Affinity anyone?

[Black Pearl]

To add to Dave and Manfred's info - a dual core Pentium might be getting a bit long in the tooth for most high demand modern software packages and I'm guessing the laptop in question has very basic shared graphics memory and not the dedicated GPU recommended by Adobe.


As an aside I found that Affinity took longer to open and render (incorrectly) a RAF file than ACR does - and that is on a two month old machine with an i7, a M.2 SSD, 24GB of RAM and a large/fast GPU so I'm not convinced Lightroom (Adobe) is the issue here.

[Gasman]

so I'm not convinced Lightroom (Adobe) is the issue here.

I agree more than likely the user 😃
Steve

[John 2]

Much also depends on what you want to do with your software. As I understand it, LR doesn't have a layers capability. 8GB of RAM might well be sufficient for LR or if you only intend to carry out basic adjustments but once you want to go beyond that, Manfred's recommended 16GB is nearer the mark. I wouldn't be without layers these days and I have 32GB of RAM on board. Even so, occasionally the processing isn't instant.

[Manfred M]

I wouldn't be without layers these days and I have 32GB of RAM on board.

John - that is the way my desktop is configured too, but finding a laptop with that much RAM is going to be challenging, hence the maximize your RAM and get an SSD for when the OS has to swap memory to the drive is really the only work around I found. My (now getting long in the tooth) ASUS laptop with 8GB of RAM and SSD works fine, but nowhere near as well as my desktop. Unfortunately fast RAM has an impact on battery life, so laptop manufacturers tend to put in as little as they can get away with. Even the newly released (and premium priced) MacBook Pros are have a base 8 GB with an option to go to 16GB.

[Gasman]

You would go and release it Andy while I'm away on hols with no laptop
Cheers for it anyway!
Steve

[Mike Buckley]

a Windows version is promised "hopefully the beta should be available before the end of the year"

That beta version for Windows is now available.

[JohnRostron]

I have just downloaded the Windows beta. I have only had a brief trial, but I was stymied when
I tried to save an edited jpeg. Apparently I have to export It! It would appear that the default save: .aphoto saves the history by default, which may be no bad thing. My impression is that it will do most of what I might want, but I my have to work hard to find out how.

John

[billtils]

John, are you using it as a stand-alone editor or as an external editor? If the former, then yes, the default format for a "Save" is .aphoto, but if the latter, a simple save (keyboard shortcut CMD S on a Mac) will complete the round trip and return the edited image.

[JohnRostron]

I was using it as a stand-alone editor. I would envisage that this would be my normal usage. I am currently looking to wean myself off Adobe CC.

John

[billtils]

John, what do you use for your library/digital asset management? Most, if not all, will let you define an external editor, which would open up the simpler round trip option for you.

[Black Pearl]

Hello all,

My name is Andy Somerfield and I'm responsible for the Affinity Photo product over here at Serif Labs.

Black Pearl - thanks for taking the time to have a look at Affinity Photo. I'm sorry your experience wasn't good. Our RAW development is often criticised - please let me try to explain what's happening.. In Photo, you can choose between two RAW development engines - the first, and default, is the "Serif Labs" engine. This engine is a "change nothing" decoder - what you see on the screen is precisely what the camera sensor saw - no sharpening, no denoise, no lens correction.. nothing. It's often the case that what you get out of this decoder looks horrible - and the user is responsible for all corrections using the develop module and often "post" using the main software features..

On the other hand, you can change the engine to "Apple RAW (Core Image)". This will make Photo use the exact same processing engine as Aperture did - and includes all the "for free" pre-processing which comes with it. Some users prefer to work directly with sensor data, some with what Apple thinks it should look like - the split is roughly 50/50 and often dependant on the camera / lens used.

That said, we are aware of some significant shortcomings with the "Serif Labs" engine as shipped in the last release and have already taken some steps to rectify that in the forthcoming 1.5 release. Users which own the app have been able to download and use this 1.5 version as a beta for some time and their feedback has been (and continues to be) invaluable to us as we attempt to improve things.

There are literally millions of body / lens combinations out there and it is impossible for us to get it right for everything all the time - but we do pride ourselves on our willingness to directly (as in the development team themselves) work with anyone who has any problem at all with our software, on our forum. I would urge you to make a post there in the "Affinity Photo Beta" section - I will do all I can to resolve any issues you are having.

