Thank you so much for the wonderful compliment! Comments like yours keep me motivated to want to continue to make videos. Often times, I feel like I ramble on about too many details which don’t actually seem too significant, but I’ve noticed a lot of people like my slower paced in-depth tutorials, so I think I’m gonna keep trying to do that. Thanks again for your wonderful comment, and I’m happy you enjoyed the video

@brgphotography 💙

You’re very welcome! I’m happy you found it so helpful!

You’re very welcome! I’m happy to hear you found it helpful!

Thank you very much! I basically got this idea after teaching my mom how to use affinity photo, because she had never used any kind of photo editing software before. So I had to explain it in a way that was easy to understand even to a total beginner. I’m really happy people are appreciating it.

Wow, thank you very much! I really appreciate it!🙏🏼 And I’m happy that you enjoyed the video and found it helpful! Hope you have a great 2025!

You’re super welcome! I’m happy you found it! 😅

You’re very welcome!

Aww, thank you!

You’re very welcome! Part of learning how to work in Affinity Photo is learning how to work efficiently. So making macros like this can really speed up your workflow. I’m happy I could share them with you!

You’re very welcome. And the migration is understandable. I personally never liked having to pay a subscription to Adobe, and Affinity Photo does everything I need to do and more.

@@brgphotography I agree 100%. Being someone who doesn't necessarily edit their photos sometimes for a couple of months, I find the subscription fees of Adobe products way too steep. Do you think there's something Affinity is lacking when compared to Photoshop?

That’s a good question. Having not used Photoshop for many many years, I kind of don’t know what I’m missing. But often times I’ll watch tutorials on Photoshop, because a lot of those techniques can be translated to affinity photo. And there are a few things that Photoshop does that so far affinity photo doesn’t do, or doesn’t do quite as well. Off the top of my head, is the option to set a taper on a brush. I think in Photoshop, you can set a taper for your brush, so the end of the brush get gets smaller and ends at a point. I know you can do things similar if you have a pressure sensitive tablet and you can set your sensitivity to the brush size, but I think it would be nice to have brushes that you can set a taper point. I think there’s also an interesting slider mechanism with their HSL adjustment. They seem to be able to more precisely narrow down an edit particular tones. I know it can be done in affinity photo, but when I watch Photoshop tutorials about it, the seams like I can do a lot more. But those are just kind of edge cases. I’ve never come across some thing while editing in affinity photo where I just couldn’t do it because affinity photo didn’t have a particular tool. Or if it doesn’t have a particular tool, I can always find another way to do it. For example, Photoshop now has AI generative fill, but that doesn’t mean that because I don’t have it in affinity photo I’m unable to remove things from the background. I can still do the manually, it just takes more time.

Thank you so much! And I totally understand as I was the same way. Using masks and “painting” with black and white just didn’t really make sense to me. But once you understand it, you realize how powerful it is. I’m glad you enjoyed the video and I appreciate the support!

Well, as far as the clone stamping goes nothing would change. It would act the same. And there are times when I just need to make one small change on a photo real quick that I just clone stamp on the base layer. I don’t even make a new layer or duplicate that layer. The main advantage of working on a new blank layer is it’s easy to keep track of your edits when that new layer only has your edits on them. And not a copy of the original layer. And if you want to add filter effects or change the blend mode, it will affect the entire image if you’re working on a duplicated layer. For example, say you do some clone stamping, and then you want to add Gaussian blur effect to it to soften the clone stamp. If you’re working on a duplicated layer, there’s no way to separate your clones stamps from the original image. Only the whole image can be blurred. But, if you were working on a blank layer and that layer only contains your clone stamps, you can apply that Gaussian blur effect just to your clone stamps without affecting the whole image. In general, working on a blank separate layer gives you a lot more control and flexibility when making further edits to your adjustments. This is a good question, and I might make a video addressing it. Because I think a lot of people have the same idea. They just duplicating their main layer a bunch of times and making changes on those layers.

@@brgphotography Thank you!!!

Yeah. It definitely something not a lot of photographers use. It’s mainly used for video.

Thank you very much! I’m glad you found it helpful.

Well, I currently use the S (small) model on my 27 inch monitors and it works for me. But, I think it really depends on the kind of work that you are doing. I’m mainly using my tablet for photo, and portrait retouching. Which means that I spend a lot of time zoomed in and correcting small areas. So for that I don’t think I need to have a bigger tablet. But, if you are using it for digital painting and you want to kind of mimic painting, or drawing in real life with bigger, and longer paint strokes, maybe a medium size tablet might feel more natural. That being said, I think it really comes down to personal preference. Some people might enjoy having a bigger surface to work on. They might like having more room to draw a longer brush strokes, and like having a big tablet to move around on. But for me, I prefer the smaller size, just because it takes up Lester space, is more compact, and I don’t have to actually move my arm around as much as I would have to on a larger tablet. If it’s possible, it’s a good idea to try to find somewhere where you can test them out. There, you can get a real sense of what it’s like to use it.

