Editing in Affinity
Raw Developments
If you shoot in Raw or Raw + JPEG modes, opening a photo brings it first into the Develop persona. Here you’ll find controls for making adjustments that are native to the raw formats, from basic exposure to lens corrections and noise reduction. It also includes tools for cropping and healing, and applying overlays in gradients or by selective brush strokes. You could perform all the adjustments you want on most photos using just the Develop persona. And since Develop is a separate persona, you can select a pixel layer in any image and switch to Develop to edit using its tools.
Editing in the Develop persona, with the split-screen Before/After view active. The diagonal line on the left is the control for a gradient overlay; the controls at right apply just to that overlay while it's active.
Affinity Photo uses its own profiles for interpreting the raw image data from a camera's native raw file formats (each manufacturer tweaks their raw formats with each new camera model release, which is why computer operating systems and software such as Adobe Camera Raw must be updated to read raw files from the newest cameras).
In my testing, though, I noticed that the raw files from my Fujifilm X-T1 camera took much longer to load using Serif’s raw engine than Nikon or Canon raw files: about 25 seconds for the Fujifilm .RAF file, compared to about 6 seconds for the others, even in files of roughly the same data size. This is likely because X-T1 files are X-Trans, which are a non-standard demosaicing challenge.
If you’re accustomed to working in Lightroom or Capture One, Affinity Photo doesn’t handle raw processing in the same way. Once you’ve clicked the Develop button, your edits are baked into that pixel layer.
In general, the Affinity Photo profiles do a good job; you can optionally choose to use the profiles built into the operating system instead – in my case, the system-level profiles in macOS that can be used by any developer – but I never found a need.
Affinity Photo’s optional auto-tone feature in the Develop persona is conservative (the Assistant Options button, sporting an icon of a tuxedo-clad butler, includes the option to Apply Tone Curve). It’s also frustratingly opaque: The software will apply a tone adjustment, but the edits aren’t reflected in the settings anywhere. The Basic and Curves controls remain at zero. I suppose the idea is that it doesn’t matter where you set your base camp, since you’re climbing the mountain from that point anyway; but it makes the editing seem arbitrary. I found myself keeping the feature off.
Keep in mind that if you’re accustomed to working in raw-native applications such as Lightroom or Capture One, Affinity Photo doesn’t handle raw processing in the same way. Once you’ve clicked the Develop button, your edits are baked into that pixel layer. Did you overcrank the contrast when you imported the raw file? Sorry, you can’t go back into the Develop persona and change just that attribute; you’d have to select the pixel layer in the Photo persona, switch to the Develop persona, and then apply a negative contrast value to compensate. If you made a lot of changes, like gradient overlays, you’ll need to start over.
Photo editing
You’ll do most of your work in the Photo persona, and the good news is that most operations are non-destructive. I would expect nothing less from a modern editor, particularly one built from scratch within the last few years.
There are buttons for automatically applying levels, contrast, color and white balance, but they’re applied destructively to a pixel layer unless you made a copy of that layer first.
The Adjustments panel includes most of the edits you’ll make, from Levels and Curves to Vibrance and HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance). When you click one, it’s added as a new adjustment layer, with a floating window containing controls for the setting; a few presets also appear in the panel for one-click editing.
Most of Affinity Photo's edits are non-destructive.
But not everything is non-destructive. For example, I unashamedly like to use an editor’s auto features as a starting point. I may not stick with what the software thinks, but it’s helpful to see what’s possible. In Affinity Photo, there are buttons for automatically applying levels, contrast, color, and white balance, but they’re applied destructively to a pixel layer – your image layer, unless you made a copy of that layer first. Non-destructive options for each adjustment are available, but none of them offer an auto ability.
This isn’t a deal-killer. I can apply adjustment layers and mess with sliders like any other pixel monkey, but it demonstrates, to me, that the developers are sometimes focused more on chasing Photoshop than creating an experience for the person editing images.
