Saijin_Naib

As I have mentioned for version 1.7.0.174, the saturation slider within the develop persona still has no effect (tested on PC with Win 7 and Win 10). However, you guys did a great job on improving the raw developement!!!
 
Kind regards

I have similar observations. I support your request.

Any reason the beta version number is never part of the download aka the file names? - IMO using affinity-photo-customer-beta-1.7.0.184.exe would be much more meaningful, especially in terms of the higher actual fluctuation of beta version downloads.
 

Photo Beta 1.7.0.178, Windows build on Windows 10 Pro
Affected: RAW develop module
Observed: Imported image from Panasonic micro four thirds camera does not benefit much from detail refinement. At full strength with a proper radius the image is only a wee bit more sharp than a RAW image imported in Adobe Camera RAW 11 with NO sharpening applied. Third example below shows same image in Adobe Camera RAW with just the default sharpening applied - and even a bit of masking.
Note: The demosaic code in use in Affinity Photo (I assume you are using the open source UFRaw, results are similar) render images slightly blurred and does not enhance details much. Perhaps as a result of this

Below: Same image developed in Photo with no detail refinement in RAW - now tried with 1px radius unsharp mask applied, factor 2.4 (a lot). 0.8px is probably a bettter setting but still - image suffered from a poor demosaic technology. The unsharp mask had less to work with. "CITY" is not affected much by any radius.

Below: Last example:
Left totally unsharpened Nikon RAW image (from expensive, SHARP macro lens) from Camera RAW 11. 
Right same totally unsharpened Nikon RAW image i Affinity Photo

 ... and from the Nikon OOC JPG with just a little sharpening for comparison..
 ... DxO Photolab 1 with no sharpening (but with lens modules (standard)) for comparison
Capture One vs Affinity Photo
Top: Unsharpened and sharpened a bit. Nice micro contrast and well defined edges. There is even noise reduction included. (Capture One Pro)
Bottom: Unsharpened, sharpened a bit and massively sharpened. Radius is the same but I have to push the factor slider far too much. This causes artifacts on the rest of the image. (Affinity Photo)

Disclaimer: To be honest - normally pixel peeping is for amateurs.  What matters is the image as a whole on paper or screen. Sometimes you need the details though - and heavily cropped images (sometimes you have to) will look worse than images from other RAW converters. A little smartphonish. And a more effective demosaic would give sharpening tools a little more to work with - images will be sharpened more naturally. Especially minor details.
I am not after the sharpest demosaic method on the market - I am concerned about the rendering of the image, thats why I use Capture One Pro myself, but in Affinity Photo RAW images are undercooked by... UFRaw?

There is also the option to define a keyboard shortcut for the cat tool 

Hi Gabe,
Thanks for the answers,
Sad to hear that but I do understand why it is so.
Please also take into consideration Saijin_Naib's comment as i feel that it makes sense. 
Ian, 
I tried to follow that road even before posting to the forums, but somehow I haven't thought about the ownership thing. It works like a charm this way, thanks a lot!
It would be nice however to have an "official" way to do it, if only because I suppose the name of the folder is gonna change after each update which won't allow me to do it once and relax for the rest of my days :)

Rafs have always been an Achilles Heal in AP. The new 1.7 seems to have made a bit of a leap in this regard. Give the Beta a try with some old (non critical) files. It may be more to your liking.

One thing missing from the changelist (as I snuck it in at the last minute...):
Added support for per-monitor ICC profiles (previously we only used the primary monitor's ICC profile) in the document view (controls still use the primary monitor's ICC profile, which will hopefully be fixed in the future).  

To use the Topaz DeNoise plugin within Affinity Photo please use the following settings in Preferences>>Plugin

Easy and quick installation, but I had to enter email add and code manually. It's so much more speedy now. Once GPU acceleration implemented we'll need a seatbelt. Thanks.

Hallo, I wish for a live update of scopes when I drag a slider.

I was able to get the beta to run on my MacBook Air and to discover what I was most curious about: the various deficiencies in Curves LAB mode are not being addressed in this release. (RGB histograms displayed when LAB or CMYK channels are requested; numerical range of A and B is 0-1 rather than -1 to 1 or a scaled version.) I have started to collect my suggestions on LAB in AP in the feature request forum and will add to that.  These issues have been known for a while and are said to have been passed on to developers, so I conclude, based on earlier posts, that Serif is not ready to devote resources to them. I had hoped to adapt the methods of Dan Margulis to Affinity and that AP's capabilities might grow as I learned more about his methods, but it may be easier to do that in PS. Would appreciate comments on Serif's plans if senior people can comment.

