Granddaddy

I bought a Canon ip8720 inkjet printer in November 2014 for $224.99. I have printed thousands of photos from borderless 4x6 to borderless 13x19. I use only genuine Canon inks. This afternoon I'm printing a couple of DVD discs for family videos. For my family and hobby photos I am more than satisfied with the printer for its reliability and trouble-free operation. In 11 years I have cleaned the print heads only once, and that was several years ago when a line appeared across a print indicating a clogged nozzle. One cleaning cycle fixed the problem and it has never recurred. I bought the Canon after discarding several Epson printers over the preceding 15 years. Every one of them suffered from frequent clogs that resisted all attempts at cleaning while wasting ink cartridges in a useless procedure. I was dismayed to find the ip8720 is no longer available from Canon. Some electronics retailers still offer it Dell offers it for $249.99 at this very moment. I am sorry to hear that newer Canon printers may be suffering from clogging problems and that inexpensive photo printers may be a thing of the past.

It is written "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news," and yet even bearers of good news have been killed when that good news was not welcomed by the authorities or by the mob.

November 4, 2022 https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/affinity-photo-announcement-next-week-will-be-something-big And many more...

60 second fix: 1. Copy your image into APhoto from clipboard screen grab 2. Rasterize 3. Add pixel layer above image layer 4. Select Inpainting tool set to Current Layer and Below 5. Inpaint on pixel layer to cover bright spots a few times to smooth results. 6. Clone brush on pixel layer set to Current Layer and Below to fix lips of young lady where Inpainting did less well and got confused by teeth. Is this what you want to do? I'm sure experts could do something greater. I'm just an amateur touching up snapshots in a few minutes, so it depends on your needs. It's all non-destructive so can be changed as you like. I sympathize with your problem taking photos outdoors in sunlight. I just had to deal with a bunch of those from my granddaughter's college graduation. It was best to take the photos in full shade and adjust them later as needed. Direct sun and even leaf-shaded sun can be a photographer's enemy for people photos. Beware of AI online tools creating fantasy images and AI tools in Photo editors in general. They are advertising hype in my experience. Old School solutions are often best without an AI interfering with and falsifying the creative process. See, for instance, this excellent tutorial on old school selection methods doing far better than AI tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMRskFvUnEY ExampleInpaint.afphoto

A sample photo would enable us to provide specific advice. What do you mean by "sports of light on my subjects faces." I have had good results using Inpainting brush to fix shiny spots on faces, often applying the brush several times to smooth things out. But it really depends on the particular problem you are seeing. Always work on a new pixel layer with the brush set to current level and below so the process is nondestructrive.

The logical implication of this argument is that most customers do not require fixes to any of the myriad bugs in Affinity products, nor do they require any improved or additional features at all. After all, they bought Affinity apps in the past so they must be satisfied with the apps as they are. Can there really be 3,000,000 active users of Affinity given that so few seem to participate in these forums? I am reminded of F. M. Cornford's opening sentences in Chapter VII of Microcosmographia Academica: "There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing. The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do. But then, of course, comes the difficulty making sure that it is right." https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford7.html For the sake of argument, let us assume that 3,000,000 individual people have purchased one or more Affinity apps. Let us also assume that a person like myself who purchased two Affinity 1 apps and three Affinity 2 apps is counted as only one customer and not as five customers (i.e., not counting one additional customer for each app purchased). Does this really imply that I do not require any changes in the apps? Of course, it does not. I require several changes in the apps. This is why seven years after my first Affinity app purchase I now mostly use an alternative product for almost all of my photo editing. I've hardly used Affinity Photo for the past several months because it lacks features I require for my routine photo editing. The more important question for Canva is not how many people purchased Affinity apps in the past but how many of those who purchased Affinity apps in the past will purchase more Affinity apps in the future? I have written elsewhere in these forums that Affinity must provide a compelling reason for purchasing additional Affinity apps. In recent years Affinity has instead provided compelling reasons for me to look elsewhere for my photo editing requirements. This is a great disappointment given the time and money I have invested in Affinity apps.

It seems a vain hope indeed that Serif will ever admit the UI is a problem. My most recent posts on this topic are at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/19598-ui-too-small/page/6/#findComment-1323641 https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/225838-i-cannot-believe-tht-the-ui-icons-and-text-are-not-scalable/#findComment-1322052 https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/225218-font-size-changes-in-user-interface/#findComment-1317902 From these you will find links taking you back through the decade-long discussion of this dysfunctional interface that has discouraged so many from continuing with Affinity software. There are thousands of posts about the UI size scattered through dozens of threads at least. Yet I still find Affinity Photo useful for some limited purposes now that I've mostly moved on.

You call attention to one of the compelling reasons that caused me to switch to a competing photo editor for most of my work. On1 Photo Raw has a simple, flexible, sophisticated export system that is a joy to use. Sadly, Serif has ignored a decade of user requests for an enhanced APhoto export function. Indeed, it is often argued in these forums that APhoto's deficient system is all that anyone needs, as if users themselves really do not understand their own needs. It's a sad tale often repeated concerning Affinity software.

Ldina has made an especially beautiful composite with a lake in a light bulb. I was delighted to see this and a few other APhoto composites posted to this forum recently. Beginners might want to view the Affinity Revolution tutorial from 2016 describing a way to make such a composite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfpiHeDkA1A&t=15s There are several similar tutorials discoverable in a simple Internet search. I have been fearing that APhoto is a dying piece of software. There have been many recent negative comments about the future of APhoto in these forums. Worse, many questions from new users have languished for one to two months without a single response from users or from Serif support staff. And there have been very few APhoto entries in this sharing forum. Some of the most prolific authors of tutorials have stopped publishing. Let's hope APhoto will be less neglected in the future. For the past few months, I myself have been using an alternative product for most routine snapshot touchup editing, but I return to APhoto for anything that is technically demanding. APhoto's model for editing still seems best to me.

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.