Anyone using Affinity Photo?

sk66

sk66

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Steven
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I've been messing with this and it seems like a very good option to LR/PS... (Mac only for now). It does everything I use PS for, and some things even more easily (i.e. frequency separation).

Two things I don't like... it's not a non destructive raw editor like LR/ACR is and it has no file management/tagging/etc. (The native Mac Photos app is fine for advanced management)

And the price is great if you want to get away from the Adobe tax. (currently $39.99, usually $49.99)
 
I had a play with the Beta version but returned to PS.
Treated myself at Xmas to the offer and purchased it :)
Just need to jog the old grey matter and try to get back into it !
 
sk66 said:
it's not a non destructive raw editor
Click to expand...
•
NOTHING…
BUT NOTHING WILL EVER OVERWRITE
YOUR RAW FILES IN AFFINITY PHOTO

…as it will read your RAW file but always save as "x" format
of your choice leaving the original untouched.

The file management should be done with a proper converter
and not by a pixel editor… that's Abobe thinking!
 
Like a few people I used the Beta version, and found it worked fine. In fact it worked rather well. It does have a different workflow to Photoshop which does make getting used to it, if you've been with PS for some time, a little difficult. However as I now mainly use Lightroom my need to use PS is limited, so I didn't use it as my main editing software. I would say though, if I didn't already have PS I would defiantly give it a serious look, especially as it's a fraction of the cost of what Photoshop was.
 
Like you all, i tried it. It confused me cos I'm so used to PS/LR. It seems to be a good start. I'd like to see more LR features in it.

For what I use PS for, I could probably switch to Affinity full time. But the lack of LR features means that I would still need LR and therefore continue to pay for CC in which case I may as well continue to use PS CC.
 
You can also use DigiKam for advanced tagging and file management and have the best of both worlds. Digikam is open source and free.
 
Yep I use it, had it since December I think, I have not used any of PS since I had CS2 on an older OSX.

Affinity is good and works well, there are a few quirks to it, like they do not have a dedicated water mark button like LR does (I believe) and when feathering selections is different in scale/grading/use than PS.

It does take a bit of getting use to but they have similar shortcut keys to PS plus they also have a fairly good forum which you can find lots of info.

For the price they charge I think it is good value.
 
sk66 said:
But it also doesn't write changes to xmp or database. You must save it out as a new file (not a huge deal).
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+1
 
sk66 said:
Thanks... At first glance it looks pretty heavy...
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Yes. But that's because it has a lot of functionality. Downloading from camera, uploading to the web, tagging, flagging and cataloging, face recognition, geo-tagging, batch processing. It also has an integrated image editor and raw processor. But I use it with Raw Therapee as it lets you open pictures in any software you like. Yet still keep your workflow in one place.
 
ianp5a said:
Yes. But that's because it has a lot of functionality. Downloading from camera, uploading to the web, tagging, flagging and cataloging, face recognition, geo-tagging, batch processing. It also has an integrated image editor and raw processor. But I use it with Raw Therapee as it lets you open pictures in any software you like. Yet still keep your workflow in one place.
Click to expand...
I've downloaded it...
I think I'm going to start 2016 using these two programs only and see how I get on.
 
ianp5a said:
You can also use DigiKam for advanced tagging and file management and have the best of both worlds. Digikam is open source and free.
Click to expand...
It's also (in it's earlier versions at least) the S L O W E S T cataloging program I have ever tried (and I've tried most of them.)
I settled for the paid for IDImager (or "PhotoSupreme" in it's latest guise.)
 
Brian G said:
It's also (in it's earlier versions at least) the S L O W E S T cataloging program I have ever tried (and I've tried most of them.)
I settled for the paid for IDImager (or "PhotoSupreme" in it's latest guise.)
Click to expand...
The raw editor function is constantly crashing the program on my Mac...
I'm not finding it slow, but it's not really intuitive either... (not too hard to figure out though).
 
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Brian G said:
It's also (in it's earlier versions at least) the S L O W E S T cataloging program I have ever tried (and I've tried most of them.)
I settled for the paid for IDImager (or "PhotoSupreme" in it's latest guise.)
Click to expand...
I've not had any technical issues with it. But it is in very active development, and the performance is top notch on my PC.

sk66 said:
The raw editor function is constantly crashing the program on my Mac...
I'm not finding it slow, but it's not really intuitive either... (not too hard to figure out though).
Click to expand...

Regarding raw, you should be able to right click a raw file and choose the Raw developer of your choice. Such as Affinity. The same with jpegs. As I don't use the integrated raw developer. But I see they've improved that too since I started using it.

I too found it initially a lot to grasp. But a few web searches later, I found out where everything is.
 
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Waiting, with interest, until a Windows version is available to trial...

Anthony.
 
Brian G said:
It's also (in it's earlier versions at least) the S L O W E S T cataloging program I have ever tried (and I've tried most of them.)
I settled for the paid for IDImager (or "PhotoSupreme" in it's latest guise.)
Click to expand...
When I said DigiKam is the slowest, I was referring to the speed of importing files into the database.
It took 4 hours to import about 10,000 image files out of 29,000 on my system, at which point I lost interest in trialling it.
I can't comment on the day to day speed of DigiKam since I gave up waiting for it to import all my images and moved on to something else.
Both IDImager and IMatch imported ALL my images in much less than 4hours.

I'm not sure what release number I was trialling but it was a couple of years ago.

If the latest version has been improved then I may give it another try, but since I do all my organising in LightRoom these days, any additional DAM software is purely for interest.
 
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