Watch the video: Use Affinity to create a vintage-inspired contact sheet
If you find it difficult to choose your favorite shot from a series of similar images, consider how this was even more difficult in cinema days. One of the methods used to check and compare shots in the past was a contact sheet. This was a practical way to display an entire roll of film on a single sheet of paper, and in the past it was an important part of the creative process for photographers.
While it may be outdated in practical terms, it’s still an interesting visual effect to try. Here we’ll pay tribute to the contact sheet and show you how to recreate the look of a sequence of shots in Affinity Photo.
We have provided a contact sheet template, (downloadable here on your computer), so that you can fill it with images using the parent-child feature of the layers. We can create rectangles for each frame and then make our shots children of these rectangles, which allows us to crop each image as we want without any overlap between the frames. Finally, we will add some notes and increase the tones to finish. That’s how…
01 Create a box
Open the “contact sheet” file provided in Affinity (download here), then go to Document> Rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Next, we’ll create frames to snap each of our images to. Grab the Rectangle tool from the toolbar and drag a shape to the top left frame.
02 Copy the rectangles
Grab the Move tool, hold down Alt and drag the rectangle to make a copy. Place it on the next frame. Keep dragging Alt to make copies for each of the frames. Next, drag the bottom layer to the top of the stack, so that the edge of the film is in front of everything else.
03 Make a ‘baby’
With the Move tool, click on the first frame to select the relevant layer. Roll a hit in Affinity. It will appear as a layer above the rectangle. Drag the image layer over the rectangle, then drag to the right: the camera will become a “child” of the shape layer.
04 Fill the frames
Now the image layer is limited to the rectangle, we can drag the bounding box to resize it to fit as we want. Highlight the next frame and drag another shot – repeat. Continue the same way to fill in all the frames, varying the cutouts as you go.
05 Copy the note
Highlight the top image layer, then click the Adjustment icon in the Levels panel and select Black and White – Adjust colors as needed. Then, open the “Contact Sheet Notes” image (download here). Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select one of the shapes, then copy and paste it.
06 Merge the note into
Use the Move tool to position and resize the note on the frames, then click the gear icon to open the merge window. Drag the black point on the source layer ranges down to blend the whites, leaving the red.
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