Affinity Photo 2

[rpcrowe]

My wife had an altercation with Adobe regarding the credit card she was using and decided to cancel her membership to Adobe Photoshop.

She has downloaded Affinity Photo 2 and likes it quite a bit. I have played with it also and, since I am not doing very much photography these days (due to age and health concerns) - So I am considering cancelling my Adobe subscription and Affiity Photo 2 for my photo editing.

I learned that I can link my subscription to NIK Software to Affinity. I do a lot of my processing with NIK Software and would not have switched to Affinity Photo 2 if I could not use NIK software.

I also enjoy using Portrait Professional as a plug-in with Photoshop and was happy to learn that I could also use that plug-in with Affinity Photo 2.

The Photoshop subscription is costing me about ten U.S. Dollars per month and I can get Affinity Photo 2 for a one-time cost of seventy U.S. Dollars. That is a decent savings in the long run.

EVEN BETTER - I just learned that Judy can install Affinity Photo 2 on a second computer (mine) at the base price.

[billtils]

Richard, I was an early and long time user of Affinity Photo (from version 1.2), but have moved to the "Dark Side" and now subscribe to Adobe Photo. Like anything else, AP has its good and not so good points. The main ones on the "good" side are exactly those you mention, the not so good are no integrated library function and the limited number of worthwhile "how to" support videos compared to the Adobe offerings. The crunch for me was the release of V2 which I had to delete and reinstall several times due to crashes, and yes, I know, I should have been more patient and let the team sort things out. Bottom line - if you want to exit Adobe land for whatever reason, download the free trial version of AP, give it a go, and make up your own mind

[rpcrowe]

I have been a bit surprised at the plethora of instructional videos regarding Affinity Photo 2. I certainly did not expect this many videos. Some of them seem to be rather good.

However - using the NIK Software (which I have been using or years) will make the transition a bit smoother. I actually do the majority of my selections using the NIK system I absolutely LOVE the NIK Software U-Point technology.

We originally found Affinity Photo 2 when we were searching for a program which would allow my wife to open the images which she had saved in PSD format after she dumped Photoshop!

I have never had any problems with Photoshop but, I have always detested having to communicate with the Adobe Corporation. This began early on. My wife is a professor emeritus from a local college. The Adobe site states that she should be eligible for an educational discount even if she s no longer an active professor. The was impossible to obtain.

[rpcrowe]

I am having problems with Affinity - there are many things that are different between that program and Photoshop.

I am sure that the problems are operator related - I am going to need to delve deeper into this program in order to figure out if I want t use it.

I have tried to resize an image to 4x6 inches and have had problems. This seems pretty damn straight forward but doesn't work:

"To resize an image in Affinity Photo 2, you can use the Resize Document option in the Document menu:

Open the image in Affinity Photo

Select Resize Document from the Document menu

Enter the new dimensions in the Size boxes

Optionally, change the units, DPI, or resample method

Click Resize"

Right now, I am thinking that I will continue with my Photoshop and pay the monthly charge but, my wife needs help with Affinity.

[Chataignier]

I have had this discussion with colleagues recently, from my point of view a digital image does not have dimensions in inches or centimetres, it only has pixels and a ratio between the width and the height. A digital image with say 6000x4000px can be printed to paper in 3x2 format at any size : bigger and the resolution is lower, smaller and the resolution is higher. Physical size has no meaning at the pixel level.

Affinity offers 2 re-dimension options, change the number of pixels in the image ie change the resolution, and change the number of pixels in the "canvas" ie add a white space around the image or subtract from (crop) the image. These are the two things you might wish to do and have no bearing on the size of the paper you might eventually print onto.

If you want to crop off part of the image at the same proportions or even to change the proportions of the image, much simpler to simply use the crop/framing tool.

[Doctor Doog]

I have had this discussion with colleagues recently, from my point of view a digital image does not have dimensions in inches or centimetres, it only has pixels and a ratio between the width and the height. A digital image with say 6000x4000px can be printed to paper in 3x2 format at any size : bigger and the resolution is lower, smaller and the resolution is higher. Physical size has no meaning at the pixel level.

Affinity offers 2 re-dimension options, change the number of pixels in the image ie change the resolution, and change the number of pixels in the "canvas" ie add a white space around the image or subtract from (crop) the image. These are the two things you might wish to do and have no bearing on the size of the paper you might eventually print onto.

If you want to crop off part of the image at the same proportions or even to change the proportions of the image, much simpler to simply use the crop/framing tool.

In would want to be able to send someone a jpeg that they could print at a certain size, but no bigger, without having to work out how many pixels that corresponds to in my head. I cover the local amateur sports teams and am happy to give them images for social media or a small enprint, but if they are printing something to go on the clubroom, or dining room, wall, I would want some recompense and control over quality.

[Manfred M]

David - this is not a completely straight forward answer here, but something that I (and other high quality printermakers that I know) do is to assume that you can make 1 pixel that the camera has captured equal to one dot that the printer reproduces. That way you avoid any issues with scaling the image.

The only other concern is knowing the native resolution of the printer.

For historical reasons (American companies were first on the scene) we work with pixels per inch (PPI) on our displays and the metric conversion is a "soft" or calculated number. The same goes for printers where two standards have appeared for printing processes we tend to use for photographic printing. Canon and HP ink jet photo printers have a native resolution of 300 dots per inch (DPI) and Epson photo printers are 360 DPI.

