How to paint on a photo, with the photo itself treated as paint materials (e.g. smudgeable, blendable etc)

[bbvv]

Hi everyone

I hope you're all keeping well.

I'm not hugely familiar with image-editing and digital painting software (audio is more my thing!) but in the past I worked with Photoshop and ArtRage on Windows.

I'm currently on a Mac and have switched over to Affinity Photo for my digital collaging and artwork. What I'd like to do is take a composite photo image and then work on it as if it was a canvas, so that I can use digital tools to smudge, paint over, scrape and blend. I'd rather do this within the Affinity suite, if possible. Would Designer be the right tool for this, or can it be done from within Photo? If neither is quite right for this, do you have any suggestions? 

Kind regards

Bee

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @bbvv.

The Paint Mixer Brush in Affinity Photo is ideal for combining the colours in an existing image.

 

[bbvv]

Thank you for the welcome. 

Great! Looking forward to trying it out 🙂 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, bbvv said:

What I'd like to do is take a composite photo image

One thing to watch for is that you can only do things like smudging if you're working on a layer marked as (Pixel) in the Layers panel. If you're collaging photos you'll often end up with layers marked (Image), and to work with their pixels you need to Rasterize them first. Easiest way to do that is to right-click on the and choose Rasterize.

Another thing to watch for: You should make sure that the photos you collage together are located on integer pixel boundaries (that is, aligned to the pixel grid of the document). The Transform panel will show you the layer's x and y coordinates, but you should also update your Affinity Photo Preferences. In the User Interface section, increase the number of decimal places displayed for pixel units. I generally recommend setting it to at least 3.