Affinity Photo Editing Core Skills

Basic stuff that all Affinity users should know

Erik Engheim
10 min readApr 7, 2023

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
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…

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Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.