can blend, stack, and fade layers just as you would in Photoshop.
Or, indeed, InDesign.5
EDIT PHOTOS WITHIN PUBLISHER
We’ve got an extraordinary claim as the headline of
our news-sheet here, so we’d better serve up some
extraordinary evidence. We use the Place Image tool to import
our bear, ending up with a loaded cursor we can drag out
into a frame any size we want, or hold over an existing frame
to populate it with a click [Image C]. To open your document in the
Photo app outside Publisher, choose “File > Edit in Photo”—all
your layers transfer across intact. However, we’re going to do
our editing in Publisher’s Photo Persona, switching to it using the
button at the top-left of the interface.6
PHOTO PERSONA
Changing Persona changes all the tools. So, instead of
tools for drawing frames and handling text, we now have
the familiar brushes, buckets, stamps, and erasers of an image-
editing app [Image D]. We’re going to choose the Eraser, and
brush away most of the bear image, so that just his (could be a
her, we didn’t ask) head remains , read y to be composited over the
cockpit of the Air Force’s finest tiltrotor aircraft. Image frames
can have backgrounds, set using a color wheel, but placed
images such as this are transparent once you begin wiping them
away. The brush previews what you’ll see before you commit to
it, so you can check if you’re brushing down to the layer below or
a background color. Holding Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel
zooms in and out to the pointer’s position, so you can change
the view to a more precise one. After all, fakery at this level of
sophistication needs to be really good, or it will fool no one. TheEHistory palette works in its usual way whatever Persona
you’re in, so you can always go back and try bits again.7
MOVE AND ROTATE
Just like in other image-editing apps, Publisher’s
Photo Persona enables you to resize, move, and
rotate the layer using frag handles arranged around
the edge of the frame. Affinity’s main difference is that
rotation is achieved using a handle that sticks up slightly
from the frame. A placed image like this is distorted if
you move the edges, whereas one in a frame isn’t, as you
are moving the frame. So, be careful to use the corner
handles if you want it to remain in its original ratio.8
MERGE LAYERS
The bear and the Osprey are pretty realistically
merged, but still separate as far as Publisher is
concerned. Merge them by Ctrl-clicking to select the two
layers (the images, not the frame) in the Layers palette,
then choosing “Layer > Merge Selected” [Image E].9
SAVE AS...
The .afpub files produced by Affinity Publisher
can be opened in the Photo and Designer sister
apps, but Windows has a nasty habit of associating them
with the last app you used to open one in, so you might
not always get Publisher if you double-click one. Export
options include PDF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, and Adobe’s PSD
format (with layers), so you should always be able to
transfer something you’ve created to a non-Affinity app,
as long as you don’t want to edit it there [Image F].D FThe idea of Personas is not new to the Affinity
series. Affinity Photo uses it to switch between
raw image development, photo editing, HDR
creation, and image liquification, while Affinity
Designer can swap between vector and raster
editing. They both have a dedicated Persona for
exporting images. It’s an idea that has become
more mature as the apps have been updated,
culminating in its implementation in Publisher. It
might have been nice to see the Export Persona in
Publisher, for fine-tuning PDF files or web images,
but the standard “File > Export” does a good job.PERSONAS
maximumpc.com OCT 2019 MAXIMUMPC 67