jorismak

I see no flickering , flashing or disappearing user interface elements anywhere. The plugin seems to work just fine on that. Changing sliders, changing the curves, zooming, panning, clicking around in the preferences... all seems fine. The thing though: I still have the purple / magenta weird color look! The moment you zoom in in Viveza (100%) the colors turn normal, but if you zoom out 'zoom to fit' it's again all purple. All the other Nik plugins don't show this. Quite weird.

Thanks for the tips ! Been using luts in videoworld , never thought about using them in photo work. Stupid :). If the 16bit conversion is indeed done in working space, that means I can work around it which is a huge help already

Neat image 8 was releases some time ago. In my mind, huge improvements but also 'more of the same '. They added more 'assist views' to make life easier dialing the settings in. Neat still has the tendency to make parts that become too blurry look weird. I don't know if I can explain it,but imagine this: you have a tree in the background. You have to apply aggressive denoising , so the tree becomes blurry and/or looses a lot of detail. Most other noise plugins make the tree look like there is some kind of gaussian blur applied. Natural looking blur. But neat doesn't get natural. It starts looking like triangles and weird shapes, which kinda stinks to be honest. Topaz is still my 'if all else fails' plugin. Good results all the time, but requires careful dialing in and is slllooowww. But i live it in my toolbox. Most denoisers work with settings to 'set noise level' and then other settings to 'set amount of reduction'. After setting noise level you dial in the amount to leave a preferable amount of noise in, giving a natural looking image that doesn't look so blurry and no banding. Topaz doesn't have the 'amount' settings, just the level. In other words , topaz always goes for ultra smooth , removing all the noise entirely, giving it a too smooth unnatural feel. The trick is to then blend some of the original image back in using layers after the plugin has run. (Or use their 'add noise' slider). You gotta remember this. Go for an unnatural oversmoothed look in topaz, then blend layers to get the amount you want. Other plugins like Neat and Noiseware have this built in. The preview assists in Topaz (and Neat now as well ) are extremely handy though , and missed in Noiseware or others . These views show you the chroma channels, or boost the shadows or show just the high frequencies as an example. Makes it very easy to dial in each slider. Neat 8 and topaz 6 both work fine in Affinity for me. And both are under 100 bucks (well, Neat was for me with upgrade s. Don't know the new-customer-price). If you have noise issues, both are extremely good to have. Shooting on an 6year old aps-c camera (the first 24mp aps-c ever I think ) , a m4/3 camera and a lot of analog film, dealing with noisy is large part of my photo hobby :).

Luts sure help with looking at the project :). May I ask how did you get those, generated them somewhere somehow? But are they also precise enough to 'apply' / rasterize the effect? For what it's worth, my test case was this: I have a 16bit tiff file in Photoshop, with my own generated / customized profile assigned, which is AdobeRGB with a gamma of 1.0. I called this 'adobergb-lin'. So that 16bit file my my adobergb-lin assigned gets converted to 32bit in Photoshop. Photoshop at this points still lists my 'adobergb-lin' as the profile assigned to the image. I save this, embedding the ICC profile. I open this in Affinity Photo and it looks OK, and Affinity Photo also lists my 'adobergb-lin' profile as the assigned profile. This file, I can't get to 'normal' AdobeRGB inside of Affinity Photo. If I convert that 32bit tiff file into 16bit, it becomes sRGB. If I assign the 32bit tiff file the 'Adobe RGB (linear)' profile that Affinity Photo lists, I also still get sRGB when converting to 16bit... This is in the .54 public beta btw. I missed that there was a lut-adjustment layer. Opens up a lot of stuff :P. Let me try a bit today, I think it's a workaround for now but will have to do some quality checks with the final output. The idea is still to convert the image to 16bit-non-linear at some stage to.. well.. actually view it :). It now still requires some roundtripping through ImageMagick or something. Not bad, but not ideal either :).

It depends on color-spaces in use and stuff like that how Viveza responds I guess. I've seen reports in the latest customer beta (1.5.1.54 thread) that the 'violet Viveza'-thing seems solved. No clue if it's true or not.

But also the conversion from 32bit (in linear adobergb for example) to 16bit (normal adobergb) does not work.. it always turns 32bit into 16bit-sRGB which is a waste if you were working in bigger color gamuts.

