Adrian991

Thanks for that information and the link, very interesting. I'm leaning towards sticking with Affinity (I have bought it whereas with ON1 its got 9 days of the trial left). I also have Topaz DeNoise and that works directly as a Plugin with Affinity so I can use the edit extension to send the image to Affinity and then do all the editing I want including DeNoise if necessary and send it back to Apple Photos. With ON1 I cannot do that so the DeNoise edit has to be made from within Photos using "Edit With" and I don't need the DAM feature of ON1 as I'm using Photos for that.

I get the impression that there is no technical support from Affinity other than through this forum. I've sent emails on the subject to Affinity but never received a reply which is not great. Compared to ON1 (and I'm only trialling their software at the moment) I have had immediate response to the questions I raised so rather disappointed with the lack of support..

I've just purchased Affinity Photo and I am using "Edit in Affinity Photo" from within Apple Photos extensions to edit RAW image files but I'm getting a message displayed at the bottom of the Apple Photos edit window before I save it I use Nikon and Olympus cameras to shoot raw images and the workflow is as follows: Open a .ORF or NEF file in Apple Photos and select Edit in Affinity Photo from the extensions tab The file opens in Affinity Photo and without doing anything else I select Develop, then save, then close The window switches back to the Edit window in Apple Photos with the choice of Cancel or save Changes but at the bottom of the window is this message: "Editing complete (16MB change limit exceeded - document will be flattened) - press save to keep these changes” . What does this mean? Is the image being compressed? I 'm also trialling ON1 Photo Raw 21 on my iMac and using exactly the same workflow I don't see any message like that

Hi rhmb, Thank you for your inputs, really appreciate the help. Since posting I have got a slightly better understanding of what Affinity Photo is doing and sorry for using the wrong terminology but I was actually trying Edit using the Affinity Develop Extension and Edit in Affinity Photo Extensions rather than "Edit with" as I had already sussed out that the latter was not without it's problems. As for the file size I think I now understand what is going on; when used as an extension to Apple Photos, only one large file gets created in a folder in the library folder and this gets overwritten each time a new image is edited so doing it this way means that the original image before it was edited in AP cannot be recovered. I have also tried editing the image directly in Affinity Photo and then exporting to Apple Photos which does mean I can revert back to the original because an image with the .afphoto gets saved but this is not very efficient in terms of disk space. I have had my Olympus cameras since August so I have tried Workspace over the past few months but I don't like it hence why I bought Affinity Photo which I do like and for £23.99 worth the price even if I'm not going to use it as my main edit application. I was using Apple Aperture until it became unsupported and switched over to Apple Photos which has been fine for what I want; it's just really annoying that Apple have still not provided ORF support for the OM-D E-M1 Mark III but having said that the processed JPG that the camera saves is actually quite good so I think I will persevere with JPGs and use Affinity Photo as and when I feel I need to do something a bit more complex with layers which is something Apple Photos cannot do. Up until buying the Olympus, I was exclusively shooting Nikon NEF RAW images so never had any issues with Apple Photos, my latest Nikon is a Z7 which I use as well as the Olympus and with over 11k images stored I find Apple Photos organisation features really useful here why it will remain as my main photo application.

MacBook Pro M1 with BigSur 11.2.1, Topaz DeNoise AI v2.4.2 and Affinity Photo v1.9.0. The Affinity Photo Application was purchased from the Affinity Store I'm unable to launch Topaz AI DeNoise as a plugin even though I have installed it and it shows in Filters as an available Plugin but when I select that Filter to edit a developed image nothing happens. I've also got an iMac 27inch 5K Retina with exactly the same software versions installed and the Topaz plugin works perfectly. I have tried reinstalling both applications on my MacBook Pro but still unable to edit with the Topaz plugin. Anyone got a similar problem and found the fix?

I’ve just started using AP as an external editor for APP but when I save the file after completing the edit in AP and close the file, at the bottom of the APP screen is a notification that the image will be flattened because it exceeds the 16MB change limit, what is going on here?

Here is a bit more to my question. So I’m using the “Edit with Affinity Photo” option from within Apple Photos and this works but when I save the image I get a notification that it has exceeded the 16MB change limit and the image has been flattened. What exactly does that mean? I compared the edited .ORF image with the .JPG version of the same image that was also imported from the camera, the JPG looks sharper which implies that editing in Affinity Photo and then saving back to Apple Photos has resulted in a loss of image quality which presumably is what “Image has been flattened” means. If that’s how it’s going to work then it’s not much use or am I doing something wrong?

I’ve just started using Affinity Photo as an external editor for RAW images stored in my Apple Photos Library(MacOS BigSur 11.2) that were taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III. Apple have still not yet implemented RAW support for this camera’s .ORF image files even though it’s been out for 12 months. However I’ve found that if I select a .ORF image file (shows as a white square) and choose Edit with Affinity Photo the image opens up in Affinity Photo and when I select Develop and Save I can now see the RAW image properly in Apple Photos. However saving the file creates an Affinity Photo Document which is 170MB whilst retaining the original 18MB .ORF file in Apple Photos Library. Can someone please explain why this is because if this happens with every image I will very quickly exceed the capacity of my hard drive.