You’re very welcome. I’m glad you found it helpful.

Thank you very much!

You’re very welcome!

Thank you very much. I try to answer all the comments and offer advice as best I can.

I’m really glad to hear that! So glad you’ve found my channel helpful! I appreciate the support. 🙏

Thank you very much! I was really trying to make it as easy as possible to understand.

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

You’re very welcome! I’m glad you found it easy to understand!

Yeah. You would just have to option (or ALT (I think) if you’re on a PC) click to change the source to somewhere else. In my example I didn’t change the source, but even after you uncheck “aligned” you can still option click to set the source anywhere you want normally. But once you set it, it will stay in that place until you set a new source. Hope this helps!

@@brgphotography you're quite "reSOURCEful" LOL :P hahaha love ALL your vids! they're super informative and straight forward to understand! :) keep it up! 🙏

I see what you did there! 😂 Thank you very much! Comments like yours keep me motivated to continue making videos!

Yup. Worked the same with the healing brush. If you have the aligned box unchecked, after you paint and release the mouse button, the source point will return to where you initially placed it. It will only follow your mouse while you have a mouse clicked down and are painting. Then, once you let go, the source point will return to its original position. I guess this could be useful for healing over different sections, but you want it to use the same source.

@@brgphotography Thanks for letting me know! 👍

That because an 18% percent gray card should have a luminance value of 50%. So an RGB value of around 120-127. Cameras expose for 18% gray (when using the camera’s exposure meter) to get a proper exposure, and that exposure should sit somewhere right in the middle of the histogram.

You’re very welcome! Thanks a great question! I actually had to watch that part to figure out what was going on! 😂 So, when I’m using the HSL adjustment layer to isolate and desaturate the blue handbag, I select the blue color chip then use picker tool to select the blue handbag. The I bring the saturation down all the way to zero to make it easier to see how much of the blue I’m affecting. Then I move the sliders around to grab as much as the blue as I can. Now, what you’re asking about (and I had to watch a few times because I couldn’t figure it out) is for a brief second the rest of the image turns black and white and just the handbag was blue. That was actually a mistake. 😅 If you pay attention, I go to close the HSL adjustment layer, but I accidentally click on her hat. When I did that it changed that blue color chip I had desaturate to the yellow of her hat. That then made everything that was yellow (and orange and a little green) completely desaturated and the only the blue with color. You’ll actually hear me say “oops” since I accidentally clicked the wrong spot. And you can see that for a brief second, the blue chip in the HSL slider turned yellow. So, great catch. But it was actually just a wrong mouse click. But if you wanted to just have one color in color and the rest in black and white, you could do something similar. Just pick and desaturate every other color in the image except the one you want to see. Hope this helps, and thanks for the question!

​@@brgphotography ooo I thought it was part of your method of color grading! 😂 Thank you so much for the detailed explanation!

Haha. Just an accidental mouse click. 😂

Thank you for your comment! I think, I recently started adding background music mainly just because I thought just my voice only would get a little monotonous. But I’m always trying to play around with a good volume, where it’s not really distracting, but just somethings subtly in the background. I guess so there’s not so much dead air during the times when I’m not talking. I’ve had another comment on the type of music that I use in the background, and that it can sometimes be distracting so I might reconsider my choice of using music or not in my future videos. I will say that I like having a little bit of background ambience/music, so it’s just not silent when I’m not speaking, so I might first start playing around with having the volume even lower, so it’s just subtly in the background, but not really distracting. But I appreciate your feedback!

Yeah. That one definitely annoys me the most. Especially when I’m trying to do some precise painting, and the cursor just keeps changing back to the arrow icon.

You’re super welcome. The curves are actually really powerful. There are of course other tools which are more efficient, but theoretically you only need the curves to make any color into any other color. I hope to make a video on the topic one day… I’m really glad you are finding my videos helpful.

Thank you! You’re super welcome! I really appreciate the comment! I wanted to make a video that clearly shows how each tool operates and just using basic shapes and color made it the easiest to visually see. That way when you are clone stamping real photos, you can have a better understanding of which tool is right for the job.

You’re welcome! I actually got this idea when teaching my mom how to use affinity photo, as she wanted to do some photo editing for old family photos but had never used a graphics editor before. So I explained it in ways that would be easy to understand. That gave me the idea to make a similar video for my channel. Happy to hear you found it useful!

You’re welcome! I’m happy you found it useful!

