Clone to perfection

Improve landscapes and remove distractions using simple retouching skills in Affinity Photo with James Paterson

- James Paterson

Retouching is usually associated with portrait editing, but it can be equally effective for landscapes. Often a little tidying up can go a long way towards achieving the perfect image. Here we have annoying electricity wires on the left side, the large ships on the right are a bit of an eyesore and the shrubs sprouting up in the foreground interrupt the flowing curve of the river. The busy image would be stronger without the distracting details.

Affinity Photo offers a host of useful retouching tools. In this project we’ll look at two of the best, the Inpainting and Clone tools. Inpainting works by automatically filling in areas you paint over, based on the surrounding pixels. The Clone tool, on the other hand, simply lets you copy pixels from one place to another. As such, the Inpainting tool is smarter, but the basic nature of the Clone tool often makes it more predictable and, therefore, better suited to some retouching tasks.