As has been mentioned, Photo is not a DAM - the RAW development module is provided as a convenience to users when they want to develop and process a single shot. We often come across users who have success using Photo as an editor for a number of third party DAMs - LR, CaptureOne, etc. The 1.5 updates contains further improvements for those users too - the ability to interop using layered PSD being the most interesting.

Thanks again,

Andy.

Thank you for taking the time to search the entire internet looking for random people who are having issues with your software - that is above and beyond.

I have had another couple of tries at opening my Fuji RAF files but unfortunately I still have some issues that unless they can be overcome are major stumbling blocks:

1. I have been unable to find a setting that renders the image pixels at a true 100%. By that I mean the software doesn't seem to recognise the native resolution of the screen being used and is scaling the images. If I'm not missing something then that is a little odd as pretty much all Apple screens are high resolution (Retina/4k/5k) these days and without an accurate 100% view it is impossible to accurately edit and sharpen an image. This is particularly pronounced on my 5k screen.

2. Is there a way to increase the RAW processing performance as it takes between 8 and 10 seconds to open a RAF file - as a comparison ACR taken less than 2 seconds on the same machine. On the same thread is it possible to synchronise multiple open files to apply setting to all?

3. On the RAW processing screen there is no right-click feature to any of the basic tools making tasks rather long winded and the crop tool seems to deal in pixels not ratios - is that correct?

4. There doesn't seem to be any way to crop/export/save a file with a specific print size without re-sampling it?

There are other quirks that wth a little practice will disappear or become less troublesome but as you somehow managed to find this thread and replied directly I thought I'd pick your brain further and the info may be useful for others wanting to trial your software.

[xpatUSA]

Hello all,

My name is Andy Somerfield and I'm responsible for the Affinity Photo product over here at Serif Labs.

Black Pearl - thanks for taking the time to have a look at Affinity Photo. I'm sorry your experience wasn't good. Our RAW development is often criticised - please let me try to explain what's happening.. In Photo, you can choose between two RAW development engines - the first, and default, is the "Serif Labs" engine. This engine is a "change nothing" decoder - what you see on the screen is precisely what the camera sensor saw - no sharpening, no denoise, no lens correction.. nothing. It's often the case that what you get out of this decoder looks horrible - and the user is responsible for all corrections using the develop module and often "post" using the main software features.

Andy.

Hello Andy,

Thanks - that explains my experience with a Sigma Merrill file today that was shot at 1600 ISO and presumably any other non-AFE Sigma camera X3F file shot at anything higher than base ISO.

Please see https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/58633399
.

[Gasman]

Any sign of a lens correction tool or better still auto lens correction guys?
Thanks
Steve

[rpcrowe]

The consensus among Lightroom users seems to be that 16gb is needed for decent performance, and an ssd for caching as well as for the catalogue.

Dave

As I mentioned in another posting, I upgraded my Photoshop to Adobe CC from CS6. I got the CC package at $99 USD for a year and I am quite happy with the new CC.

HOWEVER...

I also upgraded my computer and monitor at the same time that I upgraded to CC. I now work with 32 Gigs of Ram as well as two Hard-drives: one an SSD and the other traditional.

My performance over CS6 with the old computer is much improved. BUT... how much the improvement is due to my new computer and how much of the improvement can be attributed to CC vs. CS6?

I do know that my ON1 Photo 10 works much faster with the new computer.

I use a combination of CC versions of Photoshop and Bridge but don't use Lightroom. I also use ON1 Photo 10 (and have upgraded to On1 Photo RAW which will arrive sometime this month) and I use NIK for much of my editing.

Whatever editor you choose, I suggest that you get one that is compatible with the NIK software. You can use NIK as a stand alone editor but, I find it much easier to use my NIK filters as part of my Photoshop CC setup. NIK software is the absolute best value in photo editing programs (it is free) but, although is can work as a stand alone editor, it cannot do everything that can be accomplished in Photoshop, Lightroom or even Photoshop Elements.

The new On1 Photo Raw is touted as being a full service editor. We'll see! I still think that I will use it in conjunction with my Photoshop CC.

[John 2]

................................My performance over CS6 with the cold computer is much improved. BUT... how much the improvement is due to my new computer and how much of the improvement can be attributed to CC vs. CS6? .........................

Richard, I used both in parallel for while on the same computer and didn't notice much difference. PS CC does more though and more significantly for me, PS CC ACR will handle my Fuji raw files.

[DavidAllen]

Steve - let me be a little blunt here. There are many editing packages out there from a vast number of suppliers, all with different functionality and different costs (including "free"). The "elephant in the room" is Adobe with its offerings (Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements). Then there are all the rest.

