Up in smoke

Make a smoky shape in Affinity Photo and get to grips with the amazing Liquify Persona under the guidance of James Paterson

- James Paterson

There are several tools for pushing and pulling pixels around in Affinity Photo, but none can rival the Liquify Persona. This dedicated workspace offers a range of features that allow you to reshape objects and people. As such it has all sorts of uses. Here it lets us craft a smoky shape from a series of simple photos of smoke.

An effect like this might look complicated but it’s really very easy to carry out and encompasses many key features in Affinity Photo. We begin by making a new black background and bringing in a shape to use for our smoky structure. We’ve used a bat shape here but you could experiment with all sorts of different things. Once done, we copy in pieces of smoke and blend them in. This is where Screen – one of the most useful layer blend modes – can help us by only allowing the lighter pixels to show through.