Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: Jeremy Roussak on December 12, 2015, 07:54:47 am
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This app (https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/) has just been nominated (I'm not sure what the process might have been) Apple's app of the year. It was briefly mentioned here a few months ago when it came out of beta. Does anyone here have much experience of it? It does look quite interesting.
Jeremy
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This app (https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/) has just been nominated (I'm not sure what the process might have been) Apple's app of the year. It was briefly mentioned here a few months ago when it came out of beta. Does anyone here have much experience of it? It does look quite interesting.
Jeremy
Hi Jeremy,
Yes I agree, very interesting. I have the trial version, but due to the seasonal load on my business I've had no time to explore it. That and Affinity Design seem to offer quite a good bundle from what I've seen so far. I think I'll wait until Apple takes it to the "Cloud" though, YUK! YUK! ::) In all sincerity, I will definitely be giving it a thorough examination as soon as time permits. On the surface it seems to have almost all of the essential tools that PS provides, at least up to PS6. Obviously one never really knows until a good bit of time has been dedicated to the app, but it certainly does look like a substantial alternative to PS in many ways. And definitely the price cannot be beaten if it lives up to its promises. I guess we'll just have to stay tuned.
Gary
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Honestly, I bought it when on sale for $40 just because I want to hedge my bets on Adobe and give them something to maybe be concerned about. I see the Affinity tools as the first real competition they've had in a long time.
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I also bought it when it was first released. I've only used it for light stuff but so for, I like it. The only real "issue" for me is the limited support of PS plug-ins. Note that I'm only a light user of Photoshop, so for my usage, Affinity Photo suits me perfectly. Lately, they added support for panorama stitching, better PS plug-in support, custom shortcuts, etc...
I haven't tried to print with it but I don't print with Photoshop either… LR is perfect for that.
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My initial impressions of Affinity Designer ( Affinity's Illustrator competitor ) are quite positive.
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So first, thanks to Francois for redirecting me here ..
Have just installed a trial version and 'played' with it briefly.
First impressions are good, not sure on what the native editing space is, though.
Ps plug-in support:
Topaz Detail, Clarity, InFocus work, Remask doesn't.
Imagenomic Portraiture works, DxO Viewpoint2, Focus Magic don't.
For portraitists: good native implementation of Frequency Separation and Liquify.
There's a lot under the hood - so yes it's a'steal' at €39 and though not a full Ps replacement yet, it covers a lot of ground, some of it better implemented as well. The plug-in compatibility needs research 'cos they've got both 'native' and 'global' support - the differences and usage of which at this stage beats me, but it's a step in the right direction.
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You should be able to set color profiles in the preferences... Yes, plug-in support is not perfect but they are working on it. As you say, they bring a lot to the table for the price.
You can also ask for features and technical questions on the Affinity forum (https://affinity.serif.com/forum/).
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Is there a way to set the white balance via an eye dropper tool? If there is I can't find it. Thanks
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Is there a way to set the white balance via an eye dropper tool? If there is I can't find it. Thanks
Adjustments > White Balance
Bottom left hand corner in the pop-up dialog box, click on the button 'Picker' , just below the Tint slider.
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Can someone explain what this means:
We’ve got the best PSD support out there
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Adjustments > White Balance
Bottom left hand corner in the pop-up dialog box, click on the button 'Picker' , just below the Tint slider.
Thanks. I just discovered when in the Develop module there appears a White Balance tool on the bottom of the tool set on the left. Don't know how I missed it.
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Can someone explain what this means:
I suspect it's new wave terminology, Andrew.
In other words it''s whatever you make/imagine/expect of it!
In the good old days, we did things like 'contact' support.
Today I email them and get replies such as 'Thank you for reaching out to us ... '
What can I say ?
Reality is sometimes open to selective interpretation ..
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Can someone explain what this means:
Andrew, all I've seen is that they believe that they use the best PSD import engine.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/
Personally, I don't own it but I'm intrigued my it. I do own and use Pixelmator although for very specific things. I am glad to see someone applying a little competition in this space for Adobe. Their recent quarterly results were pretty impressive and I'd hate to have Adobe take us for granted. Like most her on LuLa I have a photo CC subscription for PS and Lr.
