Hello,
I have tried to edit an ARW image taken with a Sony camera. In this situation, Afinity behaves in a very annoying fashion.
First of all, it always opens such images in "develop" mode, and both loading and "developing" are excessively slow.
Second, and much worse, Affinity does not seem to want to rotate images from my camera, if developed or not. The rotation seems to depend on the EXIF data, and where I have found rotation menu items, these are consequently grayed out. I am sorry, but raw files are just bitmaps like everything else, and I question the purpose of having such a develop mode at all, it doesn't make any sense to me. Further, I can't easily load and scroll through such raw images, even freeware like IrfanView does this much better. Combined with the loading time, and the inability to treat such data as a simple 16bpp (or whatever) raw bitmap that doesn't need "developing", makes the application far less useful than if you were to abandon this feature altogether. The workflow is just too slow!
First and foremost, I would like the ability to 90° rotate and reverse raw images bitmaps no matter what the camera says is supposed to be the right way up.
Secondly, I would like to be able to quickly look through and select one or more raw images in Affinity, without going through the rigmarole of this slow and tedious "develop" nonsense...
Kind regards