Saara

Euka, are you aware that you can use the recolour adjustment layer in Affinity Photo to recolour elements in your designs? Adjustment layers in Affinity Photo are non-destructive too, so if change your mind about the colour you can go back into that layer adjustment and pick a different colour or delete the adjustment completely.

@Cassel I think I'm the only one from APC. As you've seen, I have a post over there with my projects from this bootcamp which might inspire some to create a few scrapbook pages, but I have a feeling they'll just find their own way of putting them together. Like myself, their main focus is to enhance their photo manipulation skills.

I deviated a little but I think this is similar enough to be recognised as the 5th and final project of this Bootcamp. It features another Affinity Photo Creatives challenge composition. This one was "Animal Show" and my image was inspired by a rather weird conversation we had during one of our weekly Zoom calls. I picked rather muted colours and kept the design quite simple as I wanted the image to stand out. @Cassel I've really enjoyed taking part in this bootcamp so thank you for joining APC and letting us know about it. 😊

So, the layer with the "contrast negate" blend mode (the one that now looks like a burgundy colour due to that blend mode) is picking up on the drop shadow from the layer beneath. This is standard behaviour for blend modes. If you place a highly textured layer under an object with this blend mode, you'll see the texture through it.

I'm not too familiar with the contrast negate blend mode as I've never used it, but blend modes in general cause a layer to react with those below it. When I next have my laptop on I'll see if I can recreate what you have here and try to work out why. If you want to change the colour of an element on your page, though, the easiest way to do it is via a recolour adjustment.

Thank you. There's no way I could create those compositions using destructive editing as I would have to start over so many times and they take me long enough as it is. I do really enjoy doing them though.

Hmmmm. I've never had any issues with the colour picker. "D" is the shortcut key to revert to black and white. Doing this shouldn't affect anthing in your design, but if you click somewhere in the working area outside of the canvas first that will ensure you have nothing selected.

Julie, if you haven't rasterised your photos then you can simply add a stroke to them. Select one of the photos and you should see the fill and stroke options in the context tool bar. If you have rasterised them, you can add an outline via the FX panel.

My project for today once again features one of my photo composites. It's the one I use for my profile picture and was created for one of our monthly challenges at Affinity Photo Creatives. I also wrote the little poem that goes with the image.

I just find it a better way of working. Even for something as simple as trimming a paper element down to size. If you make a selection the size you want and then delete everything outside of that selection, it's fixed at that size. If you decide later that you think it would fit with your layout better if it was a bit bigger, you can't resize it without risking pixelation, so you'd have to delete the layer and start again. If you used a mask (leaving the paper layer covering the entire canvas), selecting the mask layer and then clicking on the mask icon on that layer whilst holding down CTRL will select the mask and give you the handles to move and / or resize it. If you try this using a heavily patterned paper, you'll see quite clearly that it doesn't move or resize the actual paper layer, but rather move the mask around over the top of it.

It's the other way around for me. Coming into this from photo compositing creative space, my instinct is to work as non-destructively as possible.

@Cassel I've just watched today's video and I'm curious as to why you use the eraser brush to create the edging for the black paper? A much better way to do this would be to use a mask as it's non-destructive - the eraser brush actually deletes pixels whereas masks, as the name suggests, cover up the bits you don't want to show. That way, if you get further into your project and either notice you've done something wrong or you decide you don't like that pinking shears edge and would prefer something different, you can change it without having to delete that layer and start all over again. I know that actual, physical scrapbooking is always going to be destructive when cutting into paper, but with digital scrapbooking it doesn't have to be.

This is my page for Project 3. As we had to use 3 photos this time, I used actual photos rather than one of my Affinity Photo creations. Up until I was 8 my dad's mum and stepfather lived near Weston-Super-Mare (which is in Somerset in the south west of England) and we spent the first 2 weeks of June there each year. I absolutely love this photo of my mum. She would have been 35 at the time and a 6 year old me thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Our last holiday there was in the summer of 1974 and it was strange going back with my husband after all this time. A lot has changed in 50 years, including the pier which had to be rebuilt after a fire in the 80's, but I had my heart set on recreating the photo my dad had taken of my lovely mum, along with our daughter who travelled up from Devon to join us for a day at the beach. I really enjoyed putting this page together as it has huge sentimental value for me. I used a couple of the scrapbooking sets I bought from Opticillusions on Etsy, Under The Sea and Under The Boardwalk, with the glitter layer, the rope and knots coming from Piixabay.

Daniel, all adjustment layers automatically have masks attached to them, so you can add multiple HSL adjustments to one element and use the brush tool to paint in black to hide the bits you don't want to be that colour. Does this make sense? It's difficult because I know what I mean but no sure if I'm explaining it in a way that somebody not used to this program would understand. Editing to add, you have to make sure that you paint with black on the actual adjustment, not the object.

@Daniel Hess There's a much easier way to change the colour of an object in Affinity Photo. If you check out the adjustment layers, either the HSL adjustment or the Recolour adjustment will do the job nicely. You can find the adjustment layers by clicking on the little circle under your layers panel, next to the FX button. In order for the adjustment to apply only to the object you want to change the colour of, you need to clip it to that object. You can do this by dragging and dropping the adjustment onto the layer the object is on. HSL adjustments are more complicated to work with, but you can target individual colours within an object with that one so it's well worth learning how to use that one.