That seems like something that would require additional hardware & OS level support that Apple would have to implement before it would become feasible.

Just a quick update. We were planning on releasing the new beta for Windows on Monday (4 days ago), but unfortunately we discovered a bug which was crashing Windows 7 machines to crash when launching the apps. I considered launching the beta for Windows 10 users only, but ultimately decided that we should wait until the issue has been fully resolved. Unfortunately it's taking a little longer than expected, but hopefully it will be available soon.
 

Hi Dan C,
Both in the Development person and in the Photo person the Chromatic Aberration Reduction is done by replacing the purple color by black color and in most of the cases is better to have the purple color than the black color. This purple color is basically in the border of burned areas or high lights changing fast to shadows. I suggest to replace this purple color by a soft transition between the colors of the both sides of the purple color. I think that this will be better solution than just replace by black
Affinity Photo 1.6.7 in Mac

However, Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) is on the list of "Serif Labs Supported Cameras", which may be why the OP expects this to work. I find it odd that a file format is listed as a camera; perhaps there's room for clarification or enhancement there

Currently the list of cameras supported by Serif Labs RAW is pretty outdated, and some not even recent cameras aren't supported at all, so maybe faster updates to the RAW engine would be called for. It is almost sad that many cameras aren't supported, because the engine isn't updated between the 1.6.x updates. Or other 1.x.x updates for that matter.

I am a beginner in LAB attempting to apply the writings of Dan Margulis, who uses only Photoshop, to Affinity Photo. The LAB underlying functionality is mostly OK, but I have found that the AP user interface could be improved in several places. More experienced users, please comment.


 
1)  In the Curves adjustment layer with LAB selected, the A channel curve is colored green and the B curve magenta. The appropriate colors are green left and magenta right for A; blue left and yellow right for B (with light or high luminosity on the right).
2)  Creating a check box on the A and B curve windows for Intersect Midpoint would make it easier to construct color-intensifying curves. This is probably the most important basic move in LAB, and even Photoshop does not have this feature.

3) The Input Minimum and Maximum default to 0 and 1. Though I have not found a use for these, shouldn’t they be -1 to 1 or -100 to 100 or -127 to 127?

4) The Curves/LAB window’s second drop-down menu offers Master, L, A, B, and alpha. Is there a known use for ‘Master’ as in RGB? Nothing I have read about LAB indicates that there is. For that matter, is there any use for Master in CMYK? And how about ‘All’ as an alternative to Master in RGB? Furthermore, the histogram curves displayed for the LAB components here are not positioned the same as when one transforms the document to LAB and displays its histograms. May relate to previous point (3).

5) Photoshop can display the graphs of the various color space curves with the light (high-luminosity) side on the right or left (one-click toggle). This option would be useful to people learning from Margulis’s books, which show dark on the right.

6) Other Affinity users have called for improvements in the Curves window in general, not just for LAB: more precision and ways of placing nodes, a larger or scalable window, saving curves.  Because of the sensitivity of the A and B curves to small movements, a fine control on node dragging would be handy, e.g., option-drag would reduce the motion by 1/5 or 1/10. Perhaps it already exists.

7)  A LAB curves user on this forum called for a keyboard shortcut to move among the channels. Why not? He needs efficiency in a much-used workflow application. In the same vein, having selected the color space, instead of a second drop-down, radio buttons for the three or four channels would slightly simplify choosing one.

8)  In the Channel Mixer adjustment layer, the LAB window A and B sliders need appropriate coloring like the RGB and CMYK. Just for consistency.

9)  The Levels adjustment layer makes sense in RGB, but I am not so sure about LAB and CMYK. Does this lead to a useful correction? (Please help me, advanced users.) If you push the existing RGB colors to the AB limits of +/-127 won’t you just create out-of-gamut colors that will have to be distorted back in RGB space? And is gamma defined for this color space? Also, in the LAB window, shouldn’t the correct labels for the sliders be, for the A channel, green and magenta, and for the B, blue and yellow. Similar questions for CMYK.

