Bare necessities
James Paterson shares the fundamentals of layers and masks in Affinity Photo so you can get ‘beary’ creative with your composites
One of the best features of Affinity Photo is the layers option. They’re helpful for all kinds of image-editing tasks, from retouching to making tonal changes with adjustment layers. Best of all, we can use layers to bring different images together for all kinds of creative results. This is easier than it looks. All we need to do is copy one image on top of another, so that they each occupy a different layer, then we can position the top layer so that it works in harmony with the layer below, and add a layer mask to hide the parts of the layer we don’t want, thereby creating a seamless blend between the two images.