barninga

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.

usually a resolution between 72 and 96 dpi is good for the web. about compression, i think that it all depends on the accuracy you need and whether your website is based upon images or these are just decorative elements of your pages. if you can tolerate some modest degrading in quality, i guess that a quality level between 75 and 85% should be adequate. You can set the compression level as quality level directly in the file->export dialog of affinity photo. choose the file format (all what i wrote until now applies to jpeg files) and set the quality level, then click on "export".

we users have no assurances at all about the usability over time of any proprietary format, unless (to a certain extent) it becomes a widely supported standard. but even for those, there's no guarantee that they shift to something different and one day retrocompatibility is lost.

MBd, you're right, but it's not simple name the folders from multiple categories. for example, i append to the date the name of place where the shots were taken. a filesystem based archiving strategy has to be simple, since a more complex categorization should be done in a dam. the point is, at least for me, that dams are proprietary software and i don't like to be locked in.

what is the benefit for you of downloading the raw files to photos and the exporting them to the finder? do you archive the raw files in photo for later use? i find more practical to download raw images directly to the finder, using canon's eos utility. i configured it to create a new folder for each date and put them into a root folder i defined earlier: this way i have a tree where all of my raws get downloaded, and for every date i shot a photograph, a new leaf is added. then i usually convert them with dpp, or edit them directly into ap. i save the afphoto files in the same "leaf" folder where the cr2 file are, and finally convert to jpegs and archive them. from time to time, i connect an external hd to my mac an move old "leaves" to it, so i can regain some space on my disk.

since you own a 70d, you have canon's dpp raw processor. you might want to give it a try. even if it's not as fully featured as ap's develop persona, it handles digital noise very well, allows highlights and shadows recovery and exposure and white balance correction; it also allow to selectively copy&paste the edits you made to a shot to any number of shots, ant it can batch-convert the raw files to tiffs or jpegs. then you can load the exported tiffs/jpegs into ap, one at a time if you just need to continue editing them, or by small groups if you need for example to tke details from one shot and add them to another one.

i think that 64 images, about 20 megapixels each, is a tremendous load. i cannot say it for sure, but i suspect that you hit some bottleneck that made things worse with each image you were adding, most probably a memory shortage. if you experience the problem again, one thing you can try to do is to launch Activity Monitor from the Applications/Utilities folder, and try to spot where the problem is. even better, you could install some utility that allow you to understand that a problem is to come before it explodes. i suggest you to try Menu Meters. it displays inn the menubar a memory pie chart and a cpu barchart, and you instantly get an idea of what's happening inside your system and know if you are approaching a critical point, like a full memory situation.

i store my afphoto files together with their raw counterparts. when i end my editing process i export them to jpg and store the jpegs in a dedicated tree on my filesystem (basically, i have a folder for each year and, within that, a date-named folder for each event i shot. then i import the last folder in apple's iphoto, where i add only faces metadata.

it is unlikely that adobe stops developing around its proprietary file format. however, affinity phot use s a proprietary format too, so imho there's no point in switching from photoshop to affinity due to adobe's file format. there is only one solution to this issue, and it would be that all countries in the world issued laws that oblige software vendors to publish complete specifications of their data formats for free. this way, anyone can write new software that reads and write those formats. however, in the long run, the only way to guarantee a truly long life to our photographs, is to print them (but i would not print them to paper). even open or well documented and "standard" formats, like tiff or jpeg or png, can (i said "can", not "will") become a vintage thing over time, when new image coding standard make them obsolete due to new features that new formats will implement and support.