Even the use of the term "dots" is confusing. Printers use a CMYK colour process, so if you have an ordinary four ink printer, each "dot" of colour is made up of smaller dots of each ink colour. My Epson P800 uses 8 different colour ink cartridges, so each "dot" that is printed is made up of up to 8 different dots of colour. Those 8 different inks are able to produce more individual hues than the four-colour printer, so those prints will have a wider gamut.

The use of of the word dots to have two different meanings is confusing...

So if I have a 3600 x 2400 dpi image from my camera, using this 1ppi = 1dpi assumption, on a Canon or HP photo printer, my native print resolution will be 3600 / 300 = 12 inches 2400 / 300 = 8 inch native sized print. On the Epson, we are looking at 3600 / 360 = 10 inches by 2400 / 360 = 6.667 inches. Different printers create different sized prints when scaled at 100%.

That being said, the printer drivers do an excellent job interpolating the data, so while this matters in theory, it is far less important in practice.

[Chataignier]

Manfred, I can understand the interest in avoiding interpolation by the printer driver but while you can avoid interpolation by the printer driver by choosing a size that maps one pixel to one printer dot, unless that size corresponds to the camera native resolution there will have been interpolation in the image processing software when the image was resized. So, in the end one is doomed to accept interpolation somewhere in the process unless you print at a size that maps one camera native pixel to one printer dot and that means all images from a given camera must be printed at the same size.

So I come back to the notion that pixel based image files have no meaningful physical dimensions, only an upper limit imposed by the need to maintain a minimum ppi value (normally held to be around 300) for reasonable quality.

[DanK]

Isn't the interpolation done primarily by the printing software, not the print driver? Photoshop and LR do resizing.

In my experience, it isn't necessary to maintain a minimum of 300 ppi, or whatever value is the native value of the printer (360 for Epson, normally 300 for Canon.) A modest degree of upsizing is fine, as long as you are not standing 5 cm from the print and looking for minor differences in resolution. There are lots of arguments about the relative quality of the resizing algorithms in printing software--e.g., the mathematically explicit ones in Photoshop or the proprietary ones in software like QImage--but differences tend to be small unless the resizing is substantial.

I print using Lightroom, which has a fixed resizing algorithm that isn't user-modifiable. I've displayed prints up to 17 x 22 (roughly A2), mostly taken with cameras that have anywhere from 18 to 30 MPX. I have never had a single person offer a negative comment about the sharpness of the prints. In some cases, I can tell the difference, but no one else has ever commented, and I don't think anyone has noticed. The most extreme is this one:



which is a roughly 8 MPX crop from a 12-MPX image taken with a Lumix LX-100 I. I printed it roughly 11 x 19 inches (28 x 48 cm). It was obvious to me that the quality was not what I was getting from the 5D III I was usually shooting with then, and it took me an atypically large amount of editing. However, I displayed it in a gallery for months and have had it on my wall for a few years. The only comments I have received have been positive.

This is not to say that you lose nothing if the print dot count is substantially higher than the pixel count. Of course, you do. But in my experience, the difference has to be substantial before it's readily visible.

Also, keep in mind that most people are (hopefully) looking at the image, not dots.

Some Canon printers, including mine, also offer a 600 dpi setting. Years ago, Jeff Schewe did a test of that and found that if you have a very large file that needs to be downsized, 600 dpi is better. I tested it. He's right, though it takes some determination to see the difference.

[Chataignier]

I think we are all agreeing with each other to a large extent, but expressing it differently.

However, I come back to the initial post by Richard saying he wanted to resize an image to 6" x 4" and my contention that the dimensions in inches are meaningless and that's why Affinity doesnt really handle it well.

The process as I do it is : crop the image to 3x2 proportions using the crop tool, dont change the number of pixels or any other SIZE measure so as to keep as many pixels as you can, then PRINT to 6" x 4". I do this in LR by the way.

Without changing the image file in any way you could equally well print to 12"x8" (if you have enough pixels to satisfy your personal quality rrequirements) or 3"x2", the image file remains the same.

[DanK]

I think we are all agreeing with each other to a large extent, but expressing it differently.

However, I come back to the initial post by Richard saying he wanted to resize an image to 6" x 4" and my contention that the dimensions in inches are meaningless and that's why Affinity doesnt really handle it well.

The process as I do it is : crop the image to 3x2 proportions using the crop tool, dont change the number of pixels or any other SIZE measure so as to keep as many pixels as you can, then PRINT to 6" x 4".

Without changing the image file in any way you could equally well print to 12"x8" (if you have enough pixels) or 3"x2", the image file remains the same.

That's what I do. Because I print from Lightroom, this is very simple. After cropping, one has to set dimensions in the print module. Once I set the size I want, the software resizes the image accordingly. It offers a few options for how the print is outputted, but I have found only one thing I have to change: I set the contrast and brightness both to +10. By trial and error, I found that for me (YMMV), these values compensate for the difference between emissive and reflective displays.

[billtils]

... It offers a few options for how the print is outputted, but I have found only one thing I have to change: I set the contrast and brightness both to +10. By trial and error, I found that for me (YMMV), these values compensate for the difference between emissive and reflective displays.

Thanks for that tip, or more precisely, the explanation, Dan. I have found myself doing that on some images and wondering what I had done wrong pre-print