W A Tolbert

Thank you for the link. I will read it soon as I am able. Regardless of the semantics, my question is still unanswered. There has to be a qualitative difference in whatever the image is in Photo Persona, versus Develop Persona. Why are certain tools unavailable in Develop Mode where they would be useful?

I have no idea. I have always read that RAW files have more data or information than a compressed file. Is "RAW files have more (information)" a non sequitur, or a fact? They certainly have a larger file size. Isn't RAW to JPG a relationship parallel to the relationship of a WAV to an MP3? Exactly. So wouldn't it make more sense to use inpainting on the RAW image which has... more information? more data? more depth?

I feel like this is more of a general topic than a support topic, but I'm going to raise the question anyway. What is the reason for different tools being available in RAW (Develop Persona) as opposed to Photo persona? I want to work layers in RAW because I can work with more data & I get drastically different effects once I develop to the Photo Persona. "Exposure" is the best example. Results are completely different between each Persona; "exposure" is just unusable in Photo Persona. In Develop Persona the "exposure" tool is a magic lifesaver for underexposed photos or just plain handy for tweaking an already well exposed shot. In Photo Persona it just makes for weird, blue-grey, splotchy images. Recently I took two photos of a figure in a breezeway. One photo is exposed for the strong light on the left side of the composition. The other photo is exposed for the figure on the right side of the composition. The breezeway looked best in the photo with the figure underexposed. I doctored this photo by creating an adjustment layer for shadows & highlights, & another for brightness, in the Photo Persona, & thereby approximated an exposure adjustment for the figure. What would have been much easier would have been to create that adjustment layer in Develop Persona, then tweak only the exposure for that layer. Why can't I do this in Develop? Wouldn't other tools work better with more data, such as the inpainting tool? Thanks in advance for any insight.

I haven't posted in a long while but I have been using Affinity for about a year now. It does some things I like but I still do not see this one feature. I jump between Affinity & Canon Digital Photo Professional. There are things that each does well & the newest version of DPP is an incredibly capable program. What Affinity desperately needs is an analogue to DPP's "recipe" feature for working with RAW files. This business of making macros that only apply AFTER development is baloney. Whether I choose to work on pictures in DPP or Affinity depends in large part on whether I need to make the same changes across multiple files. One user on the other thread for this topic mentioned timelapse photography as an example. Here is a different one. I did an engagement shoot outdoors last weekend & took about 30 photos in an hour. Lighting was reasonably consistent, but I still needed to adjust shadows, tones, & white balance on all shots. With Affinity I had to do each photo individually, & actually wound up making the same development choices for each one. Whereas in DPP, I could have grabbed one picture, made a "recipe", then batch applied to all of the RAW files. Regardless of if my client receives five photos or eight or thirty, it would still be a huge time saver to put these development tweaks across all the pictures at once. I would spend five to seven minutes doing MOST of what I need to do, instead of that amount of time multiplied by each photo (so I spent well over 90 minutes on five pictures, in this example).

"You can..." but how? Is there a tutorial video? How do you make a macro for the Develop Persona when macro recording isn't available there? Not trying to be a smart-alec, I'm just asking because I have the same questions as OP.

Ah, OK. So I just Add Preset from the menu dropdown to the right, & it automatically saves. So how do I apply this simultaneously to all the RAW files in a given folder?

How do I do that? There's not that many options available under the Develop Persona & I don't see "presets".

I have thirty RAW images that need to have the same changes applied across all files. It's nothing drastic, just white balance, dynamic range, & contrast tweaking. However, I don't see a way to do this at all. Using File-Batch Job just develops the RAW into JPG but without a way to change anything first. The MACRO is not usable on the Develop Persona & having multiple RAW files open there doesn't mean they're all having changes applied. I guess I could just make a pen & paper list of what I did to each image, then develop each individually, but this will be very annoying. What's the solution?