Distortion on Affinity Photo

[MHUnity]

Hello
I am unfortunately not a professional designer so my lack of knowledge of the correct name for things is causing my some issues in looking up a solution myself, I hope someone here can give me some pointers.


What I'm trying to achieve.

I have a photo, I want to shrink the central band of the photo so that the sun / beach huts combine into the central 33% of the photo, to crop the upper sky out and use as a letterbox shaped final banner. 

Copy and pasting obviously doesn't cut it, as the background should be seemless. Please see attached photo rough guide. I want to condense the central "belt" of the photo. Pulling down the upper parts and maintaining the later parts as is. 

What I've Tried

I have over the years previously used Paint Shop Pro --> Mesh warp (and similar mesh warping tools) to do what I want to do, but in Affinity Photo the mesh warp dosn't appear to be quite what I need. The "Liquify Persona" seems to do (sort of) what I need but it does it in far too unlinear a way.

My other idea was to make multiple layers, so a layer for the sun, for the foreground and for the sky and then resize each layer by hand and then put these all back together. This feels inefficient and time consuming.

My Questions:
 

 -- What is the best approach to do this in Affinity Photo?

 -- Is this what Mesh warp can do for me? If so, how? I don't see any mesh when I select the tool (even after promoting the background layer)

 -- If Liquify Persona --> Push is the way to do it,  how do I make this push uniformly across the horizontal of the photo?

May thanks for your help, and sorry for the newbiness of my query, as I say, once I know what I'm trying to achieve is called I can then research it a bit more specifically.

( original image is 5k x 3.5k px )

[carl123]

Not sure if I fully understand your requirements or your diagram but do you mean something like the attached

 

 

 

[pixelrain]

Think it would be much more simple to just cut the desired portion and sun on new layers, then rescale it, on the background you could use a large inpainting brush to fill the cut or just do a gradient between color samples from top and bottom. Then you place the sun where you want it and play with blends, inpainting tool or clone tool brush.

 

Mesh warp tool starts with a whole layer selection with 4 points, double click anywhere in it to add more points.

Edited February 22, 2017 by pixelrain

[MHUnity]

Not sure if I fully understand your requirements or your diagram but do you mean something like the attached

Yes that's what I'm trying to aim for.

 

Mesh warp the way to go?

[MHUnity]

 

Mesh warp tool starts with a whole layer selection with 4 points, double click anywhere in it to add more points.

I hadn't realised that, thanks Pixelrain. I can now play with the mesh-warp more properly.  :-)

[carl123]

I did not use Mesh Warp, it was a lot simpler than that

 

I'll do a few diagrams shortly

[carl123]

The attached pictures should explain what I did. 

 

If there is anything you do not understand please post back

[MHUnity]

The attached pictures should explain what I did. 

 

If there is anything you do not understand please post back

Ahhhh, many thanks for the guide. Really useful seeing the step by step.

 

Cheers

Martin