John CK

Great to hear !! Will still keep that beer for you if you ever wander out west. John

3bean, Hoping you got all this resolved and working. If not, wanted to throw in some editorial stuff on tweaking.com and software uninstallers in general... Goal is to get you completely clean of any previous Affinity installations before going forward with a fix. The tweak thing is way powerful correcting mis allocated tasks in win 10, but have to use carefully. Has bailed me out on different occasions, but have to let it do its thing. First time I purged the system, thought the program had frozen and aborted the fixes. Reduced the OS to rubble. So let it go through the procedures. Walk away, get a cold can of Sterno and enjoy the sunset. Let the corrections happen until finished. The respected guys here have laid out a rational path to recover, and would follow their advice after all options have failed. If using Tweak, would do it like this... Uninstall Affinity using a more aggressive program like free Revo uninstaller. Also Iobit uninstaller is good. Truth is that companies are paid to install, not to write complex and complete uninstall routines. Biggest offenders I've run into so far are Native Instruments Kontakt. Only surpassed by MS Office suite that leaves thousands upon thousands of orphan files and registry entries after a generic uninstall.exe. Things like Revo will go thru the normal uninstall and then dig deeper to try and get every vestige of the uninstall out. Finds a lot of leftover crap. Not sure if it gets everything, but an improvement. Next, set a restore point that you can access either thru windows or below windows in a recovery mode if everything gets forked up. Run Tweak and let it do it's thing. When finished, reinstall the latest stable 1.92 version. Run the installer as administratot with all anti virus turned off for the time. See if this resolves the issue. If not and I've destroyed everything on your computer, I owe you a beer or two next time you wander out here to the Oregon coast. John

Another shot in the dark. Like advised here, looking more like residuals from win 7 the program is hanging onto. Friend has a similar problem with some audio software after an upgrade 7 to 10. Also as advised, try everything first before a complete clean install and having to build the computer from zero. One option to try is a free, very powerful win 10 repair tool, tweaking.com. https://www.tweaking.com/ If you use this, follow the prompt to run from safe mode. It will take awhile, maybe half hour or so to finish, but could fix. Just another option to try. Good luck. John

Tripod it is, and a lot of practice. Maybe the wife will let me use her camera hardware. She has all the good stuff. Thank you Chris

Hi Chris, Files are uploaded to Dropbox. The individual pictures were taken with a Nikon Coolpix P600. I'm seeing some lens distortions in the originals which may be contributing to a compounded effect throwing everything off. Likely user error much to blame and I just have to practice more. Tripod for panoramas could fix some of this. Appreciate your time to look at these. John

Thank you Chris, Will upload some examples to Dropbox as soon as I can get away from the mundane chores. Deleted all the files but easy to recreate. John

Friends, May or may not be a problem with Affinity or if the distortion is just part of panorama renderings in general no matter what software. Reporting this here because having a problem with the final result. The stitch process is great except for the fisheye distortion it imparts to the individual frame. Vertical structures that are aligned in the original frame are distorted to the right or left beyond center. Is more like stitching bubbles together each with the fisheye lens perspective. Advice appreciated. Can submit examples if needed. John

3bean, May not help, but something to try. From the desktop icon for Affinity, right click and open properties. From the Compatibilities tab, click run this program as administrator. Hit apply. This should circumvent anything windows is doing to block execution. 1.9 should work well in win 10. Other thing to check is the anti virus software or settings. Can turn off momentarily and see if this works. Sorry to have wasted your time if this doesn't fix things. May as well uninstall the program and reinstall the exe file (right click) as administrator (with any antivirus turned off). Can also try the compatibility modes for previous systems, though have rarely had any luck with this approach. John K

Thanks Chris. I think this is the best solution. I was applying the filters on the RAW file (NEF) before developing, which resulted in major changes from the preview. Another factor is probably working with night star pictures, likely a harsh task for any manipulations. The changes are not as apparent when processing photos taken in normal lighting. Again, appreciate your help. John

Chris, Exactly as you advised, if the RAW image is processed at 100 percent, the filter effect is representative. Catch 22 for me is that working with max pixel Nikon raws, over 5000 by something, the actual size visible at full scale is like a postage stamp view. No idea what it has done to the rest of the picture until zooming out after the fact. Accurate rendering at the expense of not seeing what is being done to the whole photograph. Not sure what is happening with the developing mode in Affinity, what state the RAW file is being held while opening up more options post developing. Have found in Affinity, if the Nikon RAW file is exported to a tiff file, then disparity between the preview and rendered document is less when filters are applied. This helps a bit, and plenty of fire power available to correct discord after the fact. Not going to slit my wrists over this. Can still upload before and after screenshots of problems with RAW processing if it would help. Really impressed by the conversion to jpeg. Put the before and after rendering (Nikon raw or tiff, to jpeg) through a pixel blow up comparison. Can hardly tell any difference. Don't know if the conversion codecs have changed over time from ancient days, but Affinity runs rings around my Photoshop 9 CS. Beautiful program. John

Thank you Chris, Will get some down time soon (I hope) and will try your suggestions and report back. If the problem persists, will attach screen shots. Thank you also for the welcome. John

Friends, First post as a newbie and already got complaints that I hope the veterans can educate me out of. Did try to find answers from previous posts, and unfortunately found my concerns raised on different forums. Long time to load raw files especially when trying to stack. Not a big problem. Bigger concern is that the preview with raw is significantly different from the developed file. Trying to enhance night sky photos from a Nikon camera. The "Clarify" function previews a great rendition to get appropriate star contrast. Hit the develop button and the end result is muddy and nowhere near the preview. Workaround I guess for now is to use the Nikon software to convert the raw (NEF or NRW) to tiff, and then use Affinity to process tiff with less disparity from the preview to the final frame. Still problems with tiff. Less with jpeg but trying to keep the top level editing away from lossy formats. Frustrating, but otherwise have to say that Affinity is INCREDIBLE !!! Nothing else in the price range comes close to the reign of Photoshop. Was wanting to replace my aging Photoshop CS 9 to get upgraded codecs and escape from the strangle of Adobe's subscription only model. 15 years hardcore Photoshop user, so it is a gut wrenching goodbye. Lots of good programs out there from GIMP to whatever. So far in my one day experience, only Affinity has kept up blow to blow with Photoshop with functions that my CS 9 does not have. Incredible, just incredible. Rendering from raw files is however defective. Please clue me in if it is a matter of an adjustment in the program somewhere. Stay safe guys, John K