Affinity Photo Tutorials - Watercolor Cartoon Effect - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Check out our beginners guide to Affinity Photo: http://affinity.sale/Photo101 In this Affinity Photo tutorial, we learn how to create a cartoon effect, making your picture look like a watercolor painting. Download today's image: http://affinityrevolution.com/cartoon-watercolor/ *********************************************** Today we're going to take this photo, and give it a beautiful Watercolor-Cartoon Effect. If you want to follow along with me, I've left a download link for today's photo in the video description, right beneath the Subscribe button. The first thing we need to do is duplicate our background layer, which we can do by pressing Command or Ctrl J. Then we'll come up the top to Filters, Detect, Detect Edges. Right now our photo is looking pretty strange, but if we change our layer's blend mode to Subtract, then we'll start to see the effect we're going for. To enhance the effect, we're going to apply a couple of adjustment layers. The first one we'll apply is a Brightness and Contrast adjustment. I'll increase the brightness and the contrast a little bit. Next, we'll apply a Split Toning adjustment. With this adjustment, I'll add some red into the highlights, and then add some purple into the shadows. To help the colors pop even more, I'll apply an HSL adjustment, and then increase the saturation a little bit. At this point, some parts of our photo are looking a little too dark, especially our castle. To fix this, we're going to apply a Curves adjustment, and then increase the brightness of our shadows by lifting the bottom left of our curve up. We don't want everything brighter though, so we are going to bring the middle of the curve down. You can continue to refine where your curves adjustment is being applied by painting in black on the parts of the photo you don't want this adjustment being applied to. Just press B for the paintbrush, and make sure you have 0% hardness while painting so your brush strokes will be soft and unnoticeable. If you'd like to learn more about masking adjustment layers and how to make the most of your photos, I'll leave a link in the video description to our beginner's guide to Affinity Photo, where we cover these techniques in much greater depth. At this point, our photo is looking pretty good, but we're going to do a few more things to really polish the effect. The first thing we're going to do is soften our photo and help the colors blend together better. To do this, we'll right click on any of our layers and select Merge Visible. Then with our merged layer, we'll change its blend mode to Soft Light. Now we just need to apply a Gaussian blur filter to it, and bring the radius up a little ways.But now our photo is looking a little dark again, so I'm going to apply another Curves adjustment to brighten the shadows in our photo. If the adjustment isn't quite strong enough, you can duplicate it by pressing Command or Ctrl J. On the duplicate copy, I'm going to paint in black on the parts of the photo that I think have become too bright. To see a before and after of our work, I'm going to select all of the layers we've been working on, and turn them off so we can see our original photo, and here it is with our effect applied. Thanks for watching my friends, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution tutorial!