... I criticised Affinity for having it's own format when it first came out in 2016. Affinity were in it for the long game and when they had developed their full suite of Photo, Designer and Publisher the reason for their own format became clear.
In Affinity Publisher you can have a document with a photo or graphic embedded in the page and then decide you need to make some change to the graphic or photo. In every other app you need to fire up Affinity Photo or Designer, find and load the photo/graphic into Photo/Designer. Make your changes, save the Photo/Graphic to your hard drive. Go back into Publisher, find the Photo/graphic and replace the existing file in the document with the new file.
What happens with Affinity Publisher is that you simply press a button and the UI changes to either Designer or Photo, you make your changes and press the button to go back to the Publisher UI. This is a game changing way to work.
I had read this before, but had forgotten the specifics. I knew there was a reason for their format. I knew they weren't just being bl**dy minded. However that wasn't my point. I wasn't criticizing them for creating their own format. My point was about interoperability, which is a wider issue:
I would guess that given this complexity, third parties find it very difficult to understand and read the file format. Doesn't help with being able to see files in other applications but it isn't a case of Serif being awkward :-)
I think it is actually, and I have the forum posts to back me up. I use a Win-only digital image database program called Imatch. In order for IMatch to index and manage afphoto files along with all the other image formats, the IMatch author needs some basic info about the file format. So he posted on the Affinity forum and asked,
here. You can read the responses. Particularly
this one. I call that being awkward.
Adobe could get away with this sort of behaviour, being the 1800kg gorilla in the room. But it makes no sense for the new kid on the block to try to lock its users into their own closed universe. For people starting out that might work, but if you want existing users with established worflows and existing image inventories to adopt your s/w, you have to enable them to fit it into their extising workflow, not to require them to ditch it all and start from scratch. These posts are old, but I don't see any signs of change.
Having had that rant, Remko's point partly mollifies me:
You do not have to save your file in the afphoto format. I save a file - with its layers - in the TIFF format. When you do that there is an option to save the affinity layers as well. ... use the Export command.
Thanks, I'm not sure I did know this. Either I forgot, or I missed that export option. Yes, that works. The export dialogs are not perfect, but even PS can open the file, although of course it doesn't show the layers. I wish it was a native save or save as option rather than export, but I guess they want to push you towards their own format.
So layered TIFFs from Affinity are like layered TIFFs from PS, other programs can read the flat file, but only the creating program can read the layers. Except that Affinity has a limited capacity to read PS layers, so in that sense it's ahead.
P.S. inspired by all this I have been playing some more, and am further mollified. (i) The afphoto file format seems to be very efficient at storing 16 bit images, unlike PS where the TIFF compression options are essentially useless for 16 bit. So that's a big tick for afphoto, despite my interoperability concerns. (ii) PS
can read layers created by Affinity if the file is exported as PSD. So there's more interoperability than I thought. This is another reminder that PSD is a more useful file format than TIFF because it's better understood, despite being proprietary. Which is not what I long thought.
This is way OT so I'll stop, but I've learnt a lot from this exchange. Thanks.
