A message from the Affinity team
As a way to lend support to the creative community during these difficult times, we’re once again offering a 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite, for anyone who wants to use them (even those who have previously completed a free trial). We’re also bringing back the 50% discount for those who would prefer to buy and keep the apps, including our iPad versions.
Check out our beginner's guide to Affinity Designer: In this Affinity Designer tutorial, we explore everything you need to k. Vector graphics tool designed to help graphic designers, web designers, game developers, and professional illustrators create UI/UX designs, typography, icons, and concept art. Affinity Designer provides a contour tool, which enables designers to create abstract shapes for logos or architectural designs using artboards of any size.
More info about supporting the creative community initiative In other news…
our apps are fully optimized for the next generation of Mac
Ready to go on Apple’s Big Sur and primed to deliver superfast performance on Macs with M1 chips, recent updates to the macOS versions of our apps mean huge performance gains.
Learn more about Apple and Affinity updates Clipping is a fundamental design technique in Affinity apps. Andy explores the basics of clipping and the different ways it is used in Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher.
Clipping is an operation you can perform in Affinity that lets you restrict the visibility of an object/layer to another object/layer.
If you’re familiar with a layered stack of objects, as you’d see in a Layers Panel, objects typically stack on top of each other. The top-most object being the nearest to you as you view your screen; the bottom-most object being the furthest back in your document. This is called the Z-order. If objects overlap other objects, then they obscure those from view; objects that aren’t overlapped will always be displayed.
So where does clipping come in? Instead of the above Z-order being used, objects can be made to show inside a targeted ‘parent’ object; areas of the bottom ‘child’ object which lie outside the parent object’s outline are hidden, i.e. clipped from view.
Clipping has several key benefits:
- Brings together differently shapes to form a new shape (without affecting the original shapes).
- Restricts editing to a specific object or layer.
- Non-destructive by nature—initially, the term clipping may sound destructive. In fact the opposite is true—the clipped object can be repositioned, scaled or deleted at any point in the future.
All Affinity apps support clipping, but due to the different characteristics and functionality available in each app, the technique may be used differently to achieve different results.
Affinity Vector Crop Tool
Remember the Z-order mention previously? This is used to control reordering and clipping objects by drag and drop in your layers stack (Layers Panel). Planner 5d pro.
Affinity Vectorize Image
For reordering, the ‘drop’ target is the full width of the layer entries. For clipping, the ‘drop’ target is indented instead to visually indicate that the object will clip.
Affinity Vector Logo
Tip: To be sure of clipping, try dropping over a target object name and release.
Let’s take a look at how that looks in each app using examples appropriate to each desktop app. For Affinity iPad apps, the drop target is shown by dragging directly over a target object.
Clipping in Affinity Designer
Clipping in Affinity Photo
Clipping in Affinity Publisher
Affinity Vector Trace
In summary, Affinity apps use clipping for different design objectives, but the process of applying clipping is identical between apps. The next time you’re in an Affinity session, try nesting an object inside another object to get familiar with this feature.