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wherever possible, i use AP native adjustment layers and live filter layers, because they are non destructive. i think that plugins are comparable to non-live filters: you pass a layer to the plugin and get it back modified in its pixel structure. moreover, i could not find a way to save the final state of a plugin's settings. this means that when i exit a plugin and i realize i done something wrong, i cannot reload the layer into the plugin and start from where i left: often i have to load a "clean" layer and rework it completely. this is why i use plugins only when AP does not allow me to get the result i want, or it appears too difficult to achieve it using AP native live tools. plugins cannot be used on a stack of layers (pixel or adjustments), or at least i cannot make them work this way. so, in order to use a plugin, i need to "merge visible" all my stack of layers, so from that point on i also loose the possibility to take advantage of the non destructive editing i made before. this is why i tend to to apply plugins as the very last step of my workflow, but this is not necessarily possible in any situation. the plugin i use most is silver efex: it's easy to convert to bw as the last step, but this is not necessarily the case of any plugin. i love AP's live filter layers and adjustment layers and i think they work great: i use them for the major part of my image processing.

for example, canon dpp offers two ways of copying/pasting a set of adjustments (called "recipe"). you can simply copy the whole bunch of settings. alternatively, you can define a list of settings that will be copied by selecting "copy selected settings". then you paste your recipe, that can be full or partial, depending on the copy command you used last. you can alter any setting during your work: if they are among the selected one, the next "copy selected settings" will reflect the changes you made. dpp does not implement overlays, and overlays are a setting that usualy cannot be meaningfully copied from an image to others.

it would not work well, unless the same presets can be applied through the set of images. this could be managed if the user had the ability to choose the settings to be copied to the temporary preset. this would allow to set certain controls separately for each shot, or groups of shots.

i'd say you can reach your goal simply by creating a new pixel layer and working on it with the clone/repair tools you need after setting to "current layer and below" their source dropdown option.

NC modules can be used both as standalone applications or a set of plugins. the way you use them depends on your editing goals and workflow. i seldom use them as standalone applications: actually, only when i need to quickly edit an image whose i don't have the raw original file (i's say, images not taken by me). in my regular workflow, i always use NC as plugins, as they allow to get results that i cannot reach with AP's native adjustment or live filter layers: i.e. black and white. as plugins, they are destructive. so, i usually create a copy of the layer i want to apply them to before calling the plugin itself. and, when possible, i try to apply plugins at the very beginning of my editing work or as the very last step. i hope i didn't misunderstand your question.

it does make sense. however, the abilty to copy all of the raw adjustments to a single preset (instead of one present for each group of controls) would be a very useful enhancement, because it would allow to paste all the adjustments to any other loaded image with just one click. it's not about managing digital assets, but rather speeding up the development process when you have a bunch of photos taken in the same environment (same iso, same light, etc) - which happens most of the times.

maybe i don't catch the point, but i'd say that adjustment layers are not tied to the size of the picture. i just created a new document and painted on it, then applied a white balance adjustment layer. then i created a second, much bigger, document and painted all over it. than i copied the adjustment layer of the first document and pasted it over the second image, and the white balance adjustment was applied to the whole bigger image. this appears to be true even if you paint a mask in the adjustment layer before copying it; however the mask retains its original size and covers only a portion of the bigger image (while the adjustment is still applied globally).

woody42, did you actually shoot bracketed images? or did you bracket them in dpp? i've noticed that several programs do recognize as bracketed only images that were shot with real (in camera) exposure bracketing.

i got the answer from MEB (thank you) in the bugs forum. an hdr image has a 32 bit colour depth, so nik plugins (except the hdr plugin) cannot handle it. this problem is easily solved converting the image to 16 bit or 8 bit (Document => Colour Format): after this, the plugins are selectable and work as expected. since the colour format conversion is destructive, as it happens at document level (not layer level), it can be useful to take a snapshot of the image just before converting it. this way, one can go on with their editing and use the plugins, and also keep the last 32 bit version for later use, if needed.

