Perfect portraits with Affinity Photo

James Paterson removes blemishes, softens skin and enhance tones with Serif Affinity Photo’s straightforward image-editing tools

- James Paterson

THE MISSION

Enhance a portrait and retouch blemishes with simple retouching skills in Affinity Photo

Time needed

20 minutes

Skill level

Intermediate

Kit needed

Affinity Photo

Among the masses the term ‘Photoshopped’ has become a byword for digitally enhanced portraits (among other types of image), but these days it’s not just Photoshop that lets you carry out these kinds of edits.

Affinity Photo offers a range of powerful portrait-enhancing tools, from those that let you remove marks and imperfections, to dedicated features for skin softening. What’s more, the layer-based workflow of Affinity means that these edits can be done on separate layers, so you always have the option to control the strength of an effect, or go back to an earlier stage.

Here we’ll explore several key retouching techniques that you can apply to almost any portrait. Along the way we’ll encounter many key features in Affinity Photo. Portrait retouching is often about enhancing different areas of a face – we boost the eyes, soften the skin, sharpen the lashes and so on. We can use layer masks to confine effects to specific areas of the shot. This is a key skill not just for retouching, but for all kinds of photograph editing.