Awesome! I think once you get used to using it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it! Lol That’s a great idea! I could put out a video showing a few of the basics. But to be honest, once you kind of get used to it, it’s pretty intuitive. But thanks for the video idea, and it’s some thing I might actually do in the near future. It’s interesting, because when I first started this channel, I had the intermediate to advanced user in mind, but I realize there’s a lot of people who are just starting out that find my videos helpful. So I definitely want to continue making videos for advanced users, and advanced techniques, but at the same time make videos to help people who are just starting out. Again, I appreciate all your support!

Yeah, I think I might try that out. But, I am using a pen tablet 99% of the time, and it’s sometimes a little awkward to hold down the pen button and move the pen up and down to simulate scrolling. But I might try to get used to that method.

Hey! That’s a great tip I didn’t know that! I would always have a keyboard shortcut set to select all layers, and then click them off and on, and as you saw from my video, it often causes a glitch where it doesn’t show me the image sometimes. But I was just testing out your method, and it works great! I can just click on the background holding the option key (on a Mac) and it gives me the same effect of turning off all layers. Great tip! Thank you!

Thank you very much! I really appreciate your support!

You’re welcome! Glad you liked it. Yeah, I plan on making another fitness video. But basically, I’m using dodge and burn to lighten the lighter areas, and darken the dark area. Does adding more contrast. If you check my videos on dodge and burn, I go into really in-depth explanations how I do it.

@ I appreciate the insight, I’m going to look into them! Looking forward to more videos man!

You’re very welcome! I’m really happy to hear that! Photography is one of those things where, given the right amount of time, resources and gear, you can get most of it right “in camera.” But, there are those times when we don’t have any of those things! Lol. And we have to make the best of what we have to work with. I think learning some of these retouching skills are really helpful in those situations. For example, I noticed the amount of retouching I had to do drastically decreased when I started working with make up artists that would take care of a lot of things on set that I usually had to correct when retouching. Also, if you haven’t checked out my video on the basics of clone brushes, check it out. I go over a lot of detail with all the different clone brushes in affinity photo. Definitely some interesting techniques in there.

Thank you, I will definitely check it out and subscribe! Haha, I am not a professional photographer, but took a course at uni many moons ago. I decided to dust off our SLR (a heavy beast by today’s standards) when attending a wedding here in Indonesia and tried my best to act as a BTS/ unofficial photographer. That was also where I took aforementioned profile pictures. My legs hurt from all the squatting, and shoulders and arms from the sheer weight of my camera, as it has video recording capabilities too.

@Roboto-chan_1402 haha. I know all about sore legs and back from shooting. 😂

You’re very welcome! I’m glad you liked it! ☺️

I believe it’s the 4100. The small one. (I don’t own it anymore.)

@@brgphotography Thanks I recently bought 6100 M because of my limited budget but it's looks like yours in terms of style the old one in this video I mean this I'm gonna use it for sculpting in zbrush.

Thank you very much for your comment! Yeah, to be honest, I feel dodge and burn is the best way to get out of a lot of wrinkles, and looks the most natural. It just definitely takes a bit more time. And yeah, having a black-and-white layer can really help, because like you said, a lot of times colors can be distracting. And sometimes we can perceive different colors as being darker and lighter, where if we’re just looking at it in black-and-white, we’re only seeing the luminosity values.

I would say that since the past three or four years, I pretty much use dodge and burn for 90% of my retouches. And only really use frequency separation in specific instances.

You’re welcome! I’m glad I could help. The more you practice the better you get. And I’m still learning all the time.

You’re welcome! Glad you enjoyed it!

Thank you! Hmm, I’m pretty sure I didn’t use the dodge and burn brushes, because I don’t ever use them anymore. When I do dodge and burn, I use a sieves layer, then use a paint brush to “reveal” the adjustment. Basically using just a normal brush set you white. I’ll usually have the flow set to 2% and the hardness down to 0% so the edges are really soft. Then with the low flow I can slowly build up the effect. But you should be able to find the dodge and burn tool in the customize tool section. It looks like a little magnifying glass and a flame icon.

Thank you very much! I’m glad you enjoyed it, and hope you found it helpful!

I think if you’re just beginning out, probably the ones without the screen just because it’s gonna be a lot cheaper. It might take a little bit of practice to get used to moving your hand on the tablet, while looking at the screen. But once you get used to it, it’s completely intuitive. I know some people like having the tablet with the screen, but usually when you’re working on the screen, you have to also have the screen mounted on your desk. Usually you can’t work on it flat on the table like you are drawing on paper. Just because it’s pretty thick, and of the cables. You might be able to, but all of my friends who work in the animation industry, or graphic industry, they all use their tablets mounted on the desk, kind of a 45° angle, similar to where a monitor would be, and they’re working like that. So it definitely takes up a lot more desk space. Where are the tablets without the screen don’t have a large footprint, and are usually gonna be a lot cheaper. You’re gonna have to use what you think works best for you, but I think if you’re starting out, I would get the non-screen one. But that’s just my two cents

Thank you!