hi all, i have an apparently weird problem with nik plugins under affinity photo 1.5.1. simply put, when i try to use my nik plugins on an image i obtained through "new hdr merge", only "hdr efex pro 2" is selectable; all other plugins are grayed (even the auto fx free sampler plugin, so it could not be a nik related issue). and yes, i have created a new layer through "merge visible" and applied "rasterize" to it, and when i go to filters->plugins->nik collection, the rasterized layer is selected. on the other hand, all of the nik plugins are selectable (great improvement since ap 1.4) when the image does not come from the hdr merge process. maybe i am just missing something, but i have tried everything i could think about (reopen the image, quit and relaunch ap, close all the other apps...) but nothing worked. any clues to solve this? thanks stefano

ooops, sorry :) post-29620-0-38746100-1469783235 (1).afphoto

i don't know actually whether a new install could work, but here's my experience: the first time i installed the nik collection was to use it with affinity photo, since i don't have photoshop or aperture. i had read in this forum something about cheating so that the nik installer believed photoshop was installed on the mac, and so i did. i don't remeber what exactly the trick was, but i think it can be found searching the forums. i got an /Applications/Nik collection folder containing the standalone apps; it contains also a "Google" folder, which in turn contains a folder for each plugin. I configured affinity photo to search /Applications/Nik collection/Google for the plugins, with "/" as support directory. Everything worked fine at the first try. yesterday i installed the nik plugins on my daughter's mac and there was no Google subfolder in the /Applications/Nik collection folder. i scratched my head a bit, then i remembered about tricking the installer. as a quick and dirty workaround i brutally copied the Google subfolder from the first mac to the second one, and configured affinity photo on the second mac just as i did on the first one. everything worked. so, the only suggestion i can give you is to have the same setup i have: an /Applications/Nik collection folder, with a Google subfolder; the folder contains the standalone apps and the subfolder the plugin subfolders. as far as i can tell from your screenshot, you already know how to configure the plugins support in affinity photo, pointing to the Google subfolder as plugin search folder and to / as support folder. after setting up things, try with a newly loaded image, with no effects applied or additional layers or masks, then apply the silver pro 2 plugin. now that i write "pro 2"... what version of nik collection did you install? my version is 1.2.11, i downloaded it in the beginning of april, a few days after google released it freely.

richard, i'm not sure this is significant, but in the post where you uploaded the first screenshot of your configuration, the plugin search path is "/Applications/Nik Collection". if you was able to launch the plugins from within affinity photo with that configuration, i assume you have a copy of the plugins in that folder, where the installer should instead put only the standalone applications. did you install the plugins multiple times in different locations? could your problem originate from having different version of the plugins in different locations?

ekoh, i used the inpainting tool on your image and got a pretty decent result. i think the key was to select very precisely what to inpaint where the object to be removed has no or very little uniform color around. i attached the image. it is saved with history, so that you can undo the few inpainting steps and see how i proceeded. anyway, the clone tool is a very effective alternative, as pauls and lilleg suggested. inpianting.afphoto

you could try by creating a mask for the bubble: - create a new pixel layer - paint it white over the bubble - layer->rasterize to mask then try different effects, like HSL, brightness/contrast, levels, curves: apply the mask you created to each effect, so that it affects only the bubble ( in the layers stack select the mask and click cmd-j du duplicate, then drag the duplicate over the effect icon) this should allow you to make the bubble barely visible, mainly in the right and center areas of the poster. it will not hide the bubble completely, however. on the left side, where the bubble is more visible, you could apply more effect layers (repeat the process i described above), but edit the mask so that the effect applies only the the areas where the bubble is more visible (click on the mask icon and paint black where you don't the effect to be applied). this should allow you a better approximation of the original colors. if you make a mistake while editing the mask, you can switch back and forth from black to white to reveal/hide the effect; you can also set the brush opacity to a value between 0 and 100 to get a dimmed effect. you can modify the brush hardness to have a softer transition where needed. i think you'll need to refine the work with some precision editing, using the clone tool. i attached the afphoto file of my experiment, you may want to take a look at it since an example is usually better than words. poster.afphoto

