JimW

I am a new member and new to Affinity. I am excited about having great alternatives to Adobe's offering, and I have a request for plugins and "send-to" capability for several tools I use regularly:
 
DxO--Optics Pro, Film Pack, Viewpoint
On1--full suite
Nik--full suite
 
Other tools that I don't use, but are very popular:
 
Topaz
CaptureOne

Add a +1 for me on this - user looking for new solutions to CS-era Photoshop, InDesign, and Aperture. Serif's products look VERY nice.
 
Aperture's strengths of quickly triaging large numbers of files, batch adjusting, batch keywording and organising, don't really seem to have been bettered.
 
What really does it for me is all of the adjustments / retouching being applied as metadata & versioning - every solution I've looked at seems to want me to flatten my adjustments out into extra TIFF files (which are about 120mb each, as opposed to 30-50mb RAWs). Apple has even dropped the ball on Photos.app with 3rd party plugins still being destructive edits on flattened files.
 
The one thing about Aperture I don't like is it being over-protective of the original files - even for things like rotating - sometimes the camera gets the orientation of an image wrong when shooting up or down, and Aperture can't rotate the original. It needs an "unlock to edit original" function.

Hi versomat,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Thanks for your words. This is already being considered. Please check our FAQ for more information.

Affinity Team — Please build an Apple Aperture replacement. I know dozens of co-photographers both amateur and pro's would will buy this product in a second. Lightroom is awful. Capture One is good for tethered work, but it's expensive and not nearly as user friendly as Aperture. Photos is not the answer.
 
This is a huge gap in the applications market. I use, and my friends still use, Aperture on a daily basis however we fear that with the next Mac OS version after 10.11 support for Aperture will finally go away. If any company is capable of building this next great photo management and adjustment application it's your team.
 
Please consider it.

Add me and a few of my other photography associates to this wish list.  This would take out any hesitation from some of my friends jumping from the Adobe ship.  I know you've got to prioritize your production schedule BUT please don't let this one fall to the backburner.  DAM is critical in my workflow such as it is for so many others.  Love the products.  Thanks so much for putting a great product together sans the subscription model.  You've got the best thing going for you right now... word of mouth marketing... I know I'm doing my share of it.  :)

Just another voice for this. There is a big gap and having a suitable alternative to Lightroom will make an awful lot of people very happy indeed. I still use Aperture as my DAM and will continue until someone releases something of a similar ilk. I won't touch Adobe products and Capture One is in many ways overkill and not as intuitive.

Dear God please! Lightroom is a fluster cluck and Photos is so weak. Please build Affinity Aperture or Affinity Album or what ever it will be called. I'm dying here.

Hello Everyone,
 
Yes, count me in, too, as an interested Affinity customer that is using Aperture for its asset management capabilities. I also imagine that Aperture will cease to function and I'd rather not buy and learn yet another vendor's product. I vote for Affinity!

Hi,
 
I'm in the process of writing up a tutorial document for using PS plugins with Photo - the process is a little complicated, because Photo is a sandboxed app.
 
mitchellm: Yes, we will be constantly improving the plugin support during the beta, with next builds weekly - hopefully most thing should be working properly fairly soon :)
 
Thanks,
 
Andy.

Yes Mike I was pleasantly surprised too. The moderator did say that presently Affinity is not supported so I decided to send them an email letting them know that though there are clearly issues, some of the plugins do work. I verified tonight that I can open, use and return to Affinity with Adjust, Detail, and Simplify in both the MAS and newest beta versions and told them this in the email. I told them for me, Clarity quits before launching in the MAS version but opens and allows changes in the beta. But when I click "OK" to go back to Affinity I get a screen asking for a validation code. Strange because it accepted the code when I first loaded the plugins and tested them. I put in the code and then get a screen saying the validation failed because the code was invalid. I tried this multiple times and the code is valid and correct. I told them there is a growing community of Affinity users anxious to use their plugins. I will let you know if I get a response.

I attended a webinar for one of the Topaz plugins the other day and some one asked If Topaz planned on making their plugins work with Affinity Photo. The moderators response was " We are considering it."

I am glad to hear that no one has given up and that there is still work going on concerning this issue.
 
I know I have said it before but if the developers would give us the ability to call an external editor it would solve a lot of these problems for a lot of us.

We are still investigating various options to improve our plugin support. Many plugin developers updated their installers to improve support for the Mac App Store version of PhotoShop Elements so that just one of the options we are looking at.
 
We will update you all when we have a definite plan and schedule.

I would like to thank the people in this thread for their excellent detective work. It's a shame, however, that this information needed to be pieced together the hard way, without much guidance from the AP staff. The problem with plug-ins has been labelled a "Hot Topic." One would think that the developers would pay attention.

I am reasonably sure that the plugin manufacturers probably think the other way - that the pixel editor developers need to conform to their plugin interface. When I spoke with the Athentech (PerfectlyClear plugin) developers (during a support request) that was their response to me.

I use Photoshop's Image > Image Size feature all the time, and I must say that the addition of "Image Size" within Affinity Photo's "Resize Document" sheet would be welcomed.  For example, when you change the PPI or dimensions in Photoshop, you see something like this:
 
Image Size: 24.5MB (was 64MB)
 
The key part of that is the "was" part in parenthesis.
 
Thanks.

It seems like no one but Photoshop offers a crop-to-size tool that is resizable.
 
By this, I mean this workflow:
 
you need some photos at 400px by 900px at 72dpi you set the crop tool to this the crop tool jumps to this size you can now drag to reposition and resize the crop tool to control how much of the image gets cropped into 400x900 The #4 is the part.  This allows me to not just choose a part of the photo that's already 400x900, but to improve composition I can enlarge the crop rectangle and the resulting image will have that area cropped and resized to what I have set.

I would like to get some WOW algorithm like the new PS RAW dehace slider (in the effects section) where one can gain tremendous details/ colors....Maybe you can try to work on something similar? ;)