Well.. with other things they just said clearly 'by design' or "won't fix". They acknowledged that it didn't do what you want it to do, but it did what they wanted it to do :). In other words, they listened to questions / bug reports but didn't agree on them. Which is OK, people can have different opinions :P. They're just blatantly being silent on threads about this topic which I find very weird and annoying. As an example, how Affinity Photo loads a file and how Photoshop loads the file: and I get the message in Affinity Photo when loading the file that it ignored the embedded profile and assigned my working space profile (where it of course goes wrong). If the files are linear-AdobeRGB I can somewhat managing it by applying a gamma correction of 2.2 (which is still annoying to do with the 'max correction' of 2.0, requiring two level-corrections). But for profiles such as sRGB which don't have a perfectly linear gamma curve this means that I can't properly convert the linear-srgb into gammacorrected-sRGB inside of Affinity Photo, and it doesn't open files with an embedded profile correctly. One of the little reasons why this awesome piece of software is now sitting unused on my system. edit: I tried to be smart. Open the file in Photoshop, save it as 32bit floating-point TIFF, open it up in Affinity Photo. This opens the 32bit file OK (and I see the name of the embedded profile even). But then when I try to convert it to RGB-16, Affinity Photo turns it into sRGB instead of (in this case) Adobe RGB... Wrong again. So while still in 32bit I 'assign' a profile, the 'Adobe RGB (1998) (linear)' option that Affinity Photo gives me. (the image had my own custom adobergb-linear profile previously). When I try to switch this file back to RGB-16, it _still_ makes it sRGB instead of Adobe RGB!! So it seems even if I manage to assign Affinity Photo's own linear-AdobeRGB profile, I can't convert to non-linear 16bit AdobeRGB with it. As long as they don't even respond to this I'm afraid this won't ever be the program I hoped it would be.

Just for my curiousity, what are you doing, or what is your primary editing action? I didn't encounter a single crash yet, and have been using it since the public beta.. only when trying Photoshop plugins that don't work that it may crash.. but then it's more the plugin that crashes. I guess you must be using some part of the application that I'm not to encounter so many crashes..

I have a tread about the same kind of problem. Profiles are ignored in 16bit if they are linear space. Not only during import. Also when assigning a profile the linear-gamma profiles won't show up _unless_ you're in 32bit mode in the image. Haven't got a single response, been bumping it a few times.. but they're ignoring it it seems.

Is there a way to keep this unintended behavior (adding adjustment as child). I think the whole child-adjustment-layer is what makes Affinity Photo special :).

Still nothing on this?

Well if you don't miss something in APh then you don't need them.. .. but there is a shitload in the whole of Nik Collection that APh doesn't have. The presharperner is a little simple, but the output sharpener has a ton of extra control and a different algorithm compared to APh built-in sharpening stuff. Nik Define2 is one of those noise reduction algorithms that profile your image from a piece (or multiple pieces) of noise and then reduce noise on it. Not something that's built in into APh (although I don't like Nik Define's results personally :P). Nik Silver is a _very_ popular and nice 'black and white' film emulator. Tons of different b&w-conversion profiles, options, grain types, etc.. Nik Analog tries to be the same for Color. Tons of filters and presets to give a vintage look to images. Nik HDR Efex and Nik Viveza are the ones I don't really get. Other tools exist to do the HDR merging or control brightness and all and generally do a better job in my opinion. Viveza can work nice to do local adjustments though, but nothing ground breaking. Nik Color is the workhorse, the one that defines the Nik collection IMHO. Nik Color is filled with different mini-plugins. Different modules that do certain stuff. From local contrast, detail enhancement, skin smoothing, film grain, vignette's, color contrast, color cast + white balance stuff to way more. Some of those are 'go to' modules that I use on pretty much every picture. 'Detail enhancer' is one to use with care but can do wonders, 'pro contrast' I use on every image to tweak final 'pop' and is a white-balance / color-cast god (specially with analog film scans it's invaluable), 'dynamic skin softener' is a wonder to quickly fix up (selectively) certain skin areas, the 'brilliance / warmth' module has a slider 'perceptual saturation' which is a miracle to some images. Different to saturation, different to color contrast, different to vibrance.. it somehow pushes colors to be more the colors I expect them to be, or something like that. Can make images come to life. The 'skylight', 'sunlight' and 'reflector' modules can work wonders to add life to pictures that were taken under overcast conditions or uneven lightning situations. There are modules in there that I don't find anything else, and there are modules in there that 'do something similar to built-in functions, but way better or with better control'. That's basically how I sum up Nik Color Efex :).

How far to you get by upsizing all your shots (still would use a softer bicubic for this, not nearest neighbor) aligning the images (as layers) and then moving one of the layers one pixel (or subpixel if APh can do that), maybe by using the keyboard or something. Does PhotoAcute work on your raw files or does it work on debayered pixels ?

Bump

Ignoring the stupid rants in this thread, about the real problem: Affinity Photo exports tiff files without an alpha channel if the document doens't need one. In the Document menu, uncheck 'transparent background'. And in the TIFF export dialog, click 'more' and there is an option for the matte to be used. It defaults to 'transparent' color (white with a red line through it). If you select another color there, Affinity makes all (possible) transparent areas that color and exports a TIFF file without transparency, regular RGB. This all being said, I created a new document in Affinity and exported it with an alpha channel and one without. And both import fine into Capture One 9 here. Transparent areas are made black though. So I don't understand your issue. Files open file here. If I process scans from VueScan in Affinity One, I go to the 'channels' tab, right-click the 'Background Alpha' channel and click 'Fill' and the alpha / transparency is gone. Or I right-click it and click 'to grayscale layer' and I have the IR data in a separate layer to use (and then right-click and click 'fill' to remove the transparency effect). If I export it to tiff, the files open fine in Capture One 9 here.

