Clone in a crowd

Make multiple clones and master essential layer masking skills in Affinity Photo with James Paterson

- James Paterson

The multiplicity effect is a fun way to combine several different portraits into one. It's a great one to try out with your own set of portraits, and the shooting technique is very simple. All you have to do is use a tripod to keep all the frames in alignment, then photograph your subject in different positions around the frame. Keep the camera settings and lighting consistent throughout, and try out different poses. You can take it further by having your 'clones' interact with one another, or by experimenting with a shallow depth of field as we've done here, so that the figures behind our main portrait become more and more blurry.

The technique for editing our set of photos is very easy. We begin by opening the set as a stack of layers in Affinity Photo. There isn't a dedicated feature that lets us do this automatically, but we can use a simple hack with the 'New Stack' command. The command is designed primarily for removing objects from multiple images, which is sort of the opposite of what we want here. But to get around this all we have to do is ungroup the stack, and we'll have a set of layers to work with (handily pre-aligned for us).