geni1105

Sorry, I just noticed I'm on the Windows forum. Actually I did all trials on Mac, but I assume the results apply to Windows too.

For the SD15 support, the Libraw website states "raw decode only" - indicating that no color corrections etc. are done by Libraw. So if Affinity Photo relies on Libraw to do the complete job, it cannot work. Unfortunately, AP (or Libraw) also does not do a good job in color rendition for other Sigma cameras - it seems that camera profiles are either not correct or missing, see attached screenshots from Colorchecker shots from a DP3 Merrill. AP is severely off in the yellow / red / orange hues, and the shadows have a distinct green cast (the two gray squares expected on the bottom right). Sigma Photo Pro is nearly correct (as should be expected), but also the open source Kalpanika X3F-to-DNG converter is very close. All samples have been white-balanced on the bottom 3rd square from the right. IMHO Affinity should not claim to support X3F raws, when the results are unuseable. Maybe include the Kalpanika code? Affinity Photo 1.07.106 beta: Sigma Photo Pro 6.6.2 Kalpanika X3F-to-DNG converter (with X3F Wrapper for flat-field correction and Adobe Camera Raw for DNG development):

Unfortunately, the basic function of dodging / burning is still not working better than in previous releases. When applied to an image area with full tonality, Dodge Highlights and Burn Shadows still basically revert each other - whereas one would expect those operations in sequence to increase contrast (basically like an s-shaped tone curve brushed in locally). The current behaviour far too much impacts the midlights independent of the tonality range selected, which makes the whole thing more or less useless.

Well that's what I did. The top stroke in the samples is dodging with "highlights" selected, and the bottom one is burning with "shadows" selected.

Unfortunately it still does not seem to be right - see a comparison of "dodge highlights" and "burn shadows" in AP (1.5 beta 4) vs. PS, applying one single brush stroke of each to a black-white gradient fill. AP has maximum effectiveness in the midtones for both dodge and burn, whereas PS mostly affects the highlights and shadows - which is what I would expect. Anyway, thanks for the update and the numerous improvements, especially the sticky settings!

I agree with csp and the point he was making: IMO the topic is not about functionality and requirements of professionals vs. amateurs, but about how pretty basic features are implemented and work (or rather do not). Some examples which prevent me from doing productive work with AP: - Sticky settings missing: everybody who has a defined, repetitive workflow and works on multiple images in a row will suffer. It's extremely annoying to have to adjust tool properties anew for every image. This has been requested to be changed by many for a long time now. - Dodging and burning offer highlights/midtones/shadows selective operation, but are nowhere near as effective as PS. The underlying curves just don't seem to be right. Burning shadows even kicks in at a hard threshold - just try with a greyscale gradient image. - Highlight and shadow recovery in develop persona are not on par with most other RAW capable tools out there. Shadow recovery produces very flat, artificial looking images. I know that AP is not a specialized RAW converter but IMHO if you are offering RAW conversion then it needs to be up to date. And then there are weaknesses which are not corrected for many releases, like when switching curves to LAB mode it's by default in a nonsensical "master" mode. Switching to the more appropriate luminosity mode is of course just one click, but has to be done for every image anew, because of no sticky settings ... I agree with other comments here: your really did a great job in bringing this SW to life, and for me it is the only likely contender in the market to Adobe. There's just one step missing, and it's not this or that fancy feature - it's bringing basic features and handling to state of the art level. I bought AP a year ago and really would want to use it productively but as of today I just can't. Like csp I come back every few months and try the new release, find the same weaknesses again and go back to PS. And I am not a professional.

Unfortunately yes - same behaviour in 1.4.1

I'm disappointed that this is considered a feature request rather than a bug report, and that such a basic functionality does not work correctly in AP. And no reaction from AP staff. I will go back to PS, where dodge/burn works like it should.

I have to bring this up again, because I am not able to reach the dodge / burn results that I want with AP and comparing to PS behaviour. I did a test of dodge and burn brushes on a gradient fill converted to a pixel layer, see attached image. I used brush size 250 for dodging and burning with the 3 options highlights / midtones / shadows each, all other settings left at their default values. One horizontal stripe (going back and forth twice, mouse kept clicked) per setting. I might be doing something wrong, but here are my conclusions: - dodging set to "highlights" reaches far into the midtones, dodging set to "midtones" seems about right, dodging set to "shadows" does not have a significant effect on the shadows - there is virtually no difference in how dodging affects midtones and shadows, irrespective of the highlights / midtones / shadows setting; if anything, dodging set to "shadows" seems to brighten midtones more than dodging set to "midtones" (!) Similar for burning: - burning set to "highlights" reaches far into the midtones, burning set to "midtones" has just a weak effect - burning set to "highlights" darkens midtones slightly more than when set to "midtones" (!) - burning set to "shadows" even kicks in at a hard threshold, which is high up in the midtones Also, I cannot avoid some posterization on the gradient (even tried 16 Bit RGB and 16 Bit LAB), which is strongly increased by dodging and burning. Finally, there is a significant difference in the strength of dodge/burn effect, whether I am brushing back and forth keeping the mouse clicked, or whether I overlay several separate strokes. Maybe this is intended behaviour, but does not seem logical to me. This is with AP 1.4, on an iMac Retina running OS X 10.11 Thanks, Georg

I am using it to implement Ming Thein's workflow, who often uses selective dodging of highlights / burning shadows to increase local contrast. This works very well in Photoshop CS5: when applying dodge/burn brushes to highlights or shadows, they nearly do not affect midtones - ok. However in AP, when either highlights or shadows are selected also the midtones are affected heavily. This can only be worked around by reducing brush opacity to 10%, but then the intended effect is mostly gone. So IMHO a steeper separation between highlights, midtones and shadows would be needed. Secondly, it is annoying that the brushes change to their defaults for every newly opened image. I am pretty sure most users would prefer to keep the last used settings. Not sure if these are feature requests or bug reports ... Anyway, congratulations to this otherwise great application! Thanks, Georg