Affinity Photo - 10 Mistakes to avoid - Free Photography Tutorial

[@OlivioSarikas]

Thank you for Watching. What is the biggest mistake that happened to you or others in Affinity Photo? :)

[@marcodimario9918]

Hello Olivio! Well...One of the biggest miskate that sometimes I make in image composition in general, not only in Affinity Photo, is...just “the composition” :) What I want to say is that sometimes I lost myself in details while I should put much more effort and focus on the overall composition, that is THE MOST impostant thing to consider when it comes to create any kind of visual art.

[@julietcollins8892]

Thank you! For me the sharpening tip was a revelation.

[@anneharwood943]

Yes! I’m finally starting to look at my background, and even what’s in the foreground when I’m doing macro or close up photography. I’ve changed my angle many times because there’s white gravel or something blurry in my foreground is distracting.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Thank you, Anne :) I will publish a Skillshare Course this month about Visuale Language and Image Composition. There will be a lot of good advise and tons of examples from phrofessional photographers in there :)

[@anneharwood943]

I ran across your videos because I was looking for some help with Affinity Designer. Despite taking an online course, it really didn’t do much for me. I used to be quite good with Photoshop, but it’s too expensive for the hobbyist, and I really didn’t want a subscription. I’m kind of lost with Affinity, but I do like it. However, the fact that you talk about taking photos along with editing is a real bonus! Thank you!!

[@puedo8306]

Installed, everything works, thanks!

[@morgancalvi6675]

You Tube has really messed up with the new format...we weren't able to see the spot at 3:34 you wanted us to see. I wish to heavens they'd just change things back. It was good...why they felt the need to mess with things, I don't know.

[@herlingwowor1896]

Very interesting and simple informative tutorial. Thank you..i was wondering do you save files on affinity icloud or into a folder on a hard drive. thank you.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Thank you, on a hard drive, but I also have a online backup with backblaze

[@judyair4725]

I enjoyed watching your video, Olivio, as I have done before. At our tutoring session, here in New Zealand, we showed your lighthouse and bulb video and had a go at it ourselves. Shortly after that one of our members replicated the procedure with his own images, to win an "Honours" at our local camera club. In this video, more than one thing I learned, the premier one is not to overdo the clarity slider, which I do. I have been putting it up to about 31 or less for years. You recommend not more than 20. From today, I will look more closely at this. Many other good things to ponder!

[@OlivioSarikas]

Hi, cool :) Can you post a link to his winning picture please :)

[@Amanet13]

The sharpening of a pic was the biggest mistake on my camera first.Then in post processing it doesn’t need too much to totally screw it over with basic tools,that are probably only used for a small adjustment.

[@pdebie1982]

Great tips! Didn’t knew the print size trick. That one is very helpfull!

[@OlivioSarikas]

Thank you pdebie! Yes that one is a classic mistake to make :)

[@clarification007]

I agree also!

[@voxdevaux7581]

Hay thanks Olivio for your explanation of RAW. I never quite understood what it was used for. Now I do.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Always happy to help. Have a nice day, Vox DeVaux :)

[@dancetweety10]

How can you tell people not to shoot in raw? You have a lot more dynamic range if you do. Also when shooting with a digital camera it is best to expose to the right so you don't get alot of noise because you have to recover shadows.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Hi Dance, you can of course do what ever you want with your camera. The thing is, a lot of amateur photographers are obsessed with RAW, because they think it's always better and perfect for fixing bad shots. But that is totally not what RAW is intended for. Just like "sharpen" is not intended to make pictures sharp that are out of focus. RAW is intended to be used for shoots that are perfect and intended for heavy editing and then be used in various formats and on various materials. It is NOT intended to be used as a fix for bad photos that are too dark or too bright or too anything. So, even if the dynamic range of a JPG is smaller, most amateur photographers, with their limited knowhow and experience and also limited time and gear, are better of using one off the programs in their camera and edit it just a little bit in post in most cases - certainly in the case of a 3000+ photo trip to asia or such. So, now to the question why a image for a professional shoot needs to be neutral and also underexposed. The reason for that is that this gives the photographer or designer a very high range of how they can use and edit the photo for the style they need. A style that might not be decided at the time of the shoot, since the customer or the art director can always change their mind and you don't want to repeat a 50.000$ shoot, because you shot everything in bright and vibrant, but now they want it in mute and turn day to night. That is where RAW makes a ton of sense. For the average "family on the beach" shot it doesn't make that much sense. BUT: That is my opinion. If you want to shoot in RAW, by all means, do it.

[@dancetweety10]

I see raw as I use to see my negatives. But people don't have to use RAW off course but it is better to do so.

