Project four: Affinity Photo - Perfect patterns

James Paterson demonstrates how to map a pattern onto clothes and get to grips with Affinity Photo's powerful Displace filter

- James Paterson

The Mission – Add a pattern to a dress using selections, masks and the Displace filter

Time – 20 minutes

Skill level – Intermediate

Kit needed – Affinity Photo

If you want to make composite images by combining photos, or bring in things like graphics and text, then one of the biggest challenges is in making it look like the separate elements belong together. Affinity’s Displace filter can be very useful in this regard. It allows you to distort the shape of an image or detail so that it conforms to the shapes on the image underneath. So it lets us replicate the texture or surface undulations of one image onto another. This allows us to add a pattern to our subject’s dress. The filter skews the pattern so that the leaves look as if they’re curving around the folds in the fabric, rather than just added on top. You can use the same technique to combine all sorts of images in a believable way.

Here we’ll explain how to use the Displace filter, as well as other compositing tools like selections and masks. We begin by isolating the dress with a selection, before converting it to a mask then using the mask on our pattern. The Multiply blend mode allows us to blend the darker parts of the dress with the pattern.

As well as masking the new pattern to the dress, we also have to fix the reflections on the skin caused by the vibrant red of the original dress. We can tone this down using a mix of adjustments and masks. This kind of selective tonal control can be handy for all kinds of image-editing tasks.