John Hawkes

Thanks Old Bruce, i'm just one of those guys who likes to know why things are as they are. You can view some of my astro images here if you're at all interested... https://www.astrobin.com/users/silentrunning/ All the best John

Hi Old Bruce I've been using Affinity for 7 or 8 hours a day since purchasing it a couple of weeks ago. I have started to use it for the final few steps in processing my astro images. I apply multiple stages of processing in Affinity and at least a dozen "adjustments" before I'm satisfied - or run out of time and/or patience and call it a day with any particular image. They are tricky to process as the SNR is so low compared to a "normal" subject. The question of what divides filters from adjustments crops up every time I head towards the menu to select one or the other as it did when I was in PS as well. I get the destructive/nondestructive thing and the concept of layers,masking etc no other question bugs me like this one. I'm sure this question would come in any classroom tutorial about Affinity or PS or image processing workflow or anywhere where the option is available. No question Affinity is an awesome product and one of the best s/w investments I've ever made. Many thanks John

Thanks, so technically there is a reason for the divide, filters are considered too computationally intensive to be made into usable layers? Getting close to an answer now. 🙂

Ummm, so technically there is no reason why any filter cannot be an adjustment - and implemented as an adjustment layer, and any filter could be implemented as an adjustment layer? Still seems like an arbitrary distinction to me, so I guess it's as you imply a naming convention and approach inherited from the good ol days. So i'm not going nuts or missing something fundamental?

Thanks I'm still confused over what fundamentally distinguishes a filter from an adjustment. The designers most have seen them as discrete entities because they have separated them out in the application and labelled them as such - adjustments or filters. It seems to me that any change to an image - destructive or not- is an "adjustment" and as such everything could be put under the adjustments label and applied as a layer with a merging down or flattening making the change destructive. Why complicate things by giving a subset of adjustments the title filters and further complicating things by adding live filter constructs. This a fundamental question not specific to Affinity as I see other applications have a similar sort of approach. John

I have basic question. Why aren't all filters available as adjustment layers and vice versa. I most be missing something fundamental. Why for example is blurring available as a filter but not an adjustment layer but levels is available as an adjustment layer but not a filter, etc etc? Many thanks John