Live Filter Layers act like adjustment layers in that you can make edits that stand alone and can be re-adjusted later.
As another example, look at filters. Affinity Photo includes plenty of filters for creating blur effects, distortions, noise, and the like. These are applied to a pixel layer, and doing so changes the pixels on that layer (destructively editing it). If you change your mind later, you need to re-do your work, step back through the History panel (which works well, although it retains edits only during the current session, not when you close the file,) or hope you had the presence of mind earlier to edit on a duplicate of your pixel layer.
However, many of those filters are available as Live Filter Layers, which act like adjustment layers in that you can make edits that stand alone and can be re-adjusted later. A Live Filter Layer can be independent and apply to every layer below it, or be clipped to a particular layer. Its settings can be changed at any time without disrupting any pixels. No doubt there is some performance hit involved, but I didn’t see it in my testing. And even if multiple live filters do start to choke the workflow, you can merge or rasterize them onto new pixel layers to create new base camps and hide the filter layers.
In 2017, this is how all image editing should be: non-destructive and flexible. Granted, the pixel filters were likely implemented first during development, and they do parallel the features in Photoshop for people already familiar with them. But going forward, I’d love to see Affinity Photo decouple itself from the Photoshop mindset and make everything non-destructive.
Selections and Other Tools
One reason you’d turn to an image editor such as Affinity Photo is to selectively edit portions of a photo, and that involves making precise selections. If you make poor, jagged selections, it doesn’t matter how well the adjustments and filters appear, because the viewer’s eye will be drawn to the anomalous selection edge.
Affinity Photo’s selection tools are what you’d expect—Rectangular, Elliptical, Free Hand (lasso), Flood Select (magic wand), and Selection Brush tools are all there. What surprised me was the minimal effort required to refine a selection. For instance, I was expecting it would take more work to clean up a selection of hair in a portrait, but all I had to do was click the Refine button and paint over the edges. Using the controls in the Refine Selection dialog box, you sometimes don’t even need to paint over areas. Your mileage may vary depending on the image, of course, but it’s a solid implementation.
Hair can be notoriously difficult to select, but the Refine Selection tool caught the wisps in just a couple of passes.
In addition to the basics, Affinity Photo crams several other powerful tools into its workshop. The Tone Mapping persona does a good job merging exposures for HDR (high dynamic range) photos, offering many presets that assume your aim isn’t to fry your eyeballs with HDR vividness (some crazy ones are thrown in, too). As with the Develop persona, many adjustment controls and overlay tools, such as gradient fills, are available to tailor the image before shuttling it to the Photo persona. It works with individual images, too.
Affinity Photo includes features for creating panoramas, focus-stacking multiple photos, the aforementioned Liquify persona and even a Live Projection mode for editing 360-degree photos.
I also found that the Tone Mapping persona sometimes made smart choices about objects in the scene that change from shot to shot. In one series, for instance, a child ran across the field of view while my camera was capturing three bracketed exposures. Instead of simply merging the shots and creating two ghosted figures, Affinity Photo chose just one image of the boy.
Two of the bracketed shots included a running child...
But the Tone Mapping persona isolated just one instance of the boy.
If you edit portraits, the Frequency Separation feature simplifies a technique for touching-up areas without losing texture. Choosing the command splits a pixel layer into two separate layers, one high and one low frequency. Painting out areas to be smoothed on each layer softens the skin (the low frequency layer) while also keeping the texture detail (the high frequency layer).
Friends complained that I looked angry in this self portrait, but I was really just caffeine-deprived. The Frequency Separation feature makes it easy to smooth my wrinkled brow.
Additionally, Affinity Photo includes features for creating panoramas, focus-stacking multiple photos, the aforementioned Liquify persona and even a Live Projection mode for editing 360-degree photos. A macro system automates repetitive tasks, and batch processing applies those macros to multiple files.
