Granddaddy

We might have expected that Canva would have the kind of influence necessary to get Affinity Photo mentioned in PCMag.com's latest review of Photoshop alternatives. https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-adobe-photoshop-alternatives Sadly, APhoto is mentioned only in passing as being less usable and less useful than Corel Paintshop Pro, which is rated "Best for Budget-Conscious Image Editors." This seems an odd comparison since another thread in these forums mentions that Paintshop Pro appears to be an almost dead product that hasn't been updated in more than two years. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/230866-affinity-photo-as-a-paintshop-pro-replacement/ Of course, PCMag's reviews are seriously deficient. Their comments about On1 Photo Raw are from January 2024 and much has been added to On1 since then, so much so that I now use it for most of my routine snapshot adjusting and simple touchups.

It seems a bit unfair to blame users for problems caused by the confusing situation with Affinity on Windows. It is, after all, the responsibility of Affinity product managers to make their products easily usable by people who have neither the interest nor time to become technical computer gurus. The confusion began within minutes following the release of Affinity 2 in November 2022. It became obvious that a significant fraction of users could not even install Affinity 2 on machines that had been running Affinity 1 for many years. It took about three months for Serif to begin to resolve the confusion caused by Affinity 2 on Windows. The technical support staff at Serif had never been trained to support the new product architecture, most likely because management did not recognize the implications of what they had done. As we see regularly in these forums, confusion still reigns. Of all the hundred or so Windows applications currently installed on my home computers, and the dozens of others I supported during my working years, not one has ever caused the installation and update problems that are common with Affinity. For those interested in the history of the Affinity MSIX turmoil, I started threads on the topic on November 14 and November 16, 2022, at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/172405-affinity-2-beta-testing-failures-stopped-users-cold-in-first-five-seconds and at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/172819-justification-by-faith-in-microsoft-really-the-msimsix-kerfuffle/

This topic was talked to death 2-1/2 years ago without effect after Affinity 2 was released with an interface that made everything less readable and more difficult to use than it had been in Affinity 1, which was already poor. See for instance a discussion I kicked off at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/173835-what-ergonomic-design-principles-call-for-minimal-contrast-and-reduced-readability-in-user-interfaces/ Sad to say, designers adopted low contrast and lack of ergonomics many years ago. The row of identical buttons on my old Honda Accord requires me to take my eyes off the road to adjust the A/C. I used my P-Touch label maker to produce labels for the keypad on my new GE Microwave that was manufactured with dark gray numbers and letters on a darker gray background. They become invisible in a darkened room at night. Web pages use dark blue type on a black background or pale gray type on a gray background. How many errors result from such poor contrast? The idea of low contrast apparently originates in university courses, as do so many other supposedly clever ideas that make modern life more difficult and less enjoyable.

Take Better Photos has a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of AI selection tools in Affinity Photo 2.6 in comparison to Photoshop. The latter has a one-click solution for fine details like hair. APhoto's AI selection requires additional work with the refine brush in such cases, but it is still quite useful. Best of all, the APhoto AI selection tools are a free update for those who purchased APhoto 2 at any time since it was released in November 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmid3iDTVmI

You can get a good idea about the inadequacy of AI selection and masking tools from Robin Whalley's comparison of Photoshop and Affinity Photo 2.6 published this week at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xipGsC8j7I He concludes that APhoto is slightly better than Photoshop at AI selecting. He also concludes that neither is very good. My experience with APhoto 2.6 and On1 Photo Raw 2025 is that AI masking and selecting is adequate and even fun for quick and dirty work when touching up and enhancing family snapshots and hobby photos. AI sloppiness isn't much of a problem for such routine work. For more precise work with fine details, AI tools are grossly inadequate. Fine work requires you to use traditional selection brushes and pen tools. This is easily seen if you use AI to remove a complex background around people. Once the subject is isolated, insert a white background to see all the spillage into the area that at first appears transparent. There remains a lot of manual cleanup to be done following application of AI selection tools. Whalley refers viewers to one of his earlier tutorials on making fine selections using traditional tools. They work far better than the AI currently available in any product. The traditional tools actually take very little time while getting far superior results. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUmwGYcWdk8 I'm less and less interested in AI hype. Vendor demonstrations and even many end-user tutorials invariably use carefully selected photos that are unrealistic and even irrelevant in my world. They also tend to ignore sloppiness that is apparent even to my aging amateur eyes. I can add that another AI tool (generative fill in On1 Photo Raw) has never improved any photo I've tried it on despite assurances by the demonstration videos from On1. I've had better results with APhoto's Inpainting than I've gotten from the OPR Generative Fill.

