Changing Native American portrait

I used to airbrush a lot - the analogue type in which a real metal airbrush is hooked up to a compressor to spray real paint on a real surface. That started in the early 80's of the previous century and lasted until approximately 8 to 10 years ago. After that I became more interested in digital image creation and manipulation, also because the programs became better and allowed to approach the quality that traditional airbrushing did. Today, the quality of the digital image creation programs has surpassed the traditional way of working in the sense that it is able to create more accurate detail that, in addition, can be edited endlessly.

I used to mainly use CorelDRAW and Corel PhotoPaint for my personal projects and during the day worked professionally with the Adobe products in the office. Sometimes I used Illustrator and Photoshop for my personal projects as well, but I always found their programs way overpriced. Things got worse when they imposed their subscription model on their users after which I switched to Serif's Affinity Designer (vector drawing program) and Affinity Photo (pixel creating and editing program). I accidentally ran into these programs when aimlessly browsing the Internet.

I've truly fallen in love with the Affinity programs that both cost about 50 USD that give you ownership of the programs and 3 free updates.... That is a whole lot more affordable than the programs in the Adobe suit. Designer and Photo are developing well - bugs are continuously removed and functions are added - which causes them to almost be on par with AI and PS functions wise, while having surpassed them in a certain number of aspects. I may elaborate on this in a future blog entry. In addition Serif issued Affinity Publisher which is and InDesign competitor. Already now Publisher is sufficiently equipped with functions to do by far the most DTP work very well while only lacking compared to ID in very specialist areas like interactive digital publications for instance. But artists that work in that type of document creation are relatively small numbered.

OK, back to what I was going to express here. Sometimes when I get bored, I tinker with images in Affinity Photo. In the old days I used to airbrush a lot of portraits of Native American people. But when browsing the web, it occurred to me that many artists create portraits of the same people, simply because there weren't too many photographers to record faces of Native American people in the old days. In order to create a unique face one has to be created from scratch or an existing one has to be changed so that it looks nothing like the original, trying to preserve the ethnic facial traits of the subject. Gertrude Kasebier and Edward S. Curtis are two of the best known magnificent photographers who shot a large number of great Native American portraits. But in their day, it wasn't like everyone had a camera on their smartphone like people have these days. It is why a relatively small number of genuine photographs of Native Americans exist.

So when I find a photo of a Native American person that I potentially would like to airbrush, but I find elements in their facial traits that I would like to change, I load the photo into Affinity Photo and start tinkering. Some would say that this is historic fraud, which in fact is the case to a certain extent, but that could also be said of the paintings of the brilliant Howard Terpning who I am sure interprets some things according to his personal vision (which is what makes his art so awesome). Personally I enjoy watching Terpning's work. Perhaps a little more and focused on details than the average person, because I want to know where the beauty of art is hiding in the details.

Below you find a brief sequence of me changing a portrait that I found on the web. At the bottom is the original photo. Above that the alterations made in Affinity Photo - mainly using the Liquify Push Forward Tool in the Liquify Persona. The image above that shows more detailing done with the Paint Brush Tool (using a textured brush), The Blur Brush Tool and the Clone Brush Tool. I also used the Color Adjustment and Curve Adjustment filters to make the image more crisp and dramatic. Finally I placed the edited image in a frame in the 3D program Rhinoceros v5 as show in the image at the top. I enjoyed doing this piece of historic fraud that I think turned out quite well considering the original photo was small and of a low resolution (600 x 938 pixels), while damages were present both in the face and in the background.

Tip: click on one of the image and it will be displayed in Google's Lightbox. If you are on a PC (also possible on a Mac I presume) you can turn the scroll wheel of your mouse and flick through the images to compare them.

Placed the edited image in a virtual 3D frame

Image edited with Paint-, Blur- and Clone- Brush tools
to add detail and Colour and Curve Adjustment filters
to make the image more crisp and dramatic looking

Photo edited with the Liquify tool and
Blur tool to remove jagged edges on areas

Reference photo, which was small, low res,
damaged and jagged

Affinity - alternative to the Adobe and Corel suits?

