors most of the time sometimes I indulge in creating pixel art. This portrait of Danny Trejo started out as an analog airbrush (with real paint on real paper) that I reworked digitally two years later, using some of the standard brushes that come with the program (among other techniques).

More whimsical nonsense. I saw a meme recently asking what if prey animals were predators and vice-versa. Naturally, I thought 'I can do better than that', and perhaps I have. (I haven't got the original to show you, so you'll have to take my word for it.) In case you can't recognise them, this is a rabbit and a wolf, but I've switched the eyes and the teeth. I think the results are a little disturbing . . . Both source images are from Pixabay. The rabbit is by David Mark, the wolf by WikiImages.

I realise I haven't posted anything here for some time, so here's something I made to amuse my musical friends on Facebook (with some success). The concept is taken from a Will Heath Robinson drawing I saw in an exhibition not long ago. I could have bought the original (if I had lots of money) but I decided to steal emulate the Master's idea instead. The original image, on the left, I found on the internet; it's not very big, and so my piece isn't either.