Keith Reeder

I've chipped in to lots of crowd funding initiatives without ever having any intention to actually buy the thing the funding was for - sometimes i just like an idea enough to throw a few quid at it even though I'd never actually use the end product. Point being - crowd funding does not provide a reliable indicator of future demand.

Ah - so this is a Designer thing. Helpful if you could indicate as much in the subject line...

And probably a bad decision, too. Unless maybe he thought it was a word processor or something... ;)

Obviously this is a subjective issue, with no "one size fits all" answer. And with that said, I also think that different cases can be made for Designer and Photo. For most photographers, it's likely that the questions: "does it do the same things I used in my previous solution?" "Does it do them well?" "Is it acceptably stable?" and "Does it fit into my existing workflow?" (which is all that most of us need to know, if we're honest) can be answered easily enough within 10 days in most cases. But I can easily imagine Designer needing a longer lead time (not in R C-R's case! :D), simply because of the relative complexity of workflow.

As Ian suggests, it's an operating system issue, not an Affinity Photo issue.

Lightroom would only do that if it was set up to do it, Ian.

Only Serif knows that.

If you can wait a (little?) while, Serif is working on its own DAM/cataloguing/file management solution.

What has that got to do with anything? Are you seriously saying that because a shitty thing happens over there, we may as well accept it happening here too? Besides, never having had the intention to pirate Photo, I've never tried to find pirated copies. The fact that you apprarently did is interesting in the context of this discussion... If software companies could rely on users' conscience as a barrier to piracy, there'd be no need for software protection. And we all know what the real World looks like there.

The big (but by no means the only) problem with 32 bit is the 4gb physical RAM limit (which amounts to 3gb usable on most machines - if the 3gb switch doesn't make the machine unstable): running Photo on such a small amount of RAM will be a joyless experience, which is why most software companies no longer provide or support 32 bit products. There are also dependency issues: most modern 64 bit programmes rely on native OS functions that simply aren't available in 32 bit operating systems, so Serif would need to code their own alternatives - and all for a very rapidly diminishing target audiience.

It also opens the door to piracy and licence abuse.

Do you mean "Photo Ninja"? Because that has no cataloguing whatsoever.

Nope - not even close to "fact", except as it applies to your expectations. And (I really shouldn't have to point this out) your way isn't the only way, nor is it remotely the only "right" way. Fact: deal with the DAM part of your workflow before opening Photo and it isn't a "poor choice" at all. There's no rule anywhere - written or unwritten - that your DAM solution has to come from the same company that provides the software you use for the rest of your workflow.

Note that it's the same price for Windows...

Yep, agreed - that's my point. Which is why "Lightroom competitor" doesn't make sense if we're only talking about cataloguing, because Lr is definitely not "just" an asset manager.

That's one kind of thing a DAM is, but this is the problem - there are as many ideas about what a DAM should be as there are people who would use it, and Serif is going to have the Devil of a job getting that right. In fact, even the phrase "Lightroom competitor" tells the story: I have never used Lr as a DAM solution (I have my own), only as a Raw conversion solution. So for me a "Lightroom competitor" is Photo Ninja, my Raw converter of choice. By the same token, because Photo has the Raw conversion functionality, it is already a "Lightroom competitor". See what I mean?

There are umpteen posts on the forum already about this - try searching for "DAM", "catalog", or "catalogue".

And considerably more information about the camera, computer and operating system in use. CR2s open and convert just fine (if a bit slowly, but that's already well-discussed) in Photo on my machine - Canon 7DMk II full CR2s; Win 8.1, AMD FX-4300 Quad Core 3.8GHz processor, Radeon R7260X graphics card, 16 gb RAM.

DarkClown, you seem hell-bent on picking fights, and I'm pretty tired of your attitude. You asked a question, I answered. I'm done with you, and your posts are now blocked.

It would help if the OP had mentioned his operating system and which plugins he's having problems with...

Capture One and Affinity Photo are not analogous, Jörgen - although Photo provides Raw processing functionality, it's not intended to replace your current Raw solution, so the smart move is to have a two stage workflow, starting with the Raw converter and ending with Photo. The Photo Raw converter will doubtless improve in speed terms, but it's going to be hard-pushed to compete with the established Raw solutions, in image quality terms, for the foreseeable future. As to your other questions. Hard to answer without knowing what you're doing in Photo that isn't working. But do these help at all? Have you read on up Photo's batch processing?

I use DeNoise and Detail by Topaz. Both work perfectly.

Culling outside of Lr can be really easy, and literally as fast as you can think and move your fingers; and you don't need an expensive dedicated program like Photo Mechanic to do so. For example, my own (Windows) workflow is as follows (and note that as a sport/motor sport/wildlife photographer I can come back from a shoot with 1000s of images): 1) Ingest images onto my computer using the file system, to a folder named for the date and location of the session; 2) Navigate to the first Raw file in the folder, and Open With Irfanview; 3) If it's to go, press the Delete key (Irfanview can be configured automatically to move to the next image on delete - you'd want to do that); 4) If it's a keeper, press the -> key to navigate to the next image; 5) Repeat as necessary - I can literally fly through a big folder of images this way - and finally; 6) Import the remaining images into Lightroom/the Raw converter of choice. It's much, much, much quicker this way than in Lr. Admittedly I'm not rating images as part of this workflow, but I don't do that anyway. If rating is seen as a necessity, you can do that in Lr as a much more manageable second pass. I also believe that XnView allows the addition of ratings, so that might be a substitute for Irfanview - but I don't know if its ratings are readable by Raw converters. That said - it looks like it's pretty capable as a cataloguing tool in its own right. (Note that for my approach you'll probably need to install the Irfanview Raw plugin if you're not already a user - it's a one-off, two minute job, and well worth the trouble).

A "local" problem with your kit, I reckon - I see no such problems here.

So what? This is about DeHaze, not you. :angry: Looks terrible, too - perfect proof that the job doesn't finish at the converter...