I'm also intrigued if they create a DAM to compete with Lr.
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Andrew, all I've seen is that they believe that they use the best PSD import engine.
Just downloaded the trial. It open's a PSD WITH layers and Adjustment layers. Amazing!
Too bad it doesn't appear to do the same with a TIFF. That's really odd. I have to check that more.
What they appear to get right, unlike Adobe is their Gamut Warning overlay. In the image I use to test, in ColorMatch RGB, Adobe shows OOG which is wrong. Affinity doesn't.
What I don't like at all is their 'convert to profile' dialog which doesn't provide options to toggle the rendering intent and soft proof that effect. That seems to be tied into their color preferences. That's in need of fixing.
For $40, this seems like a no brainer.
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What I don't like at all is their 'convert to profile' dialog which doesn't provide options to toggle the rendering intent and soft proof that effect. That seems to be tied into their color preferences. That's in need of fixing.
Perhaps a different way of working ? They assume that you've done all the OOG checks under the Affinity persona/Soft Proof tab which allows you to change rendering intent/profiles/bpc/ combined with opacity, blending modes and OOG display , on the fly and in 'real time' - first.
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Perhaps a different way of working ? They assume that you've done all the OOG checks under the Affinity persona/Soft Proof tab which allows you to change rendering intent/profiles/bpc/ combined with opacity, blending modes and OOG display , on the fly and in 'real time' - first.
They shouldn't assume. :)
Different yes, more work, not ideal. And OOG has nothing to do with selecting a rendering intent. That's a visual analysis that requires toggling the various options. Hard wiring the RI to the color preferences isn't ideal and that's why in Photoshop, the Convert to Profile dialog is far more useful. You can pick any color space, any RI and see what you're doing before you click the OK button.
I suspect this wouldn't be big engineering for Affinity to provide.
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The developers seem pretty responsive to postings on their Feature Requests forum.
One thing I mentioned is to make Apply Image work more like Photoshop's but so far that request hasn't gone too far.
They did make a posting that they plan on developing a DAM app next year.
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The developers seem pretty responsive to postings on their Feature Requests forum.
I did ask about TIFF support on the forums, no word back. It's odd. One can't open a TIFF with layers and when one saves a PSD with layers in their product, Photoshop can open it. When one saves a PSD with layers as a TIFF, the TIFF has no layers. They pay Adobe to support PSD and don't have to for TIFF, it would be nice if they fully supported TIFF as spec'ed.
Not a huge big deal, I'd have to save all layered TIFFs in Photoshop as PSD to use this product, but it's kind of a kludge.
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I did ask about TIFF support on the forums, no word back.
I saw this on their forum, AFAIK, it's not correct:
In short - we do not currently handle layered TIFF files. "Layered TIFF" is actually an Adobe hack - it is not a part of the actual TIFF standard, which has no concept of layers.
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I ended up buying the product. It's pretty impressive and I'm amazed they can sell it at twice the current price considering it's features. It's pretty darn fast too.
They support PSB as well as PSD, TIFF with layers is something they appear to want to support but say it's undocumented which isn't what I've heard elsewhere but who knows. I was told there are products that support layered TIFFs, off hand I don't know of any but will try to do further research. Their raw converter supports DNG which is great for me, no profiles as yet. Hopefully they will support DNG profiles. The clipping overlay for saturation, something they call 'clipped tones' oddly enough, appears to indicate that the processing color space is rather large. On some images I see clipping when I select sRGB, none with ProPhoto, just as I see in ACR/LR. After purchasing, I was able to download and try a beta, the one bug I found was already fixed! Product has great potential.
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They did make a posting that they plan on developing a DAM app next year.
Yes, and that is intriguing. I wonder what they're thinking. A non-destructive RAW workflow tool like Lightroom or Aperture? A way to keep track of RAW files and their resulting TIFFs?
Maybe more clues will come out as they get further into development. Whenever that is.
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Hopefully we'll see a Windows version next year, promised to come after the full suite is complete on Mac.