[@OlivioSarikas]

I'm not sure i understand what you mean by "see my negatives". Btw, here is another opinion, worth watching, on that: kzbin.info/www/bejne/joTOo3R6qdSSd9U

[@unoengborg]

@@OlivioSarikas If you are going to edit 3000+ images one at the time in Affinity Photo or Adobe Photoshop I understand if you think it is a lot of work. Such tools are not really good as the only tool for the workflow of most photographers. They are more the perfect tools for digital artists, that do a lot of advanced editing to one image rather than a few small often similar edits to lots and lots of images. Look at the develop persona in Affinity Photo the same way as a built in flash in your camera. It is good to have, but not something you use if you can chose not to. For handling large amount of images you need tools like Capture One or Adobe Lightroom where you can apply edits to many photos at once. I do about 95% of my editing in Capture One, and the rest in Affinity Photo. If I apply auto settings on import I get about the same quality as if I had shot them in JPEG from my camera on top of that I can apply presets to make the pictures to have my look & style instead of that of some Japanese engineer and I have still all my data from my camera available if needed. This wouldn't take longer than your trip home from Asia. You might even have time to weed out all your images where I have missed focus. Using the focus peeking like feature in Capture one that would likely take less than 20 minutes, at the same time you can also weed out bad exposures. At the end you may end up with perhaps 100 photos that need special treatment such as e.g. frequency separation, focus stacking, or panorama stitching in Affinity photo and that editing would have been needed anyway regardless if you shoot RAW or JPEG. Another advantage of using this kind of programs is that the culling process gets much faster as you can star rate your pictures. I usuall give all new pictures five stars, then I set a filter that only shows five stars pictures, and then I brows through the images and set a more apropropriate rating. when I'm done I only see five stare images. If that's not enough to cover your subject add the ones you gave 4 stars to your filter, and now all of a sudden you have a lot less images to edit. If you use the right tools and know how to use them 3000, or so, images is not that hard to handle, most wedding photographers handle a lot more each week and still have time to go out and shoot new weddings.

[@OlivioSarikas]

@@unoengborg yes, you can do all that. the question remains: why. if the photo is good, probably doesn't need much editing anyways. if the photo is bad, it won't be any better in raw and raw isn't meant for bad photos. if it's just something you post on facebook, nobody will care if it ever was raw. if it's one in a series of 3000 vacation photos nobody cares either. here is where it matters: if you want a very specific result and know you need to do most of that in post. that's what raw is for. to give is a neutral starting point that is highly adjustable. that's why it is called raw. not to give you a picture that doesn't need to be retouched anyways, but to give you a picture that will be retouched a lot and used in various formats. raw is like a racing tire. you don't need it on the way to your job on your car. you need it to be 1 second faster in a 1 hour long race.but like i said: by all means, shoot in raw if you want to ;)

[@adagioscreen6609]

"Learning new things is great, but avoiding bad habits is also very important."

[@rochelledouglassmceathron511]

Hi Olivio, I wouldn't mind supporting you, I like your teaching style. I was wondering if you teach about composites?

[@OlivioSarikas]

hi rochelle, thank you. yes i do. search my channel for "Project" to get several compositions i have done so far :)

[@mkmpotterytools410]

Hi Olivio! I have watched a lot of tutorials over the years, and now have watched several of yours. They are great. Clear voice, intelligent instruction, and good artistic choices. Pushes me to use parts of the program I hadn't used before, and to pay attention to details I might have ignored. Really excellent tutorials. Just wish you did them for Affinity Designer as well. Keep it up. I look forward to supporting you on Patreon.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Awesome, thank you, MKM Pottery Tools. Looking forward to welcome you to our Patreon Community. Make sure you check out the "Behind the Scenes" videos, some of which are free on my youtube channel. They are a great addition for Patrons. Here is a free one :) kzbin.info/www/bejne/gKCreYF-n6hsmdk

[@MichelleCoxPhotography]

Great video and information! It's all in the details with editing :)

[@OlivioSarikas]

Hi Michelle, thank you very much. Check out my other videos. I have over 60 Tutorials on editing :)

[@herlingwowor1896]

guilty has charged I also tend to over saturate and over edit my pictures. It is so true that we do get influence from posted pics on the net. The trick is to edit a photographe without it looking edited. I think thats the hardest thing for me. Many time i edite then i post and after a while a regret the over editing look. Its true most of my none photograpic friend love them and even dare calling me a pro because of the over saturated photos..This is something i really need to work on.

[@jaschana2220]

you have GREAT videos! Keep up the good work

[@OlivioSarikas]

Thank you, Jas, looking forward to hearing more from you :)

[@Noriuslephotographe]

I shoot in Raw..I have a d850 from nikon and shooting jpg's doesn't make sense....thanks for the video. I respect what you say even if I don't agree to some extent.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Hi Norius, i don't say never use raw at all, i say use it when it makes sense. Can your d850 shoot jpg? yes. So i suppose the developers of the camera had something in mind when they build a jpg mode into your camera. Can it natively shoot gif animations? proably not. So i suppose the developers of the camera thought about what formats to include. ;)

[@clarification007]

Great tips! Thanks!

[@OlivioSarikas]

You are welcome, Ctrèsbeau Claude :)

[@PrimeRsoul]

Shooting the picture in RAW format can save quite a few headaches when editing. Hope people realize this.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Hi Aduden, sure, when the shoot needs it, it's the right choice. But i know people who take 2-3000 holiday photos in raw. RAW isn't meant to overcome bad camera handling. It's meant to give people with good camera skills more options in post. So, i would advice RAW only for dedicated shooting events, where the shoot actually requires it.

