Chris.R

Success! It turns out I totally misunderstood how to do steps 5, 6 and 7 (it's kind of weirdly multi-layered in a way I hadn't grasped... anyway, I was doing the wrong thing). So this is my first trichrome, no glitches except for a bit of dust here and there. It looks a bit faded, but I suspect that's because my blue filter isn't as strong as it should be...S So thanks again, I hope I can do this again for the other ones I took!

Thank you very much, that opens now. I'm going to have another go at your method and see how the result differs from yours! Thanks again.

As far as I can tell, the documents are RGB/16. Across the top (just below the Photo Persona bit) is some text which gives the pixel dimensions and MP size, then says RGBA/16 and the formal sRGB profile name. Thanks for the afphoto file; unfortunately I can't open it as it "contains features of a later version of afphoto". My usage has been so low it was never worth my while paying for an upgrade!

OK it turns out if I control click on the extremely narrow area on the extreme right edge of the thumbnail, I can bring up the menu! Let's see if I can make the rest of this work...

I tried this option and it looks promising. I get as far as step 4, and I presume you mean a channel mixer adjustment as I can't see a separate colour mixer adjustment. Go through steps 5, 6 and 7, setting the appropriate colour to 100% and the others to zero (I'm guessing that's what you meant). Unfortunately at this point I've still got a greyscale image! All 3 layers have opacity 100%, which seems likely wrong to me, but I've tried reducing the opacity without visible benefit.

Trying this as an almost complete novice at Affinity Photo (v1.10.6), on a MacBook Pro... it's all fine until I get to para 6. Then at "Right click on the R channel's thumbnail and choose Make Spare Channel from the menu" it all goes wrong. Nothing I can do (well, almost nothing, see below) will allow me to select that R channel's thumbnail. I don't have a mouse, so in all other circumstances control-click should be usable instead of right click. But no matter where in that general area I control click, nothing happens. I try shift click, option click and command click, and as many combinations of these as I can think of, and nothing happens! Except... just once, while I was fiddling about, the menu appeared and I was able to select Make Spare Channel! But, I have no idea what caused that to work. Can anyone suggest what I'm doing wrong? Thanks, Chris

I have set up Affinity Photo as an external editor for Aperture on my Mac. I can then call it by choosing Edit with Affinity Photo from the Photos menu in Aperture. This will create a TIFF version of the selected file, open Affinity Photo which will then open the TIFF. I want to do some edits in AP and return the edited file (flattened as a TIFF preferably, rather than a PSD file) into Aperture. I can't find a way to make this last step happen. If I try a few simple edits (like a Levels adjustment), when I click Save in AP it says the file contains non-pixel elements, and asks if I want to save a TIFF with layers, or Save As something else. I don't think Aperture wants layers, but if I choose Save As it wants to put the file somewhere else in the file system. How should I do this?

Sam, the best approach would be heavily dependent on how many negatives, and to a lesser extent whether they are black and white or colour. Also what print sizes you have in mind. If you have a lot of negatives, there are still some very good scanners still available. There are also some very bad ones. I'd suggest NOT getting one of those stand-alone scanners that puts images on a SD card; they might be just about OK for black and white, but they can give some very poor results for colour negatives, as they have no way of adjusting for the different orange masks that are needed for different films. An ordinary flat bed scanner (eg an all-in-one printer scanner) will not give particularly good results, as it works by reflective light and you need to transmit light for good results from negatives. I bought one of the ones I'm NOT recommending (a Veho I think) but within a week realised how poor it was, particularly with light leaks as well as weird colours. Luckily I was able to send it back to Amazon for free because of the faults. I then bought a Plustek 7500i; there is an equivalent model still available, but over £200 unless you can get a good second hand one (which does happen, as people buy them, scan a collection then sell them on). This is a dedicated 35mm film scanner. It's pretty good quality but slow. I most often scan at 2400 ppi, which gives an image around 2400*3600 pixels, theoretically printable at 10*8", although for most images you can comfortably go to A3 without noticing the difference. The other option, particularly if you have 120 film negatives, would be an Epson scanner like the V500, a bit cheaper and in a few ways lower quality, but they do have the ability to batch scan a strip of up to 6 negatives, rather than moving a film holder through one frame at a time. Mind you, I also have one of these, for 120, and I've not managed to get the multi-frame scanning to work properly yet! If you buy a Plustek you will also get Silverfast scanner software, very powerful but complicated and confusing. If you buy the Epson you'll get Epson Scan, which I've not used. I've ditched both of these for Vuescan Pro, which works with pretty much all scanners including all-in-one printer-scanners and is a bit more intuitive in my view. I'm still shooting film, so my workflow for black and white is: a) shoot the roll b) home dev it, no darkroom required other than a dark change bag for putting the film in the tank, or (in my case) a Rondinax daylight tank c) after the negs are dry and have sat under a heavy book in their sleeves for a day or so, scan the roll. I pay attention to each frame and scan the poor ones at perhaps 600 ppi just as a record, most of the better ones at 2400, and if there's one I really like the look of, I might scan it at 3600 ppi. d) import the scans into a project in Aperture, post process as required, and print from Aperture. AP would get called from Aperture as an external editor as required. Obviously you don't need to use Aperture or an equivalent, you could just work on images from the folder created by the scanner software using AP. BTW I use file naming record information about the roll like film type, camera, location etc. When I was scanning the thousands of old negatives and slides the approach was pretty much the same. A word on colour negatives... if you've got them it's definitely worth scanning them, but I find colour accuracy is a bit random, and my colour management capabilities are not good. So for new colour films, I get them processed and scanned by Filmdev, £5 a roll for process and medium scan (around 2000 ppi), turned round in a day usually. Good quality. The pain is posting a roll to them; they theoretically don't fit in a large letter, so it's small packet at £3.35! Slides can also be a problem, although usually less so. The issue here can be blocked up shadows and out of gamut colours, but results can still be pretty good. If I have a cracker I wanted to print big I'd send it off for a drum scan, much more expensive. So you can see, it could be expensive, and one of the services that will scan existing negatives for you might be a cheaper option if you don't have too many. But that route will also get expensive if you have a lot. I contemplated weeding and only getting the best scanned externally, but soon realised I can't judge a negative without scanning it in the first place, plus taking out frames and sending them off will play havoc with any filing system you might have! This is probably a bit off topic for Affinity; I'd suggest dropping in to Talk Photography, where there's an active and supportive Film & Conventional sub-forum.

Hi, just bought Affinity Photo for Mac, which I hope to use in conjunction with Aperture (on Yosemite) while I still can. I'm not a fan of Adobe software, although I have tried to use the copy of Elements 9 that came with my Epson scanner. I've never really managed to get good results, or even work out what it's really for. It was maybe a bit mad to buy Affinity, since I do most post processing within the non-destructive environment of Aperture, and also because the photo group I go to mostly just uses Photoshop for all photo editing. But I thought it worth taking advantage of the discount, which I should have done a few weeks ago when it was even cheaper. So far I've used the live light tool on one shot of a woodland path through silver birches which are side lit, leaving the path rather too dark, and it seems to have gone reasonably well for a first attempt (light rather too cool for the rest of the scene, perhaps). I have not yet set it up to round trip from Aperture, I guess that's next. In due course I will have to decide where to go after Aperture, being down on Adobe (and subscriptions) I don't want to go the Lightroom route, so Capture One Pro has my interest for DAM and most PP, though I have yet to try it. Perhaps Affinity will be offering a DAM and more non-desrtuctive editing tools combined???