Performance
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| Affinity Photo can get deep in the weeds (in a good way) when it comes to tweaking settings for performance and other options. |
One of Affinity Photo’s vaunted selling points is its speed. I tested the Mac version on a late-2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and, except for opening Fujifilm raw files, I didn’t feel as if performance was holding me back. The software also gets credit for its live previews of things such as layer blend modes. When you’re experimenting with these, the result appears as your pointer moves over the menu items; no more applying a blend mode to see what it does, then moving on to the next one. It seems like a minor detail, but in practice it makes a big difference.
Since Affinity Photo was originally developed for Mac, it incorporates a lot of Apple software optimizations.
Since Affinity Photo was originally developed for Mac, it incorporates a lot of Apple software optimizations, such as support for Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics technologies, Force Touch on trackpads, and DCI-P3 (Wide Color) displays. The Touch Bar integration includes contextual access to tools and controls, and provides a small, nice touch I’ve found myself using often: With no images open, Affinity Photo displays thumbnails of recent files for quickly opening images you were working on earlier. And if you use Apple’s Photos application to manage your image library, Affinity Photo adds six editing extensions: Develop, Haze Removal, Liquify, Miniature, Monochrome and Retouch.
On the Windows side, the application is optimized for Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, supports gesture, pen and touch screen input, and incorporates DIrectX 11 and Direct 2D rendering and hardware acceleration.
Playing Well with Others
Affinity Photo’s export options give you a lot of control over file formats and compression. In the Export persona, you can choose which layers and effects are exported with the image, so you’re not toggling layer visibility in the Photo persona before exporting test versions.
If you’re iterating files among other people who only have Photoshop, you’ll be frustrated. But if you’re mostly using Affinity Photo to work on your own images, you shouldn’t have a problem.
The Export persona is also where you can create slices. It’s a helpful feature if you’re chopping up an image, or if you want to define a section for export—say, a square portion to send to social media—without cropping the overall file just for that purpose. Affinity Photo retains the slices in the persona to make it easy to return to them later.
More significant, Affinity Photo can export Photoshop PSD files. Natively, the application saves to its own .afphoto format, which isn’t recognized by programs that aren’t Serif’s own. Exporting to the Photoshop format preserves layers and editability well, but not everything transfers; live filters, for example, show up empty. If you’re iterating files among other people who only have Photoshop, you’ll be frustrated. But if you’re mostly using Affinity Photo to work on your own images, or you’re collaborating with others who are using the application, you shouldn’t have a problem.
Conclusion: To Affinity and Beyond
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| A screenshot of the Raw processing work space in Affinity Pro. |
We tend to think of version 1.x software as its determined, but wobbly, first steps. The desire and technical achievement to bring it into existence are there, but usually the real muscle and balance arrives in versions 2.0 and later.
Affinity Photo is a bargain if you’re looking for Photoshop-style capability without a Creative Cloud price tag. For a lot of photographers, that’s more than enough reason.
With Affinity Photo, at version 1.5.2 (the latest release version available at the time I wrote this review), the software has sprung directly into a sprint. Every corner offers new discoveries – the Scope panel alone will make some editors’ eyes light up – and they’re all affixed to a strong image-editing core.
That said, I yearn for a future version when the application breaks away from the Photoshop way of doing things, such as the destructive-edited filters mentioned earlier. I can see what Serif is striving toward, and want it to get there as soon as possible.
That’s when I remember that Affinity Photo, in its current form, costs $50, which is a bargain if you’re looking for Photoshop-style capability without a Creative Cloud price tag. For a lot of photographers, that’s more than enough reason.
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
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- Broad range of professional-level editing tools
- Good selection features
- Most adjustments are non-destructive
- $50 price, no subscription
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- Good, but not comprehensive, .psd file support
- Autotone feature in Develop module makes opaque changes
- Auto adjustments are destructive
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Who it's good for:
- Photographers who want professional-level image editing at an inexpensive price.
Who it's not good for:
- Photographers who need to trade .psd formatted files with others who use Photoshop.
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