Photo Manipulation tips

[Jacob Cameron]

Hi Guys,

My first time posting here so please go easy on me!

I'm trying to learn how to complete wallpaper/texture changes on Affinity Photo similar to the attached photo. Ideally I want to be able to change panels from dark wood to lightwood etc and plain walls to leather textures. I have been searching online but haven't had any success apart from finding 'Vanishing Point' tutorials on PhotoShop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1l4EMRC8Kc) but can't seem to find the Affinity alternative.

If anyone can give me the help needed I would be hugely appreciative, I'm also very much an Affinity beginner so please let me know if it's a complicated task!

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @Jacob Cameron

Photo manipulation of this kind is not an easy task.
In your examples the work required is made much more difficult by the underlying textures being different – for example, the wood grain is vertical in one image while it’s horizontal in the other.
This means that you would need to, in many places, somehow ‘extract’ the reflection pixels from the original image and be able to apply that reflection to a new texture which has also been ‘warped’ to fit the shape of the physical items in the image.
Doable, but not a trivial task by any means.

Some of the experts in the forums may be able to give you advice and point you towards tutorials to do parts of what you want to do but I’m guessing there’s no single workflow that will do everything you need and you will have to learn a lot of different techniques which will have to be applied very well to get something that looks right.
If I had to recommend any further action it would be to start by getting a very good idea of how all of the Selection tools and techniques work as you will need to do a lot of selecting in lots of different ways to ‘extract’ and ‘mask’ various things.

I realise that might not be what you wanted to hear but, hopefully, someone else can get you started in the right direction.

[Jacob Cameron]

On 9/21/2020 at 9:00 AM, GarryP said:

Welcome to the forums @Jacob Cameron

Photo manipulation of this kind is not an easy task.
In your examples the work required is made much more difficult by the underlying textures being different – for example, the wood grain is vertical in one image while it’s horizontal in the other.
This means that you would need to, in many places, somehow ‘extract’ the reflection pixels from the original image and be able to apply that reflection to a new texture which has also been ‘warped’ to fit the shape of the physical items in the image.
Doable, but not a trivial task by any means.

Some of the experts in the forums may be able to give you advice and point you towards tutorials to do parts of what you want to do but I’m guessing there’s no single workflow that will do everything you need and you will have to learn a lot of different techniques which will have to be applied very well to get something that looks right.
If I had to recommend any further action it would be to start by getting a very good idea of how all of the Selection tools and techniques work as you will need to do a lot of selecting in lots of different ways to ‘extract’ and ‘mask’ various things.

I realise that might not be what you wanted to hear but, hopefully, someone else can get you started in the right direction.

Dear Garry,

Thank you for your detailed response, it is much appreciated. I thought this would potentially be the case and it wouldn't be as easy as I once thought.

The photo example I gave was a complicated one but let's see it was similar like the YouTube link I shared - which shows the user applying a textured wall paper to a wall. How can I do similar finishes in Affinity? Let's say I wanted to change a flat, blank wall to a wooden wall or to a brick effect wall. How can I apply those textures and techniques on Affinity? I assume that has to be easier than the one I have originally set out?

I hope you can help,

Thank you - Jacob

 

[GarryP]

I’m really not an expert in this area so I’m not the best person to advise.
I could help with some basic techniques and tool use but you will need to use lots of different workflows to get a good-looking result, when it’s all put together, and some techniques may not be best when taken individually.
It’s very easy to do this sort of thing badly – bad photo manipulation is easy to spot and looks horrible – so you need to learn how to do it well from the start rather than some piecemeal approach I could give you which might confuse things further down the road.
There are, however, lots of experts in these forums and one or more of them will probably have some good advice and will be able to point you towards some good videos.
Note: While you are waiting for someone to help you could do a lot worse than to go through the official videos (especially those that are for selecting, blend modes, channels and masking): https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/tutorials/photo/desktop/