Gerry Fraiberg

Twenty years ago it was suggested I learn Photoshop to make myself employable at the local community college. Well, I didn't and went on to other things. Now I'm learning Affinity Photo and I have to say I love the Affinity Photo Workbook. I find it's clearly designed, and the exercises are easy to follow. I've always found that I learn best by doing. The Help section is great, but having someone guide me along is very helpful. I'm early into the Workbook, learning about Selections. The first image shows you the photos I started with, the second is the composite made by Selections and saving with Transparent Background. I used a slight Glow effect around the dog to separate her from the cat, sampling the cat for the colour of the glow.

DxO links to Lightroom with a plugin, which shows at the far right up on the black horizontal bar below the Essential Tools palettes. Without the plugin, you likely see a blue button labeled Export to disk. I usually export an 8-bit Tiff, which gives a bigger file but keeps the colour information from DxO for further processing in LR. JPEG would work as well if you're just passing through to Export. If I shoot an event and edit down to 60-70 images, I edit in LR only, often starting with JPEGs in camera. Shooting NEF (Nikon) or RAW offers more editing options. As for Export settings, it depends on what your end goal is. Are you exporting for print at 300 dpi or 72 dpi JPEG for social media on the web? I mainly export to LR, and then use the export functions there which allow me to change file names if needed and add my watermark.

As I learn Photo, I decided to edit the same image in Photo then in DxO Photo Lab 2. My photo editing workflow starts in Lightroom 6 (no subscription for me) for asset management, quick edits, applying a watermark and to create online galleries for client review. I've been using DxO for a few years. One downside is the .afphoto file in this exercise is 545 MB. The Nikon NEF or RAW file from a D7500 is 24.9 MB. After editing in DxO Photo Lab 2, the image goes back to LR6 as a TIFF - 28.5 MB, so DxO wins over Affinity as far as hard drive economy goes. Interestingly, the JPEG from Photo is smaller, but that might be due to the intermediate TIFF. I intend to use Affinity Photo for composites (layers) and graphic screens with text for video. The image with the watermark was edited in DxO, then sent back to LR for watermark and resized for export. The image without the watermark was edited and resized in Photo. There are subtle differences as a result of the way the two softwares process images. At the moment, DxO does the best job for noise reduction in RAW or NEF images. By the way, the photo is of fringes on a scarf hanging on stair railing in morning sun. It caught my eye as I was going by.

I'm in Canada, and the shipping cost was $8.49CAD. Shipping is handled by Amazon. Here's a quote from the Affinity Spotlight article on how the book was made. You can read the article here: https://affinityspotlight.com/article/creating-the-affinity-photo-workbook/

How big is your document/PDF? What version of Windows? Does your PC meet specs? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/desktop/full-feature-list/ What colour space are you working in? How are you exporting? How are you viewing your PDF? Are you printing from the PDF? What type of printer? Does the printer profile match your document Colour Format? I ask these questions for basic troubleshooting. My experience with this beta is somewhat different. I created a trifold brochure in Publisher 1.7.0.206 on a vintage 2009 Mac Pro running OS 10.11.6 with a calibrated 22" Dell monitor. In the Document setup, Colour Format is CMYK/8, Colour Profile is U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2. On Export, I selected PDF for Print, Raster DPI 300. I have created seven versions, all saved as PDF with no problem. The PDFs were sent to a local shop and printed on coated stock. Publish has performed flawlessly. The laser printed colour proofs were colour accurate. I am not a designer by trade, but occasionally produce print material for clients and organizations I volunteer with.

My Workbook stays flat on my desk. The exception is towards the end of the book, but I haven't removed the tear out Shortcuts pages yet.

My Affinity Photo Workbook arrived today, in very good time as I placed my order on Christmas Eve (Dear Santa), and Serif was on holiday break. After watching the excellent Behind The Scenes video on the making of the Workbook, I'm glad to have it in my hands. A beautiful book. Clean, crisp design. It's obvious a lot of thought and planning went into its creation. Online Help and the numerous video tutorials are very helpful, but I believe the hard copy printed page engages the mind differently. The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan referred to television as a "cool" medium and radio as "hot". We passively watch TV, but our brains actively listen to radio. He died in 1980, long before the Internet, smart phones and too much screen time. But I digress. I look forward to spending hours with Affinity Photo Workbook as I delve into the software.

Here's a low res version (original output file is 854x480) of the animated photos. Affinity PSD Test.m4v

As I learn Photo, I'm delighted to see compatibility with Apple's Final Cut Pro X video editing software. When exporting as a Photoshop PSD you can select "Final Cut Pro X". Until now I've been using Photoshop CS5 to create graphics for video projects, which I'm replacing with Affinity Photo. With CS5 I found that drop shadows created in Photoshop didn't translate to FCPX. But with Photo, the transition is seamless. FCPX lets you animate layers to have photos and or text move around the screen by creating keyframes. I like how images can be placed and quickly sized in Photo by selecting Place, click and drag. Aligning images is made easy by guidelines that pop up as you move around the document. The image below is 1920 X 1080 for HD video. Old school collage with drop shadows, gradient background. I sampled the sky reflection in the water and the fungus for the gradient background. The JPEGs are unprocessed, straight out of camera.

Love this. Great word play. And what better proof of concept for Publisher than a finished, printed book in your hands.

Do you have the "Bleed" area showing? If not, from the menu select View, then from the drop down menu select Show Bleed. I think there is a keyboard shortcut, but I can't find it at the moment. Still learning :-)

Make sure you uninstall the Trial version before installing your purchased version when buying from the App Store. After a couple of days of the Trial version of Photo, I decided to buy it from Apple's App Store. After downloading and installing the program to my Mac Pro (2009) desktop computer, I was asked for a Product Key on launch. I tried downloading and installing again. Same thing. Then came the "aha" moment. I moved the Trial version to the trash (uninstalled), downloaded again and installed - et voila! So far I'm impressed with how well Affinity Photo runs on my vintage Mac Pro running OS 10.11.6 (El Capitan) with 8 GB RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB GPU. Not the most robust system.

By the way, I've just subscribed to your YouTube channel

Thanks. I just figured that out before seeing your reply :-) I also found I can save a version with Transparent Background. Lots to learn about Affinity Photo. This will be helpful as I create a lot of graphic and text screens for my video work.

Is it possible to set and save Guides? I'm coming from Photoshop CS5, which has Video pages with Action Safe and Title Safe guides. Affinity Photo has new Document settings that include Web with a page preset of FHD 1080p (1920 x 1080, 16:9). I'd like to be able to have a default Guides setting so I don't have to enter manually every time. When I imported a PSD, it brought in the Guides so I got the settings: Horizontal - 54 px 108 px 972 px 1026 px Vertical - 96 px 192 px 1728 px 1824 px