Yes, I am now using On1 Photo Raw 2025.1, the latest version. They have single purpose products and also plugins for Affinity and PS. The plugins are destructive when used with APhoto as I understand it. I started with On1 Effects just about one year ago when someone in these forums alerted us to a free giveaway. Later there were some very deep discounts that led me to upgrade to OPR and to join On1 Plus to get access to the tutorials. I do like OPR for routine snapshot editing. But OPR is nowhere near being a replacement for APhoto, really very far from being a replacement. Thus, I'm using APhoto today to cut out a group of 11 people from a snapshot taken under poor lighting with a messy background to make a portrait to print at 13x19 for framing. From experience I know I can make a very good image using APhoto. I then print using Qimage Ultimate. Now that APhoto has the Object Selection Tool working well, I'm looking for more breakthroughs from Serif. I hope APhoto 2.6 is a sign of renewed interest in photo editing, which I think has been neglected for the past two years because of the DTP development work.

It is indeed dangerous for a company to disappoint so many users, in this case a large number of Mac users. I came to Affinity because when I upgraded from Photoshop Elements 10 to PSE 14 I discovered they had removed a feature (Clouds, or Perlin Noise) that I used frequently when creating backgrounds. I read in the PS forums that they had not yet gotten a 64-bit version working. So I looked for an alternative, found Affinity, and never bought PSE again. There was no compelling reason to return to PSE and Affinity's emphasis on non-destructive editing was a compelling reason to continue using it. (That and these superb forums, and the plethora of free tutorials from dedicated Affinity enthusiasts more concerned with showing how to do things than with showing their own talking heads.) Beware, though, of jumping to another product thinking it will replace the one you are using. For the past few months I've been doing all my routine snapshot editing (Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays) with On1 Photo Raw because of it's AI masking features. I also love its Export function compared to the primitive Affinity Export that requires great care as described in many threads in these forums. I like On1's tiny sidecar files when compared to .aphoto files that are 5 to 10 time larger than my oriiginal jpg files. (122 KB On1 sidecar vs 90 MB aphoto file for a 9 MB jpg original) But, I am frequently brought up short by things that On1 can't do but Affinity can do. The Text tool is very limited. There are no vector capabilities that I use frequently in APhoto for making arbitrary shapes to be used as clipping masks in my collages. The On1 UI is not great. Adjustments, effects, portrait adjustments, and color and tone adjustments are scattered across five separate tabs rather than being immediately apparent in layers associated with the image being edited. Finding where you did what is a chore. The latest example this past week was my attempt to use On1 to replace a background for a portrait of two adults and three children standing against a background of furniture, wall hangings, rugs, while wearing dark clothing that tended to blend into the background and into the shadows cast on the wall by the flash. Yes, terrible conditions, but that's real life when taking family photos. Failing to get a decent selection (or mask in On1 terminology) I turned back to Affinity. I had made many such portraits using APhoto over several years. It was a somewhat tedious process, but the selections were always sharp when i finished. I was delighted to download APhoto 2.6 and to discover the Object Selection Tool. It made short work of the project. I had a nice portrait with a studio style background in less than an hour. (It would have taken less time but I was playing with the OST as it was totally new to me.) The tool is far beyond the quality of what's possible with On1. See for yourself by viewing the On1 tutorials on masking subjects from the background (the tutorials that are not hidden behind the On1 pay wall, that is). I am amazed that the halos around the subjects are not even mentioned in most On1 tutorials. I find the masks completely unacceptable. Perhaps they can be cleaned up somehow using some tools in On1, but with APhoto I had very minor cleanups to do after using the OST. Finally, Affinity's Inpainting tool is far superior to anything I've found in On1.

