SJP737

Thanks Walt for the steer on the TIFF with Affinity Layers containing the .afphoto file, that makes more sense of what I'm seeing. Plus I take your point on the compression. In this case my workflow starts with an old photo print scanned to 1200dpi TIFF using Vuescan. I'm then doing restoration using inpainting and other adjustment layers in Affinity Photo. I had started out by saving to a .afphoto file, which would help keep the file size down, but in the end I changed to saving as TIFF with Affinity Layers purely for ease of browsing within Windows and being able to quickly look at the image full screen without each time having to launch Affinity Photo. I have tried XnView MP - it is okay, but the thumbnail image embedded in the .afphoto file is so small. Don't suppose there is a way to change the size of the embedded thumbnail...? Guess I'm stuck with the ease of TIFF but massive file sizes, or less ease of use with .afphoto but with lower file sizes.

I've been trying to figure own why my file sizes are becoming so large when adding layers and using "save with Affinity layers" when exporting to TIFF. At its simplest my workflow just adds a pixel layer which I use for inpainting to remove imperfections but I found the much larger file size puzzling. In my example below I've left the inpainting out, and just focussed on how on adding either empty for filled pixel layers changes file size. Here my base image is 79MB as shown in the export window. Even though there is only the single image layer, clicking on "Save Affinity Layers" yields a 333MB file. I get the exact same file size if I add an empty pixel layer or duplicate the background layer. So why when I duplicate a single background layer and export with Affinity layers does the file size quadruple rather than double? As noted above, adding an empty pixel layer yielded an export file size of 333MB. However I found that filling that layer with white, black or 50% grey lowered the file size down to 254MB. That has me puzzled - at the end of the day it is just a layer of pixels, so how come all white, all black or all 50% grey gives a file which is 80MB smaller than if the same pixels are from an image....? Hope someone can help me figure out the answers to these questions, and thanks in advance.