3/3 Easy Recoloring in Affinity Photo SCHEDULED

Last month, I showed you a few quick tips for scrapping on your mobile devices with Affinity Photo by Serif. In this post, I'm going to demonstrate a few ways for recoloring word art and other easy elements. As usual in any software, there is always more than one way to accomplish a task.

20200118-IMG_0055e by Stacia, on Flickr

I selected a piece of word art from the Gratitude collection and put it on a fairly neutral paper so we can easily see what happens. And now that I've been working with Affinity Photo for a while I know I'll need to rasterize the layer so that it is a pixel layer and not an image layer.

Here's where I get to be honest: I'm choosing to learn to use Affinity mostly by trial and error. And here at the beginning it's a whole lot of error some times If I can't figure it out, I'll seek out a tutorial. I'm having a lot of "happy accidents" along the way, just by pushing all the buttons and knowing I can't break it. So trust me, learning to rasterize first was a lesson I needed to learn.

20200118-IMG_0056e by Stacia, on Flickr

My first try was to click on the "paint bucket" on the left, the Flood Fill tool, select the color on the color wheel in the Color Studio on the right and expect the word art to change colors. Nope, that didn't work. Maybe I'm not on the right layer. in the Layer Studio.. but I am... So I tried something else. (Note: we are going to come back to this!)

20200118-IMG_0058e by Stacia, on Flickr

Let's take a look at the choices when using the Flood Fill tool. For Mode, you can choose fill or erase, we'd be using fill primarily. The Tolerance, Contiguous and Blend Mode choices are much like what we are used to in other programs.

20200118-IMG_0060e by Stacia, on Flickr
20200118-IMG_0061e by Stacia, on Flickr

Because I know that clipping masks work very easily, I created a blank layer above my word art, grabbed the Paint Brush tool and selected a color. Then I painted over the word art on the blank layer knowing that I could clip it down and recolor the word art that way.

20200118-IMG_0062e by Stacia, on Flickr
20200118-IMG_0064 by Stacia, on Flickr

Turns out it's pretty easy to fill an entire layer using the Fill Tool. With the Fill Context selected below, all you have to do is click on the Color Studio and the layer you're on is filled with the chosen color. So if I create a new Fill layer and use the Fill tool I can easily create a solid color layer that I can again clip down onto my word art.

20200118-IMG_0065 by Stacia, on Flickr
20200118-IMG_0091 by Stacia, on Flickr

But unlike my painted layer, I can easily change the color of my solid color layer to my heart's delight and thus change my word art.

20200118-IMG_0068e by Stacia, on Flickr

What other option might I use to change colors? Another familiar choice is to use a Hue Saturation Adjustment layer. Click in the Adjustment Studio and when you scroll down you'll see LOTS of adjustment layer choices. Unfortunately, the HSL layer doesn't work well on a black element like this word art. But due to one of my happy accidents, I can show you on a piece of patterned paper, though.

20200118-IMG_0073e by Stacia, on Flickr
20200118-IMG_0074 by Stacia, on Flickr

For colored elements like this paper strip, swiping my pen or finger across each of the hue, saturation and luminance sliders will totally change the color and the depth of color. I'm definitely going to be looking more into the Adjustment Studio later to see what other fun things I can do in there.

20200118-IMG_0059e by Stacia, on Flickr

But that Flood Fill tool has been nagging at my mind and I found a tutorial on it. Turns out I was almost there the first time. You select the Flood Fill tool, pick the color in the Color Studio, for me it's white, and then you have to CLICK ON the element to be recolored! So I click on one of the letters and the word art turns white, assuming Contiguous is NOT checked because each letter is individual. So the Flood Fill tool is totally an easy way to recolor a simple piece of word art.

I hope you learned a new trick in Affinity Photo. If you have anything else you'd like me to cover in future articles, please let me know.