Peter W Gallagher

On my maxed iMac and MacAir M1, Affinity photo takes 15+ sec to load (while Affinity Publisher loads almost immediately). The suggested 'workaround' (duplicating + deleting the original) makes little if any difference. This is REALLY annoying because most of the time I'm launching Photo for a specific purpose that will take <1 min to complete in Photo (e.g. an 'inpainting' brush stroke or a quick sharpening with a 'Photoshop' plugin). The slow startup is discouraging. The long delay in fixing it is also discouraging? I bought AP from the Apple App Store ... maybe a mistake. Is the version direct from Affinity better at startup?

I am using a regex search/replace to correct an problem in text. The regex is '(\w) ([;:?])' and the replace '$1$2'. It works fine. EXCEPT that after a dozen or so replaces AP crashes. It crashes in different places in the text so I don't think the text (which looks fine) is the source of the problem. AP also crashes every time with 'Replace All'. Very annoying. I attach a crash log with the usual ugly details in case it is helpful. AP-RegEx-Crash-Log.txt

OK. But Lightroom for iPad has no problem opening raw files imported into the Photos app (using my SD card reader dongle). And even Readdle Documents for iPad (a file manager of sorts), although it cannot display raw files, will pass them to Affinity Photo via the "share" extension AS RAW rather than as JPEG. If the raw passes through the share extension I'm really puzzled that it will not open directly! Serif has created a wonderful product here, but not being able to import from LOCAL storage is a major deficit for me, especially on the road (the only time I need to process raws on the iPad). I hope your developers will re-address this.

I guess there will be a "troubleshooting" topic in due course... But here goes. I loaded up some Olympus Pen-f raw files via the SD card dongle into Photos on iOS. But when I open them from Affinity for iPad, it seems to find only the JPEGs. I know that the raws are on my iPad because LightRoom for iPad displays them as "raw" in the choose dialog. Affinity opens them in the Photo personna and not in the Develop personna. From the size and lack of any meta-data I'm pretty sure they are the embedded JPEGs. A .DNG file downloaded from Dropbox opens immediatedly in the Develop personna and displays a "RAW:" tag with image info in the top left of the Develop screen. Am I holding it wrong?

Thank you for sharing these notes, dmstraker. They're a great addition to the AP Manual and the videos. Your notes are also a fine tribute to the James Ritson videos that, in my view, are the best set of tutorial videos for any image-processing program that I've used. For their concision, thoughtful focus, broad topic coverage and low-key tone I rate them higher than even the polished performances of Julianne Kost on Adobe's products. I guess, since you've apparently watched and paid attention to all of them, you must like them too :). Peter

The last thing I do in the raw-conversion part of development (i.e. in Adobe Camera Raw or in AP's Develop module) is capture sharpening. My experience has been that the precise amount of capture sharpening within modest limits isn't critical to the final result. So I just eyeball the result, starting from some slider-values (my own pre-sets in ACR) that have worked in the past. But I'm a bit puzzled by AP's use of a percentage in the Radius slider of Detail Refinement. If this is a USM routine, I'd expect the value in "radius" to be the number of pixels surrounding detected edges where contrast will be increased (by the "amount"). What does a percentage radius measure? Percent of what? (Or am I wrong to assume that this is a USM routine? Is it, instead, some form of de-convolution?) Thank you.

James, thank you so much for a full and informative reply to a new user. It helps a lot. Once more, I am impressed by Serif. I'm very glad to learn of Serif's choice to manage your own RAW processing; for the reasons you give but also because it shows your interest in image quality. I had seen the color noise reduction option (and the luminance noise reduction option) in the Develop Assistant. I have really no qualms about the former since I imagine it is more or less impossible to un-twist the Bayer sensor puzzle without some color noise. As for luminance noise: I prefer to make my own luminance corrections, so I'm grateful for the option to separate it from the color-noise treatment (I use a Nikon D810 normally on the lowest ISO I can manage, so I usually choose to accept luminance noise, if any, to keep overall IQ high). Your observations on Apple Core-Image RAW routines as implemented in Photos seem exactly right to me. Adobe ACR does not seem to add anything to retain texture but a little digging with RawDigger shows that their tonal curve manipulation and added exposure can be quite large. The result is still, usually, a good place to start user-development. But I've seen a few cases in my own images where the (roughly 1.3ev) added exposure and (increased) contrast has been misleading (they also move typically push the black-point a bit, but I don't argue with that). If you don't mind I have a follow-up question about input sharpening in AP. But I'll make a separate topic in this forum about that. Peter

I've owned AP since it was first published. I buy stuff by independent developers these days in the hope that it will become great. But I started using AP only a few days ago when I discovered the direction of the workflow (from 'developer' to 'photo') and watched a few video tutorials (well-made & relatively information-dense, but... video! ugh!). I'm surprised to say that, now I "get it", I'm impressed by AP. This will be a killer suite when it's a bit more mature. As a user of specialist focus-stacking software, I was delighted by the built-in AP routines, for example. I'm curious, however, about the choice between AP raw conversion and Apple raw conversion. Is there a difference? I have a prejudice that raw-conversion is in fact critical although it's one of those things that gets swept under the carpet by most "photo" suites. I use Adobe Camera Raw by default but I can't decide whether its de-mosaicing etc is much different from the de-mosaicing in e.g. Photos. What is different is the non-linear adjustments to exposure and contrast/tone-curves (especially) that ACR applies by default (in Process 2012 and earlier) without telling the user (Adobe is a little more transparent about input-sharpening). I'm sure Photos also applies it's own (hidden) post de-mosaic adjustments. They're not as clever as Adobe's in my view. What does AP do? Does it apply some initial adjustments OTHER than those mentioned in the "Develop Assistant"? Are AP de-mosaicing routines developed in-house? Do they have some advantages we should know about? PS: The only raw converter I own that does NOT make initial adjustments unless you tell it to is Raw Photo Processor (http://www.raw-photo-processor.com); a great program with many clever touches, if a little eccentric.