I think AP always sees itself as RGBA even if your background layer isn't set to transparency. A bit weird but OK. I find it weirder that C1 just doesn't work with alpha channel files apparently ? Just ignoring the alpha would be enough :). In the document menu or layer menu is an option to enable or disable background layer being transparent. Maybe that helps in the export. Otherwise a quick imagemagick command to strip the alpha channel (or something similar ) is required . For what it's worth , I work with negative raw scans from vuescan as well and it works fine in AP (auto level / curves not having an auto mode with threshold is a bit of a pain, and supporting colorperfect would be icing on the cake ) but I can invert, fix balance (with help of Nik Color Efex) and fix defects with the help of the IR channel all fine within AP... .. PS just works a bit easier and faster for this stuff I find.

+1. I have the 16bit linear profiles I want to use in my system folder, _And_ through file -> import icc. But they appear only when in 32bit mode, not in 16bit mode.

Bump, haven't received any answer yet... can't convert and work properly with linear-gamma files.

It kinda is if the OP is clearly doing this to _NOT_ have to resort to external tools. That means you to do it with the tools inside of the photo-tool. So if Photosave save-for-web is beating Affinity (by an apparently quite large effect) for the same file size then it's settled, right? How that filesize is achieved doesn't really matter. If Affinity leaves the metadata in than that doesn't matter to what's possible to get out of Affinity without external tools :). The results can be _explained_ by including or excluding metadata or progressive or baseline or stuff like that... but results are results, and if Affinity doesn't give options to change, then the results are final. I stated before that if you're willing to use external tools there come legion of options available to optimize how you see fit, but then it isn't relevant anymore to what you get 'as is' out of the photo program. If you're asking "why stay 'inside' of Affinity, why don't allow some sort of external tools" then I'm inclined to agree, but apparently the OP isn't interested in that. It seems he/she/they have a macro-workflow or something that saves a lot of time if it's saved directly from the program.. I don't know. Saving it all als jpeg and then having a program strip metadata from all jpgs in a directory seems simple enough. And then you might as well save everything as tif or png and have a program that puts all tif/png files in a directory through mozjpeg or a similar jpeg-optimizer :).

Comparisons need to be done at (roughly) the same filesize. Like the OP, he tweaked the values so that they both give or take got the same filesizes (104kb and 100kb apparently). If the 100kb is clearly better looking then there is quality difference :P. About the resample options in the export dialog (they are there for all filetypes, not just jpeg): Isn't it also the case that you can have documents scaled to (for example) 4523.8 by 793.3 pixels in Affinity. And if you export, those boundaries need to be rounded to the nearest full pixel, thus you get a fractional resize (and thus the option to choose your resampler). It could also be the case if for a format (like jpeg) it's possible to do chroma subsampling, and the resampler is used to downsample the chroma. Although this would be weird as 'too sharp' for chroma downsampling really gives artifacts, and lanczos (both options) is really not the best for chroma downsampling as I read it. So the option shouldn't be there in that case. But I believe it's there to do on-the-fly scaling if you wish, and to round-to-nearest-pixel if you got fractions in your dimensions. Otherwise a resampler would really be a silly option for exporting to tiff or exr :). I'm so used to using the mozjpeg command line together with ImageMagick that the quality of built-in jpeg export is non-issue for me, but clearly for a lot of people this can be a make-or-break it kinda situation.

in my experience (comparing to a lot of open source jpeg libraries, irfanview, mozjpeg 2 / mozjpeg 3) Photoshop's jpeg export is actually shockingly good and you should not expect any other program to just blindly match it :). That's with CC 2014 / 2015 / 2017 though, but I doubt the jpeg engine changed over the years. Mozjpeg3 is still the winner of them all, but I never use irfanview or imagemagick's jpeg save anymore because photoshop's is clearly better. If it's possible for the Affinity team to incorporate the opensource mozjpeg3 library (a mod /fork of the 'normal' libjpeg as far as I know) it would be a winner :P, but I have no clue if this is possible license-wise and all.

You could always select a small area and apply an average blur to average the area out, then sample it. Gives the same effect as a picker that samples more pixels I guess

Done tests once. My Raw files opened in ACR and then a VSCO preset applied as test-image-1. My raw file opened in DxO, all lightning stuff disabled, export as DNG, open DNG in ACR with the same VSCO preset appled as test-image-2. Test-image-1 and test-image-2 are identical. Once you start applying the DxO corrections stuff will differ of course. This kinda proves that you can go from RAW -> DXO -> DNG -> raw-converter and get the output exactly the same as going RAW -> raw-converter... as long as the DNG processing is OK in the raw -converter. CaptureOne still doesn't do this properly, I'm guessing APhoto doesn't as well. But DNG files are kinda tricky to get right from what I understand. Using the embedded color-data can help though.

OK will try. This is the first customer beta than? First beta release after the final .45? Expected something more of a big announcement or mail to join the customer-beta program, missed this release if it wasn't for this thread :).

I'm guessing the byte-order is wrong (or interpreted wrong) in that tif file. Or it might be something funky as transparency why you (almost) don't see any image.