Based on the questions we see here, the I would suggest that the majority of the site members use one of the Adobe products (note - you can't buy Photoshop, it is only available on a subscription basis and there are rumours that Lightroom might be headed that way as well). There are a few folks that use the software that shipped with their camera or upgraded to something that the camera supplier sells as an upgrade.

A lot of people on Mac used Aperture, before Apple discontinued the product and some might have switched to iPhoto, others went to Lightroom and others went to Phase One's Capture One.

Commercially, I believe that Corel still has a fairly significant following with its Paint Shop Pro product. There are also a number of Gimp (free software) users here.

I'm not aware of anyone here using Affinity, although there may be. The downside is that the support for many of these other products is quite variable. You'll find a lot of support for the more popular products by the user community, but this is not necessarily the case for these less well known products.

If you are just learning, I would highly recommend you look at a product that you can get help with when you get stuck (notice I didn't say "if you get stuck"). If you are a competent user, you should be able to figure things out yourself, but not so much if you are just starting out.

I've recently purchased Affinity Photo following a 10 day trial & I find it to be excellent. Having used PS for years I've finally had enough. The subscription model, the bloat, the poor speed... It may be the 'industry standard' but personally I've found Affinity able to do almost everthing PS can do, it's faster and some operations which in PS can be convoluted, are, in Affinity often just a couple of clicks.
Support is pretty damning good and there's numerous video tutorials, all located in the same place.
You talk of the 'elephant in the room', a very apt description of PS (in my opinion) - the weight of an elephant and moves at about the same speed. It's high time PS had some competition and Affinity, as it matures, could well be just that.

[JohnRostron]

John, what do you use for your library/digital asset management? Most, if not all, will let you define an external editor, which would open up the simpler round trip option for you.

I am now using ACDSee Pro, which seems to do all I want of it, though I am still finding my way around it. I have now cancelled my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription from when it next expires. I still retain PS CS5 for when I really need Photoshop.

Affinity will not import from a scanner, but I have discovered that if I scan with VueScan, the image will then open in Affinity.

John

[Manfred M]

You talk of the 'elephant in the room', a very apt description of PS (in my opinion) - the weight of an elephant and moves at about the same speed. It's high time PS had some competition and Affinity, as it matures, could well be just that.

One issue with almost any software around is that the requirements to run it has changed over time. Bloat is a feature of pretty well any package out there and adding more RAM seems to solve a lot of issues.

I'm afraid I have not noticed any performance speed issues with Photoship CC 2017, and I am currently running using a 4+ year old laptop with 8GB of RAM. It does run faster on my desktop, where I have a 1 year old machine and 32GB or RAM.

When I look at the Affinity specs, it does not support some of the features of Photoshop that I use daily - the various content aware functions and the dehaze feature.

There are people who do not want to use Adobe, Microsoft, etc. products out of principle, and that's fine by me. I am always the first one to suggest that full blown Photoshop is definitely too much of product for most photographers.

[JohnRostron]

...in the Affinity specs, it does not support some of the features of Photoshop that I use daily - the various content aware functions and the dehaze feature.

For information, Affinity does have a content-aware equivalent in the InPainting brush. It also has a dehaze filter. Serif is very responsive to user feedback. If it cannot, or will not add a feature, the staff on the forum will usually make it very clear why.

John

[Manfred M]

For information, Affinity does have a content-aware equivalent in the InPainting brush. It also has a dehaze filter. Serif is very responsive to user feedback. If it cannot, or will not add a feature, the staff on the forum will usually make it very clear why.

John

John - I have installed the demo on my laptop worked with it for a for a bit.

My first impressions are definitely in line with Robin's assessment. This software is painfully slow compared to Photoshop CC 2017. Some of the basic functions in the raw converter that occur in fractions of a second with Adobe, Phase One and DxO Labs products plod along and can be measured in the tens of seconds (simple stuff like removal of CA).

Yes it does have fairly good content aware functionality; the quality of the algorithms seems to be good. I did a head to head comparison, and I would give the Photoshop tool a very slight edge here, in terms of better edges and colour match, but the Affinity implementation is very good too. A second pass with the tool seems to all that was required to get a better blend.

The dehaze tool, on the other hand is painfully slow and does not seem to be as effective as the Photoshop implementation.

I did own an early implementation of the ACDSee software, but that was probably 20 years ago, so I suspect I wouldn't recognize the power of the more recent implementations.