you can achieve your goal using layers and masks. open an image, then open or paste a second image as a new layer over the first one. then add a mask to the new layer, click on this mask and start painting black on the image: you'll see that the areas where you painted black disappear, and let you see the lower image. you can paint the mask white to make the lower image disappear again. this way you can choose exactly what parts of the upper image you want to be visible and hide the corresponding areas of the lower picture. if you paint gray, you get a transparency effect: the darker the grey tone, the more transparent the mask. if the area you want to hide is small, you can invert the mask by pressing cmd-i and then paint it white to reveal the upper image. if your goal is to keep the brightest part of a darker exposure and the darkest parts of a brighter one, you can generate a suitable mask by making a grayscale copy of the brighter image: then apply the threshold effect to it, adjust it as needed, gaussian blur it and layer->rasterize to mask. then apply the mask to the brightest image (that must be the upper layer). the process may need refinements (the threshold value, the blur level) but should easily and rapidly approximate what you need.

you can copy and paste the selection, then edit the pasted copy. or you might want to try the perspective tool.

if you click on a selection tool like the selection brush, then on the refine button that appears above the image, you can use the refine instruments to improve the selection. painting with the matte brush on the edges that need to be refined you should get a nice result.

i downloaded your aphoto file and could get some texture in the nucleus of the galaxy by stacking for minimum instead of median. however, i'm not sure it's real detail rather than noise. i think that, basically, you have an overexposure problem, maybe you should take more shots with a shorter exposure. in addition, one of your shot appears to be misaligned. most of the photoshop tutorials i've seen around can be valid for affinity photo too, maybe somthing has to be changed and adapted, but the login behind the sequence of operations is often quite the same.

well maybe i don't get the point, but: 1) the topic title is about the milky way, but the images you reference to are deep space shots. usually milky way images reproduce a big portion of the visible sky 2) the "starting" image is b/w, while the goal image is in color the b/w image seems a zoom in and the stars are a bit blurry; it looks like the exposure time was so long that earth's rotation has gotten in, or the pointing system did not work properly. anyway, there is no way, imho, to obtain something like the target image starting from the b/w one. i assume they're just two examples. in this case, i'd suggest to browse http://photographingspace.com/, if you don't know already. it contains lots of suggestions and examples, and offers a free cheat sheet that explains how to reasonably set a camera to take good space shots.

a very simple method to get an ortin effect can be based on what mr. orton explains on his site (www.michaelortonphotography.com): duplicate the background, add some blur to the copy (gaussian blur or lens blur work fine) and set the opacity of the copy to about 50-60%; then apply a slight overexposure to the original background layer (usually 1/3 stop is enough).

hi OldNav, I agree with Mike, there's no automagical way. in general, you can achieve good results adding pixel layers and changing their blending mode to "colour". then, paint on them with the paintbrush: the painted area should retian textures and tonality from the bw image, but take the hue from the brush strokes. selecting colors accurately and trying different amounts of opacity, you should get what you want. you can also experiment with different blending modes. my advice is to use a new pixel layer for each area in the image: this way, you can set blending mode and opacity for each area and also get a strong, non-destructive setup of your work: if you decide to change something, you can edit the corresponding layer or even delete it, while keeping the good part of your work intact.

Mojo_mike, i experience this problem with more than one program (not ap) i downloaded from the app store. i simply try again several times, alternatively from the update and the download pages, until it works. however, you wrote that you deleted all of the trial entries. the problem should not be related to trial entries at all, since these are not downloaded from the app store. if you still have an app store downloaded (not trial) in the applications folder, try deleting that one too.

the only reason i can think of at present, is that in the layer stack on the right you have not selected the lighting filter layer, so you see the light spots in the mage but cannot modify them since you are actually working on a different layer.

chatterbox, affinity photo is not a dam software, so it doesn't manage image libraries. like R C-R said, you have to transfer the shots from your camera to your mac, then you can open then in AP.