‘I’ve seen some videos about this or that technique and the person in the photo was gorgeous! But how do I actually enhance one of my photo portraits? Where do I start? How do I finish?’

That was the question I saw asked on a forum and I thought: ‘Good point!’ So here is a course designed with exactly that in mind. This is not a course about how to enhance an image of a professional model with a professional camera and professional lighting. Nope! This course is about taking the kind of photos you typically see of loved ones in a family album and making them look as good as they can be.

Real world photos are more of a challenge and can give you the kind of problems you don’t always get in a photography studio. I’ll show you how to meet that challenge with Affinity Photo, start to finish. Don’t get me wrong. The workflow and techniques you will learn are the same as the experts use, but I’ve designed this course so that you can apply what you’ve learned to any standard of photography.

Sometimes we have that special photo of a special person but it needs special care to make the memories it holds clearer, brighter, more vivid. So I use the kind of real world photos you find in a family album. I also deal with different faces because everyone deserves to look their best, no matter if they are young or old, or the tone of their skin. I deal with photos that will be seen by loved ones who know the face in the photo. Faces that deserve to be seen, not in a false light, but in their best light.

We’ll take a series of .jpegs and RAW files and work them through, right from the start, right to the end. I’ll take you through every stage and explain why we are doing things in a particular order. I’ve given you all the images used on the course to follow along with. I’ll show you problems that can crop up and what do about them. Real world portrait development brings its own set of problems and opportunities, and the various techniques I guide you through take this into consideration. Check out the free preview introduction video and see the files we start out with, and then see just how good we can make them by the end.

This course assumes you have some basic knowledge of Affinity Photo but I’ll also help you there. I’ve included links to videos I recently uploaded plus links to articles I’ve written in the public domain which show you the principles of things like Layer Masks, Layer Blend Ranges and Curves.

By the end of the course you will have followed along with a series of portraits, start to finish. You will gain the confidence to tackle your own images and one day soon you may be looking at a photo of you or a loved one which you’ve enhanced, and thinking ‘That looks fantastic! I did that…’