Moving away from Adobe

[rdenney]

Before you give it up, give Affinity Photo a try. If you like Photoshop, you'll like Affinity Photo. They are so close to each other. In fact, I don't understand how there isn't a copyright infringement!!!

I have it, but it had three key weaknesses when I tested it. One was that it managed to undermine print sharpness somehow. I worked with them on the issue, but they weren’t able to resolve it. Another is that if the calibrated monitor isn’t not the primary display, Affinity won’t display using the correct profile. Abd then I discovered it can’t do soft proofs using the printer profile, which is a common fault.

They may have corrected all that by now, but those were the issue a year ago.

Rick “who likes DXO Photolab for raw processing, but only Photoshop seems to fully support the calibrated color workflow for printing” Denney

[darr]

Before you give it up, give Affinity Photo a try. If you like Photoshop, you'll like Affinity Photo. They are so close to each other. In fact, I don't understand how there isn't a copyright infringement!!!

Back in 2016-2017 I was asked by a popular photography blog site if I could give Affinity a test drive and do a write up for the site. I was a full time commercial photography instructor at a local tech college and told him I would ask to see if some of my students would help out. The students were in their second year of daily Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) instruction and use, and were darn good at post-processing and were already making money through commercial work. They had an understanding on the importance of a workflow that did not take all day to finish. Time is money when you work for yourself.

I went on Affinity's website, looked at a few tutorials and assigned a few students various projects through the tutorials. About an hour into the assignments, a student came to me and said they followed the tutorial instructions for making a panorama, but it was not stitching the images correctly after numerous tries. Simple enough I thought as we went through making panoramas in LR previously and as long as you shot your stitching images correctly it really should not be a problem. Well it was a big problem with Affinity. I ended up spending part of a weekend running through the tutorial and could not get "good results." I stopped wasting the students time and mine. The blogger was disappointed I would not do a write up as I was not going to put anymore time into software that was not working as advertised.

Maybe it is better today, but back then it was seriously flawed in the panorama making department and could not hold a candle to LR let alone PS (handles bigger panorama challenges better). I cannot say it worked well in any specific area as the students asked to be excused from test driving it once the panorama flaw showed its incompetence. Hopefully they got the bugs out of that messy algorithm and have the funding to support R&D.

Competition is a good thing as it keeps competitors on their toes, and gives us freedom of choice.

Best to you!

[PatrickMarq]

After some day’s experimenting with Affinity, there are some point that are different but workable. One thing my files in Photoshop after editing are around 1,5 Gb and the except the same layers in Affinity Y end up with 0.5 Gb, quite interesting.

[Sasquatchian]

What kind of compression are you using with your Ps files vs. your Affinity files? What type of files are you saving? Do they have layers and/or any alpha channels? Many factors affect final file size. I hope that Affinity isn't using jpeg compression without telling you.

[PatrickMarq]

My normal edits are about 3 curved layers, one contrast layer and sometimes a levels layer.
Also I always crop my images to a 1:1 format.
The format stays tiff, going to open the file from Affinity in photoshop and save again.

[Sasquatchian]

When you save your tiff files in Ps, what compression option are you choosing and are you choosing the same for layers and background. The smallest Ps tiff files are by using Zip compression on background and layers but also the longest save times. It's possible to actually save a layered or flattened tiff file with jpeg compression in Ps, but that is never ever recommended. Depending on the nature of your images, zip compression can either save a little disk space or a whole lot as it depends on content. Maybe you're saving your Ps tiffs with no compression and Affinity is either applying zip or jpeg to the same file. You really have to look into what saving options you've chosen in each program. And as an aside, there's never any reason ever to use Levels - ever. It's just a very limited subset of Curves with three adjustment points and two invisible locked down point near each end of the curve. You can do everything more effectively and efficiently with Curves alone. Same applies to using Brightness/Contrast if that's what you're using.

[paulbarden]

Before you give it up, give Affinity Photo a try. If you like Photoshop, you'll like Affinity Photo. They are so close to each other. In fact, I don't understand how there isn't a copyright infringement!!!

Adam, I do not use Photoshop, and haven't needed it in many years. I'm not looking for an alternative to Photoshop - I don't need that tool set. I am only interested in Lightroom, and I will continue to use it until such time that it cannot run on my machine. But thanks for the suggestion.

[PatrickMarq]

When you save your tiff files in Ps, what compression option are you choosing and are you choosing the same for layers and background. The smallest
Maybe you're saving your Ps tiffs with no compression and Affinity is either applying zip or jpeg to the same file. You really have to look into what saving options you've chosen in each program..

In Ps I never save with zip compression, but after opening a Tiff edited with Affinity in PS I can see they are using Zip compressing and there is no way to turn that off.
So it seems that I’ll be staying with PS afterall.

[Corran]

ZIP compression is a lossless algorithm. It may take longer to save/open though I guess? From an image perspective, it won't matter.

[Sasquatchian]

ZIP is the most efficient lossless compression commonly available and there's not reason not to use it other than it takes longer to open and save files. It can often keep you under the 4GB file size limit for Tiff files and keep you from going to .psb files which have no effective limit, well, something like 300 GB. And if you're using 16 bit per channel files, ZIP is preferred over LZW as LZW will actually make larger files when your 16 bit per channel file is really a 10, 12, or 14 bit file padded to 16 bit. And if you still use .psd files for some reason, they're all compressed with lossless compression that you can't turn off either.

Since I deliver a LOT of files to client via hightail, I always zip all files. Takes less time to send and is more polite to the folks on the other end, but it's better if you can to stuff a folder full of images into one zip archive, which hightail will do automatically for you anyway.