Affinity anyone?

[Gasman]

Hi folks
After checking and trialling many PP packages I came across Affinity which is only available for Macs at the moment although a Windows version is promised "hopefully the beta should be available before the end of the year" which seems a powerful package and I`m wondering if others have tried it albeit on a Mac for now and if its worth the wait ;-)?
thanks
Steve

[Manfred M]

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.

[billtils]

Steve

I have been using Affinity Photo for more than 2 years now and can give it an unreserved thumbs up. I use it as an external editor, at first to Aperture but now with CaptureOnePro.

It is that rare thing, a low cost, high performance and fully featured editing** program that does what it says on the tin. If you want to get a feeling for its capability take a look at the Serif Affinity Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/channels/875980 (I take it from your post that you are on a Windows machine and not a Mac - if you are indeed on a Mac or iPad, then go to the Serif web site, not the Apple/Mac App store, and download a free trial copy).

As far as support goes, I've been in the AP beta community from the outset and tech support via the beta website has been excellent on the few occasions I had to call on it.

** It does not include a Digital Asset Manager

[Ian H]

I had a play with the free trail version a few months ago, mostly it seems to be pretty good value until that is you come to wanting to produce a printed version of your image, it is almost like this element of the software was a second thought and I need up having to use PS or LR to print he images which to my mind is defeating the whole idea of not using Adobe software.

[Black Pearl]

Well I downloaded the trial and had a go with a Fuji X-T1 RAF file - which it made an absolute pigs ear of.

The interface isn't particularly slick and from a bit of a play its not very intuitive.
It was horribly slow opening the RAF file and it doesn't work on a hi-res screen so when you ask to see the image at 100% it isn't anywhere near.
The raw rendering failed hopelessly - honestly you can't even use the image from it - see below.
The Save As function doesn't give you any file formats or size options or anything else.
I finally found the Export panel which did and got a jpeg of a crop I made to show the disastrous demosaicing.

Unless there is some major and I mean MAJOR rewriting of the software from the ground up it is a 100% failure.

[billtils]

Ian


It does print in quite a straightforward manner. The easiest was to do it is via the "New Document" pathway where you can set the parameters to match your intended output. It's just a different path to the same destination.

[billtils]

Robin, if you don't like it - fine, but this is not the conclusion that most people come to. The beta site has loads of posts from people delighted with the transition from Adobe.

What I would add is that your feedback supports a comment that I make consistently when people post here asking for advice - if you are interested in some new hardware or software try it out and make a decision on the basis of your personal experience. Mine with AP was and continues to be excellent. But then I may be quirky since when looking for an Aperture replacement LR was one of the first things I tried. It was a no-brainer "No" from me ...

[Black Pearl]

Its not so much that I don't like it - more that it failed completely to render a useable image from my RAF files.

If it can't even do that then the rest of its features are pointless and while I'd love to have a play with it because I like to experiment and I like to try new things its simply not possible.

[Gasman]

Hi folks
Many thanks for the very helpful replies ☺.
Manfred - no probs be as blunt as you like 😊. Like most new things I embark on I go in all guns blazing then choose a direction to go in and stick with it, I'm just sussing out that direction and the software choice I suppose is part of that. Most folk I speak to say that Photoshop is the way to go but I don't know enough of the subject to commit to a subscription and I've tried the alleged 2nd best Lightroom which was okish but ran terribly slow on my dual core laptop hence me looking around for options.
Hopefully when I know more of what I need then a better informed decision can be made.😁
Regards
Steve

[asomerfield]

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.

[Donald]

Hello all,

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

Hello Andy and thank you for coming in with your comments on the forum. I'm sure people taking part in this thread will appreciate your input. And, of course, you're more than welcome to remain an active participant in the forum.

[Gasman]

Hi Andy
Hows the Windows version coming along?. I keep asking when but just told the above!. Suppose like all things software it will be ready when its ready .
best
Steve

[asomerfield]

Hi Andy
Hows the Windows version coming along?. I keep asking when but just told the above!. Suppose like all things software it will be ready when its ready .
best
Steve

Gasman,

It's actually a little further along than most people think - I would stay tuned - back half of this week (if all goes well - which, sometimes, it does not).

