Create striking shape-shifting effects

James Paterson explains how you can use this fun Affinity Photo technique to make a creative image for your screen wallpaper

-  James Paterson

Affinity Photo is a great tool for photo editing, but it’s also brilliant for making abstract images and incorporating elements of graphic design into your photography. In this project, we explain how to combine your photos with triangle shapes for an inventive effect that would look great as a wallpaper for your computer or phone. The technique for this encompasses lots of fundamental Affinity Photo skills, from shifting images and shapes around to using shadows and adjustment layers. It’s also a good example of how you can make use of shortcuts to speed up your editing.

While the build-up of shapes here might look complicated, it really only takes a few minutes to create. We begin by making a handful of triangle shapes and a few lines to go with them. This is a simple task with the array of shape tools in Affinity Photo. From here, we can merge our shapes and then drop them on top of our portrait image. This bit can be a bit fiddly – there’s a few ways to drop one layer on to another, and we need to take care that the shape layer latches to the side of the image layer thumbnail, so that the side of the thumbnail turns blue. This way, the only parts of the portrait that are visible are those that are directly on top of the shape. Once done, we can add a shadow to give the illusion of depth to our effect, then simply copy and reposition the portrait and shapes to build it up.