Put the moves on

James Paterson demonstrates how to add panning blur effects to moving subjects and get to grips with live filters in Affinity Photo

- James Paterson

THE MISSION

Use blur filters to add motion effects to a car in Affinity Photo

Time needed 20 minutes

Skill level Intermediate

Kit needed Affinity Photo

A touch of motion blur can create a sense of action with vehicles and other moving objects in your photos. Shooting for panning blur involves using a fairly slow shutter speed (usually around 1/100 to 1/20 sec depending on the speed of the object), then panning the camera in sync with the object. If the timing and panning is right, the object will come out sharp and the background will be blurred by the movement of the camera. However, it can be tricky to get it perfect in-camera. So if you want to add the motion blur effect to images afterwards, Affinity Photo offers a host of useful tools.

In this project we’ll show you how it’s done. For a realistic panning blur effect we need our car to be sharp and everything else blurred, so we begin by cutting out the car with precise selection tools. We can start our selection with the fantastic Selection Brush, then perfect it with the Refine command. Once done, we can blur everything behind the car.