These forums are a huge benefit of using Affinity products. I'm using a competing product now for most of my routine snapshot editing because of its AI masking. I'm doing things I never thought of doing with Affinity Photo, in part because it is too tedious or difficult in Affinity. Now with a couple of clicks and a slider I can enhance parts of a photo I used to leave alone as being good enough. My snapshots are now much better than previously. This competing product advertises itself as not requiring a subscription. But the users forum requires a subscription and many if not most of the tutorials also require a subscription. Sadly the forum has very little traffic and is not very useful. I'll not renew my subscription. It gives me the impression that few people are actually using this competing product. I've said that to the company without effect. Also, there are few user-generated tutorials in comparison to Affinity. Here we have dozens of tutorial makers, some contributing several hundred tutorials. For the competing product the tutorials are few. So, indeed, thanks to Serif for building a model for customer support with this superb forum and with tutorials. It pays off in the long run.

By all means keep this thread visible for others to learn from. This thread illustrates Granddaddy's problem-solving technique called Broadcasting Your Ignorance. As I first learned some 45 years ago, in the days of IBM mainframe listservs and PC bulletin boards, the quickest way to find a solution to my problem was to broadcast my ignorance. Sure I was sometimes made fun of by others. So what? So long as I had my say they could say anything they pleased. Remember that nothing good ever happens that some don't have their fill of laughter from it. Intelligent people, those who can help you, know what to disregard and will think no worse of you because of foolish criticisms by others. The important thing is that there is always someone who understands your problem and who is willing and able to provide a solution. As a professional librarian in research libraries at two large state universities, I always taught students a three step sequence to finding information. 1.) Ask someone who knows 2.) Broadcast your ignorance 3.) As a last resort, go to the library Today that last step more often involves searching the Web. But beware. The Web is not a library. As was written long ago: Search engines, with their half-baked algorithms, are closer to slot machines than to library catalogues --David Rothenberg Chronicle of Higher Education p. A44, August 15, 1997 It's worse today given that search engines are written to serve the purposes and agendas of the search engine companies. Often that means they are designed to mislead you and redirect you away from the best information. So ask someone who knows and when necessary broadcast your ignorance on these forums. As we see every day, someone who knows will answer your call. Oh, and one thing more, broadcast your ignorance gently and with humility.

I sympathize with those trying to introduce Affinity into companies with a long commitment to Adobe products. No matter how enthusiastic and passionate you are about making a change, you are doomed to failure until you (or external circumstances) provide a compelling reason for management and your coworkers to make the change. Since I've previously written about Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason, I'll just provide links to those posts: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201403-canva/page/3/#comment-1192784 https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/206072-affinity-does-not-provide-quality-it-is-time-to-part-with-serif/page/2/#comment-1238379 Management lessons I learned during thirty years of software/hardware wars at a large state university: Show your colleagues a compelling reason to make a change and they will follow you anywhere with enthusiasm. Fail to present a compelling reason and your colleagues will brand you a quack or fanatic and tune you out. Force a change on them and they will resist and rebel.

