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Hello, I am a hobby macro photographer, but by trade I'm a writer dabbling in graphic design. I've done hundreds of brochures, flyers, packaging, marketing materials but nothing that connotes original art. So this is a big step for me. I took one of the Affinity Designer courses and it really made a huge impact on my confidence to do design work, but I'm stuck at start already!  I want to use this photo (or something similar to it from my set of macro shots) as a hero image for a web site and make it a composite image of the  photo plus vector art and text. I want to keep the butterfly and tongue, but draw in the purple sage, or it can even be simple flowers.  I'm really just experimenting right now and my color palette will be more muted than the vibrancy in the shots. But I'm curious if I need to do any of the pixel work I need to do on the photos in a photo program like Affinity Photo or Photoshop. The selection tool for example, seems to work nicely at selecting around the butterfly but it doesn't delete the pixels on the image, I have to erase it inside the selection.  I started playing with it in Affinity Designer to see how much photo work I can do (like deleting pixels) but I'm still unsure how much I can work on a photo in Affinity Designer to achieve a mixture of vector and raster art. As a newbie, I would love some ideas on how to approach this project. For example: vector flowers, I"m assuming should be done in multiple layers around the tongue and other parts of the butterfly, but sit accordingly above or below the photo in layer panel.  I do have a tagline that will go on this as well and these images are not full 16:9, they're from an old export, so they will resize and i'll have lots of blank space for text. Any input on how to approach to get me started, I would appreciate!

IMG_9703-2-2.jpg

IMG_9705-2-2.jpg

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Designer is certainly capable of doing the composition that you describe.

When you import your photo it will show as an Image in the layers panel.

Many pixel based operations will require you to Rasterize the image first, so that it shows as Pixels in the Layer Panel.

Selection brush to isolate the elements you want to keep then Refine to tidy things up.

There are of course additional features in Photo that you may appreciate such as the Liquify Persona, or Focus Stacking, but that all depends on what you want to achieve.

I'd suggest playing in Designer, then if you need more, try the 7 day trial of Photo.

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Actually, although you could probably do it in Designer, I think you would be better off with Photo. If you are going to invest a lot of time learning, learn Photo.

It is better working with selections, but more importantly for you, it would be much better for your hobby as a macro photographer. You can use stacking to improve the focus depth.

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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Thanks for these thoughts! They're helping already. 

That was the first hurdle, i needed to rasterize the image so I can use the selection tool and delete. I overlooked having converting my image to raster layer.  Thanks for that! 

I never really did photo stacking in macro, though I know how to do it. I'm a handheld gal. I breakout the tripod 2x year.  But I won't lie and say Affinity Photo does not look attractive to me. I absolutely abhor working in PS and avoid it whenever I can. I don't know what it is, but it's not fun working PS. It's fun working in Affinity Designer. And yes, I understand they are different tools. I think it's just the seemless way Affinity Designer works, and the UI is so nice compared to Adobe products. Plus faster too! 

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5 hours ago, Wild Dingo said:

I think it's just the seemless way Affinity Designer works, and the UI is so nice compared to Adobe products. Plus faster too! 

There is very little difference between Affinity Designer and Photo when working, so Photo should seem the same to you. In fact, it is even more seamless than Designer because you don't have to keep swapping between the Draw Persona and the Pixel Persona. Which is the one thing I find mildly irritating !

What is more, you can load Photo files directly into Designer and vice versa. 

It's just that for photography (my hobby and trade for decades) Photo has so many more features. Like much better pixel selection tools, cloning, inpainting and healing, filters, the colour replacement brush and so on. Not to mention Unsharp mask. It has nearly all of Designer's drawing tools too. The only thing Photo really lacks is artboards, vector brushes and text on a path, but if you already have Designer . . . 

You could always download a free trial and try it.

Still, it's your money. I like both programs, so it's only a suggestion based on my experience of photography and using both programs day to day.

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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Hey Toltec, thanks for the info! I appreciate it. Right now, the only reason I'm not moving to Affinity Photo is because I'm just focusing on my design skills right now. For the moment I put photography on a back burner (I know, blasphemer!) and just process my stuff in Lightroom. I haven't been truly using PS for a long time, just recently broke it out to see if I needed it (experimented with the features etc.). I've been an Adobe user since the 1990's working in PS, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, InDesign, and even Quark (yes I'm that old). I hadn't worked in either illustrator or PS for years (10+ years unwanted, unexpected sabbatical), so when I came back to those programs, well, things were very different from how I remembered. Yes everything is similar, I don't disagree. It's more about the UI and the ease of use. Like the move tool for example, it's tricky in PS if you're working on tiny shapes made in vector then have a transparent background. I swear I had to zoom in 10,000% (ok, I exaggerate) just to get the move tool to click the actual pixel and pick up the item. That's what I mean. And though I haven't really tried Photo, from Designer, I am guessing that UI experience will be more pleasant. It was just so nice to come back to the work market and find a sweet, clean design and possible photo solution for my work needs. This info is helpful and I have no doubt I'll switch later! Thanks! 

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