Software is ready when it's ready - that's certainly true.. trouble is.. it's never really ready

Thanks,

Andy.

[Manfred M]

Gasman, back half of this week (if all goes well - which, sometimes, it does not).

It sounds like software development has not changed very much since I got out the field. Things were aways going to be "ready by the end of the week". A cycle that seemed to repeat itself from week to week. After product launch, the same story seemed to be true about bug fixes.

[Manfred M]

I've tried the alleged 2nd best Lightroom which was okish but ran terribly slow on my dual core laptop hence me looking around for options

Slow running is often a problem of insufficient memory and the slowness is the computer swapping things out to the hard drive. The best solution is adding memory (16GB is really what is required to run image editing software efficiently) and if your laptop can't handle that much, a second option is to replace the mechanical hard drive with a SSD (solid state drive). That is something I ended up doing on my laptop.

Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 do a far better job of memory management than the older versions of Window (Windows 7 and earlier), and of course one needs the 64bit version of Windows as well (just in case you are running an old Win 7 machine).

[davidedric]

Gasman,

It's actually a little further along than most people think - I would stay tuned - back half of this week (if all goes well - which, sometimes, it does not).

Software is ready when it's ready - that's certainly true.. trouble is.. it's never really ready

Thanks,

Andy.

The question is, usually, is it ready when marketing say, or when engineering say?

Look forward to the launch - the more competitive products out there the better!

Dave

[Gasman]

Gasman,

I would stay tuned - back half of this week (if all goes well - which, sometimes, it does not).

That will be pretty cool Andy as I`ve been biding my time waiting for the release of On1 Photo Raw due Nov 23rd but I could be persuaded otherwise .
cheers
Steve

[Gasman]

Slow running is often a problem of insufficient memory and the slowness is the computer swapping things out to the hard drive. The best solution is adding memory (16GB is really what is required to run image editing software efficiently) and if your laptop can't handle that much, a second option is to replace the mechanical hard drive with a SSD (solid state drive). That is something I ended up doing on my laptop.

Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 do a far better job of memory management than the older versions of Window (Windows 7 and earlier), and of course one needs the 64bit version of Windows as well (just in case you are running an old Win 7 machine).

Been thinking about what you said re the memory Manfred and have to say that my 4gb ram dual core Pentium running Windows 10 64 bit when running some the other apps I mention really flies in particular Acdsee Ultimate 10, On1 photo a bit clunky, DXO Optics runs fine when it gets going,Aftershot pro 3 good and all the rest seem to run ok but Lightroom just seems to slog away so I assume it's all down to how the software deals with the PC's resources. Maybe it's time for a new lappy??
Best
Steve

[Manfred M]

Been thinking about what you said re the memory Manfred and have to say that my 4gb ram dual core Pentium running Windows 10 64 bit when running some the other apps I mention really flies in particular Acdsee Ultimate 10, On1 photo a bit clunky, DXO Optics runs fine when it gets going,Aftershot pro 3 good and all the rest seem to run ok but Lightroom just seems to slog away so I assume it's all down to how the software deals with the PC's resources. Maybe it's time for a new lappy??
Best
Steve

If you look at the Adobe site, they give the resource requirements for the Lightroom software. While Adobe suggests it can run with 2GB of RAM, they recommend 8GB.


https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/sy...uirements.html


The way I read this is that the software will load and run something with 2GB, but if you want it to run at a reasonable speed and efficiency, then 8GB is required. Nicely said, at 2GB, nothing else had better be running and the program will be swapping out to the (painfully slow) HDD like crazy.

If you go for a new laptop, make sure you get a decent amount of RAM, otherwise you will see the same issue all over again. Even with 8MB of RAM, there is still some swapping, which is why I also went with a SSD with its much higher read / write speeds.

[davidedric]

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