Affinity Photo Editing Core Skills

Basic stuff that all Affinity users should know

This is just a collection of things I have picked up on which I realize are very useful and important for just general usage of Affinity Photo and related suite of tools.

Olivio Sarikas has an excellent intro to Affinity Photo which would cover a lot of the same things as I do here: FIX MidJourney AI Artworks — Affinity Photo Ultimate Beginners Guide

Also worth knowing that you can get full overview of all the Affinity Photo UI and tools on the Affinity Web site: Get answers fast.

Adding and Removing Panels

You know all the little panels on the right side with for layers, color, swatches, histogram, transform, and brushes? Ever accidentally remove one of those, and now you cannot get back one you used? They are all listed under the Windows submenu to the right of the Help menu entry. You can toggle them on there.

Location of various Affinity panels for things such as layers and color selection

The Click-Drag Trick

Several tools in Affinity work in a bit unusual way. They require you to click and hold. For instance, to do color sampling from the color panel by clicking and holding the mouse on the little round color well. A color is picked when you release the button.

The Info panel towards the bottom of your stack of panels (together with History, Transform, and Navigator palette windows) has similar behavior for picking reference colors. You can click on the crosshairs and hold while moving it to an area of the image you want to use as a reference point.

I am pointing this out because I constantly forget that this is a way many tools work in Affinity. I usually think I can click on the tool once, and it becomes selected, and I perform a second click somewhere. No, some tools such as color picker and reference color picker require click and drag.

The info panel for defining two colors to compare with each other.