[@ichbins9728]

This was the most helpful advice for me! Thank you. I was also one of those people always shooting in raw and was also often annoyed about the work with it afterwards.

[@OlivioSarikas]

You are welcome, Ich :)

[@unoengborg]

@@OlivioSarikas Disk space is cheap. Not saving all the information your expensive camera can provide is probably a bad idea in most cases. Even technically skilled photographers makes mistakes now and then so why not have the possibility to fix some of them. Also shooting in RAW leaves you less things to fiddle with while shooting. The moment may be gone once you have carefully set your exposure, your white balance, contrast or color profile in camera to your liking. Back in post you often have all the time in the world to do that and you can do it on a large hopefully calibrated screen where you can see what you are doing. I would say use RAW as standard and JPEG only when you absolutely need it e.g. if you shoot sports and need extreme frame rates and have a hard deadline or perhaps even upload your images to your news agency directly as you shoot. Sometimes it makes sense to shoot both RAW and JPEG, e.g, if you do an event of some sort, perhaps a wedding and want to upload images directly to facebook or display images directly on a screen at the event. Doing that could be a good way to promote the sales of your services. I would say that shooting in JPEG is a typical pro thing to do in certain very carefully selected situations and not a good advice for beginners. Regardless if you shoot RAW or JPEG you will need some way to store and catalog your images adding keywords, copyright info etc. That is best done in programs like Capture One Pro, Adobe Lightroom, Darktable... In such programs you can automatically apply presets as you import your images and also apply edits and metadata to multiple images at a time at a time, and then use programs like Affinity Photo or Photoshop just for the final touch or when you need to combine several images into one, such as if you need to replace a sky as often done by real estate photographers.

[@clarification007]

@@OlivioSarikas ... also shooting a lot of pictures in Raw, it is a lot of memory for only once in correction ( for me is family reunion, and I hate doing photo for that! Grrrrr! ) With your recommandation it will be jpeg picture only for those family pictures. Other wise it is always in RAW. ---- Thanks Olivio!

[@SecondhandKidMusic]

'also- my Mother is doing that' ! hahahahahahahaha Great vid and that made me laugh...

[@morgancalvi6675]

Tip 1...it's called 'just do HDR'.

[@OlivioSarikas]

Not really. Persoally i'm not a fan of the HDR look and like to avoid it where I can. I'd rather take a RAW and edit it with a really good RAW editor, like Photolab, to get all the values I need. Only in very extrem Light rituoations I use a soft version of HDR

[@morgancalvi6675]

@@OlivioSarikas you don't have to make it anything other than simple and decent so there are more colours. You are probably thinking of the extreme ones???

[@OlivioSarikas]

@@morgancalvi6675 yes, but you can do that with a single raw. no need for bracketing and hdr in most cases

[@morgancalvi6675]

@@OlivioSarikas OMG whatever floats your boat 🙄. WTF's wrong with a simple HDR photo? Gee.

[@nikonrulz]

Good video.

[@OlivioSarikas]

You are welcome, nikonrulz

[@juanalvarado7794]

Not Everything has to have a natural feeling. Eveyone edits differetnly and everyone has different opinions of what color is better. Color is subjective.👍

[@OlivioSarikas]

So, just do what you want. Why are you telling me?

[@MrPogee]

Of course, there are different preferences of color, but there is still a standard. Oversaturated photos tend to look fake and thus, unappealing. That's why it's best to make a photo as natural as possible. Oversaturated photos are like burnt food from being heated too much.

[@MichaelChylinski]

They destroyed that HDR. I use it all the time. Most people can hardly tell.

[@RussellDionGreen]

So: obviously mothers (05:00) don't ALWAYS know things better ;-)

[@OlivioSarikas]

LOL :)

[@howlinmad03]

That cracked me up.

[@NigelDesmond]

Raw is the only way to work, every time you save a JPEG image you reduce the quality - If someone gave me $1000 to purchase a camera I would not throw $500 into the fire. Using JPEG is the same thing as throwing away money, I can shoot 500-1000 images in a day out in, Raw, I get 1250 images on a card, but I still carry two spare cards so I would not worry if the opportunity of a lifetime arrived. Cards are cheap a reasonable 32 GB card is a few Ponds/Euros/Dollars . And by using RAW I can choose how I want my images to look, and it's rarely the over-saturated snapshots that are the defaults with most consumer and even SemiPro cameras. If I did want the image to look like the JPEG version I can just apply a camera profile to match I would only shoot JPEG if I needed a high shot count for a specific reason before the camera Buffer filled but as my buffer holds around 40 Shots, I cannot see this happening often

[@OlivioSarikas]

You do realize that this is my channel where i state my opinion. You can do whatever you want with your gear. There really is no need to act in this agressive tone here.

[@lkystryke]

super blurry

[@OlivioSarikas]

not sure what you mean

[@judyair4725]

Oops, I had not noticed that I am using my wife's login. I am Jim Air! Am in trouble again!!

[@OlivioSarikas]

Lol. don't worry, that's ok :)