cristofa

Mats001 - the thing is that Affinity Photo is not a 'RAW editor' equivalent to Lightroom and Capture One. Edit in either of those programs and the RAW file remains around the same size, but export to .tif etc. and the files are huge. RC-R provides a clear explanation above. Affinity Photo, as far as I understand, is equivalent to Photoshop. If you open a RAW file in Photoshop, you can't save it as RAW. If you save it as .tif (depending on the original file) it will be > 90MB. So that's similar to AP. I have converted from many years using Lightroom to Capture One, which I much prefer now. I can carry out most of the edits I want in C1 and only go into Affinity Photo every so often. The resultant big files in that case are no big deal.

Thank you for your clear and thorough answer to this question. And, presumably, after a bit of editing, the file size will grow again? So time to double the RAM and get some monster drives and not give it a second thought!

So I have just started using Affinity Photo after many years on Lightroom and am really shocked at the size of .afphoto files! The two threads above are ancient - I don't know why the .afphoto files are so big, but has Affinity not managed to do something about this in the intervening 4 or 5 years, or is this deemed acceptable?! In Lightroom, I will likely open a .orf file (13.4MB) and work on that. I could have 3 or 4 virtual copies of different versions and the .orf remains the same size with its tiny XML buddy. I sometimes go out into Photoshop, but can normally do what I need in Lightroom. Once it's all set, I will export that to full size .jpg which will be between 6 & 8MB. If I open the same 13.4MB .orf in Affinity Photo - do nothing beyond going to develop - do nothing and save ... the resulant .afphoto is 87MB !! How on earth ?! I haven't begun to carry out any serious editing on numerous layers - I dread to think how big that will make the files? I have been learning all three Affinity programs, and really like them - but this could be a deal-breaker. Why are AffinityPhoto files SO big? later edit ... I should have researched this more thoroughly before posting this because doing just the same in Photoshop saving as .tif and .psd produced files about the same size as .afphoto! I still don't understand why they should put on so much weight. It is clearly time to get an additional, monster hard drive !

A TRIUMPHANT TRIUMVIRATE OF PROGRAMS - effin well done Affinity!! 9 years on Quark Express - at least same again on InDesign - first glance, this publishing program looks best yet by a long way. Except for all the legacy LR files, I will soon be able to leave Adobe for good with no regrets.