During my 7-1/2 years of using Affinity Photo I have never found it useful for printing. Anyone doing a lot of printing needs at print time to be able to crop, set aspect ratios, add borders inside or outside the print dimensions, set prints/page or duplicate several prints on a page for later cutting, resize, save and recall settings for more than one printer, recall previous print jobs, and many other tasks. This requires a robust photo printing program. I've been using QImage and QImage Ultimate to do all my photo printing for more than 20 years with excellent results. It was originally a Windows program but a Windows/Mac implementation from a different vendor was released a few years ago. https://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u/ https://www.binartem.com/qimageone/ When you do something frequently it pays to have the proper tools rather than struggle with tools not designed for the purpose. The latter may be adequate for occasional use but in the long run are not worth the frustration.

I'm pretty much ignorant about the limitations imposed by MSIX programs. The disastrous results when Affinity 2 was released imply that I am not alone in my ignorance. Still, I had assumed that sandboxing only prevented MSIX apps from being interfered with by isolating their operation in protected memory spaces. They also cannot interfere with the operation of other programs I guess, but I don't know. But what is installed on the computer is known to Windows. I assume all installed programs are listed in the Windows Registry, with the exception of stand-alone exe files that are not installed but simply executed from wherever you put them on the disk. Portable apps work from anywhere, including from flash drives. They are not installed and not known to exist by Windows. I use Open Shell and it certainly knows everything that is installed on my computer. It's getting that information from somewhere. Cannot any program retrieve a list of installed programs from Windows?

This discussion implies to me that the Affinity installer programs should alert the user when he is about to install a version different from that already installed. That is, if one is about to install the MSI/EXE version when an MSIX version is already installed, the user should be warned, and vice versa. It's just common courtesy on the part of software vendors. Even free software I have warns me when I am about to install a new version and already have an older version installed. How much more important to alert the user when a completely different version installing in a completely different manner is about to be installed and possibly cause conflicts.

The easiest might be to refine the selection using the Quick Mask mode. Paint on the mask using the paintbrush tool switching color from white to black and back again to reveal or conceal more of the man's scalp. It might be still easier to not use the selection brush at all. You could simply create the selection by starting with your photo and immediately turning on Quick Mask. Refine the mask by painting on it with white to show only the area where you want to add hair. If you overshoot, switch to black to paint the mask back in. (I wish I had thought of this first.) There's a nice tutorial on Quick Mask at https://affinityspotlight.com/article/quick-maskswhat-are-they-why-are-they-quick-and-what-do-they-do/ You could also create the selection with the pen tool if that seems easier or more precise than painting on the Quick Mask or using the freehand selection tool. However, hairlines are not very geometric nor symmetric, so drawing tools may not be the best way to approach this. But if you do use the pen tool, use it to draw the outline you want and then click Selection in the Pen toolbar. I've almost never used the Pen tool so I can't provide any real help or hints for doing this. As others have mentioned, there are many methods to do what you want. I can't draw so I'd probably just paint on the Quick Mask to make the initial selection of where to put the new hair. Remember to clone nondestructively by first creating a new pixel layer above your image and paint with the Clone Brush onto that new pixel layer. You can do that after you've made your selection. Another trick with selections is to save them to a Spare Channel so you can call them back in the future. Go to Select/Save Selections/As Spare Channel. You can then always recall your selection and reuse it, refine it further, etc.

Can't you do this very simply by: 1.) add a pixel layer above the image 2.) make a freehand selection outlining the new hairline boundary 3.) set the clone tool source to current layer and below 4.) working on the new pixel layer, clone from the existing hair into the selected area Hair will be cloned up to the selection boundaries and no further and that will be the new hairline. Only the area within the selection will be affected by the clone brush. Would this not meet your requirements for doing this very simply? Added 10 minutes later: I should mention that I learned this method (in 2018 during my first year using Affinity Photo) from a superb cloning tutorial by Hubert van den Borre from HVDB Photography. It was titled "AFFINITY PHOTO-Extensive use of the Clone Brush." Unfortunately, Hubert's YouTube channel vanished some five years ago, and I haven't been able to find him again anywhere else. At least one other person noted his absence at I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who knows more about Hubert's departure from YouTube and from these forums. His tutorials were models of simplicity, efficiency, and elegance.