10) The Apply Image filter and Channel Mixer adjustment layer seem as if they should have similar functionality, but their capabilities and interfaces are rather different. My understanding of Apply Image in Photoshop from Margulis is to blend or replace channels one at a time, sometimes across color spaces, but to do that in AP one has to create a gray scale image of a channel in a layer and make that the source. The destination seems to be all channels of a selected layer, or does one have to separate out those channels as well? The Channel Mixer is designed to specify a single channel as destination, but it appears the source must be in the same color space. Shouldn’t these two processes allow individual choice of source and destination channels in all color spaces? Are equations (Apply Image) and sliders (Channel Mixer) of equal value in practical applications?


 
I don’t think this exhausts these issues, but this post has already exhausted me. My compliments if you have read this far. If you want to know more about Margulis, use a search engine or post here and I will try to summarize what I have earned from a large corpus of writing.

Each time the Crop Tool is selected, the Mode menu always  opens with Unconstrained. 
If I am cropping a number of open photographs to, say, 6x4, I need to re-select the required ratio for each photograph.
I would love to see a feature that allows the selected Crop Ratio to be remembered - each time another photograph is selected.  I would also love to see the selected Crop Ratio to be remembered between each Affinity Photo session.
Such a feature would significantly improve workflow when the same crop ratio is applied to a series of photographs.
 
 

This is from another thread - looking at the demosaicing feature in Raw. I noted that AP on Windows "only" has the Serif engine which bears a striking resemblance to AMaZE (which would make sense as it's so highly regarded). However, there are multiple other algorithms out there including ones to deal with high noise images like this one. I wonder if we could have some alternative engines built in so we can take a crack to see what produces the best initial results off the sensor before we start fiddling? 

Strongly suggest to add "divide" layer mode, very useful for different operation. Attachment from photoshop where you can see applayed picked white color sample from X-rite (sligly blue), used that color to fill layer on divide mode and compesate that with grey layer on multiple. Can't do similar thing in Affinity photo. Especialy with bath module

Seems like everybody is busy checking out the Publisher Beta and that there's no time left to discuss RAW support :o).

I still think that a broader discussion on Serifs strategy in terms of RAW handling made a lot of sense. Comparison with Adobe is of course a bit unfair but what I find quite intriguing is that they really offer workflows for any RAW editing scenario and preference I can imagine...

You want to browse and edit RAWs but prefer sticking to the OS file system?
Use Bridge to browse and ACR to edit one file or as many as your system can handle. All you do is non-destructive, settings are written into a sidecar file.
Import the file(s) directly into Photoshop (without having to export to bitmap first).
You like that catalog less workflow but you can't stand these silly sidecar thingies?
Then use Bridge to browse and ACR to edit one file or as many as your system can handle. Press Shift when bringing the edited files into Photoshop. The RAW file (with nondestructive settings) now gets embeded into the psd file for further compositing. At that point you can savely delete the input RAW file (and its linked sidecars). If you change your mind totally or need a completely reset version of the input file you can still export (just the RAW) as a dng.
You firmly believe that this is all fine and dandy but that one should never touch images without a catalog in place?
Then use Lightroom to work on one image at a time or a full folder and bring your edited files into Photoshop as either bitmaps or Smart objects (with their editing history encapsulated).
 
But enough with Adobe.
It's also interesting to look around and see what programs like Luminar, Alien Skin Exposure, ON1 and ACDC are up to lately. All of them have long moved away from the 'I let you browse and sort images also let you do some RAW preprocessing (before you go to your "proper" image editor' paradigm. They all have Layers now and support complex masking – some even let you build multi image composites. None of them needs several seconds to open just a single RAW file and of course one can instantly transfer settings from one file to the next without even having to open them.
 
 

Any chance for this? I'd really prefer to do all of my "developing" in well, the Develop persona

How about adding the FITS file extension so those of us who do Astrophotography can import the files directly into the Affinity Photo program without having to go through a 3rd party conversion program and stacking them in a 3rd party program then having to convert those LRGB images to TIFF extensions before importing the LRGB TIFF channels to Affinity Photo? It would sure be nice to just import the FITS images into the 'Add' Affinity stacking feature of Affinity then they would be easily moved to the channels without using third party programs before stretching and processing.

The resource manager window allows you to "make linked" or embed (default) images. The problem I found is you can't select multiple images at the same time to switch the image settings. Can you set the window so multiple items can be changed simultaneously?