barninga

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.

i'm not sure i've understood what you mean by "isolate the high frequency layer". are you trying to edit blemishes on it? when you apply the frequency separation filter, you get two layers. the low frequency layer mostly contains color, while the high freq layer contains most of the textures. this way, you can use any blemish removal tool on the low freq layer without the risk of flattening textures, since they are on the hig freq layer. you have non need to edit the hig freq layer, unless you want to edit textures. you have to select the low freq layer before using the blemish removal tools. if you apply an adjustment (color, white balance, or any oather of them) its effetc are applied to both of the layer if you place it on top of the layer stack; if you place it as a child of one of the two layers, it will be applied only to that layer. i hope i've clarified things a bit. if i misunderstood your question i apologize.

it looks like the mask should be refined a bit, maybe shrunk (so that it hides a little of the border of the church) and softened.

you just select fil->new stack in AP and choose the images you want to process; in a short time you'll get an image where all the stacked images are layers, grouped into a single stack group, where the stacking algorithm is indicated on the right. if you click on the algorithm symbol, you can select a different one and it will be applied "live". this way you can check what stacking options you have. once you select the stacking algorithm that suits your needs, you can uncheck all the images in the stack, except one, and apply adjustments and filter and live filters to the stack itself; when you're satisfied, just check all of the images again. working on one image only improves performances; when you're done, my advice is that you rightclick on the stack layer and rasterize it. this will create a static copy of it, where you will be able to apply subsequent filters and effects, or image insertions, etc. without worrying about performances. i assume that the mean algorithm (the default) should be good for star trails and smashing down digital noise..

under the filters->blur menu, there is a "minimum filter" and a "maximum filter". they work destructively.

in my experience, the ramp control (found in the refine selection dialog window), applied to an existing selection, does shrink or enlarge the selection. not by a dramatic ratio, but enough (again, in my experience) to have the selection edge following closer the border of the selected border.

the refine selection dialog has a ramp cursor, it ha the effect of shrinking or expanding the selection edge, did you try it?

you won't be disappointed by the 70d, it's powerful and really flexible. the 80d represents its evolution, but the big step further would be the 6d, mainly because it has a full frame sensor (while the 80d has an aps-c sensor, like the 70d).

if i understood how blend modes work, it's the same thing. the blend mode rules how the pixel in the layer interact with the pixels in the layers beneath. it doesn't matter if the layer which the blend mode is applied to is a pixel layer, an adjustment layer or a live filter layer: each blend mode has an algorithm associated with it, and this alogrithm is applied, no matter what kind of layer it is.

you have several options. if they are just spots within a rather uniform area, the inpainting brush could get rid of them easily. another option is to use the clone brush, to manually copy color and texture form similar areas. you might want to experiment with the tool's options, particularly opacity, hardness and aligned. the patch tool could also work. you can also select an area that features similar color and textures of the burned zone, copy&paste it, and try to arrange it so that it covers the white spot. based on my experience, i'd keep this third option as a last chance.

simpler and less powerful, i'd suggest "Exif Editor" from the apple store.it's very good when working on an image at a time and can handle a bunch of images, but it does not do batch afaik. nayway, it costs around 10$. if you feel geeky, you can use the super-powerful exiftool, freely downloadable from http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/. with some shell or applescript scripting, it can be turned in a batch beast. i recently discovered that a graphical interface is available (at https://hvdwolf.github.io/pyExifToolGUI/) but i've never used it (yet) so i can't comment on it.

i can confirm that the raw files produced by the canon 70d are handled flawlessly by ap. i own a 70d and i'm able to process them with dpp or ap, the result is great both ways. imho dpp deals slightly better than ap with extreme noise (but i can't exclude it's because i just can't fine tune ap noise settings as needed); anyway ap's develop persona is waaaay more flexible and powerful than dpp, so i choose which one to use according to the settings i shot the raw images with.

if you're having troubles with the select/copy/paste as new workflow, you could try a different approach. instead of selecting, crop a single photo out of your image and select "save as", the undo. this way you get your whole image back and you're able to crop another photo, while having the previously cropped image saved on disk. just pay attention to the fact that the file name you used to save as becomes the new filename of your working file (you have the original png or jpeg anyway).

you could try adding a gaussian blur live filter and set the radius so that it smooths the lines as needed. if there are areas where you don't want the blur effect, you can click on the blur layer thumbnail and then paint black (with the paintbrush tool) where you don't need the image to be blurred. then if you select "merge visible" from the layer menu, you get a new layer where a new image with smoother lines; at this point the fill tool should work better. an alternative approach could be to select the coloured areas instead of the black lines, and then invert the selection and paint it black.

elisabeth_k, if you want to apply the same adjustment to other portions of the image, you can click on the adjustment thumbnail and paint white over the image with the paint brush; if you want instead return some of the brightened areas to their previous aspect, you can paint black.

in the layers panel, drag the levels adjustment layer onto the icon of the layer you want to apply it to exclusively, so that the adjustment gets nested to that layer.

if you want to clone from the background layer to a layer above it, set the clone tool option to current layer and below, and work on the upper layer. in the photo you posted, if your goal is to hide the white among the hairs, you can add a mask to the layer and paint black over what you want to hide; if you make a mistake you can paint white to get the details back.

well, apparently the dodge / burn tools have no effect on grayscale images in general, even if they have not been rasterized to mask...