After continuous crashes forced me to look for alternatives to the bug ridden Corel PhotoPaint I ran across Affinity Photo some time ago. While experimenting with open source GIMP, I remained on the look out for other programs to create bitmap art, mainly because GIMP has an entirely different approach and many features are still being developed. Photoshop licences used to be immensely expensive, which got even worse since Adobe switched to a horrendous subscription policy. It has definitively made me forget about using software from that company. All functionality and integration of the programs in the Adobe suit are far outweighed by their deceptively overpriced subscription scam.

Affinity has a wealth of functions that almost make it match Adobe's usability and quality and its pricing is no less than spectacular. The desktop versions of Affinity Photo (for pixel pushers) and Designer - for vector drawers - both sell for 55 Euro. The iPad versions cost just under 20 Euro! This means you buy a license and are not forced to endlessly pay for the use of Adobe's programs and work in their cloud! Affinity's pricing is a humongous financial advantage over that of the Adobe programs. I haven't yet bought the Affinity programs, but watched many tutorials on Youtube, which kindled my enthusiasm. Affinity's programs were selected Apple's editor's choice for very good reasons in 2014 and have improved their functionality ever since. Today there are Mac and Windows versions of the programs, which makes exchange of files a piece of cake.

Affinity exports to psd-files with conservation of all layer information, allowing Photoshop license holders and subscription victims to flawlessly edit them (and send them back to Affinity users if needed). To learn more about Affinity Photo's dazzling feature list, please visit this page. And here you find the Designer feature roadmap. Affinity's managers have even acknowledged it will be possible to import CorelDRAW files some time in the future. This would potentially lower the threshold for quite a few CorelDRAW users to make the switch to Affinity. I remain very curious to their software development progress. The time to ditch the established players on the market that abuse their monopoly position, is nearing rapidly. It was only a matter of time before less expensive but very usable alternatives would emerge. They have become available now and work most excellently.

Update October 6 2017:
I've tried Affinity Photo and was positively surprised by some functions. In Particular the the Pen-tool (comparable with the Path-tool in Photoshop) that actually is parametric, which means you can apply changes to it afterwards, because it actually is a vector shape inside a pixel program. In addition the Pen shape can be turned into a selection that can be blurred... The same parametric property goes for the Prefabricated Shape-tool (of which there are many available) and the Text-tool. The fully customizable Transparency-tool can also be changed afterwards. These are magnificent features for artists and designers. More over, the entire history of applied tools can be viewed and edited, which is something no other bitmap editing program allows to do. I must say I am thoroughly impressed by Serif's programming, Serif being the company that has built Affinity Photo.

I am totally convinced that Affinity Photo is going to gain a market share rapidly, once its presence / availability is going to be noticed by a growing audience. I feel I can safely recommend both the Photo and Designer programs Affinity has created. They're a breath of fresh air in a market that looked like it was being choked by Adobe and Corel. The open source programs GIMP and Inkscape are going to have to step up their development pace if they intend to keep up with Affinity, especially since the company has put a more than friendly price tag to their programs and made them work on Windows, Mac and iPad platforms. Affinity has the potential to change the landscape of graphic design, which is a huge compliment.

Update February 21 2023:
Somewhere in November 2022 Affinity released its 2.0 version of its suit after quite a long time of not upgrading anything significant function wise. Although even after such an extended period of basically not noticeably upgrading the tools of its suit, there were problems mainly by installing the programs because Serif went with the Microsoft store installation method that I described in an other post. However since the 2.0.4 upgrade everything seems to work properly. May functions were added, while existing ones were improved. There still are functions missing - like the blend  and array option for instance - that its competition (e.a. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop) included in their programs, but those are minor things that affect productivity. In addition it has other functions, like the magnificent blur option and effect tools, that by far outperforms those of the Adobe programs, so in the field of functional versatility of its programs things are pretty much balanced between the two. Best of all the Affinity programs do not cost an arm and a leg and are not offered through a subscription model, which is nothing less than plundering users in my and many other peoples' humble opinion. Especially for new users in the graphic market that do not have a six figure bank account and a huge number of legacy files, that could be needing updates or alterations long after the original was created, the Affinity suit is the perfect solution. Give their trial programs a try and you'll find out why I wrote this update.