Hello everyone,
I just bought an iPad Pro 10.5” (coming from an iPad Air) mainly to be able to use Affinity Photo for developing my RAW files on the go. I am a heavy Lightroom user but the subscription idea drives me mad. Anyway, back to AP. I bought the app yesterday, and processed 10 RAW photos from a Sony A7II camera and an Olympus E-M1. I faced some issues and I was missing a few features, so I was very glad when I found you had an active forum running. Here goes my feedback:
I imported all my RAW photos to the Photos library then went to AP and wanted to import several files from inside but I had to do it one by one. I suggest adding the ability to import multiple photos at once.
Then I remembered that I can drag and drop multiple photos at once from the photos app (I watched some tutorials before buying the app) and it worked but with a glitch. Not all of the photo thumbnails were displayed. They only appeared after developing the photos.
Creating a new folder to host my images was not straightforward, but I found was able to create a project and move the photos one by one inside. I believe this could be made easier and more intuitive.
When I finished editing the photos and exporting the, I wanted to delete them from AP. I tried deleting the whole project at once and failed. I had to delete the photos one by one (why no select multiple or select all?) then delete the project after that.
When editing the photos, I couldn’t find a white balance dropper tool. I had 3 photos for the same person that were shot under fluorescent lighting and had varying white balance, and I wasn’t able to match the white balance for all three photos without a dropper.
For the same three photos, I wish I was able to copy the develop settings from one photo and apply to multiple photos at once. I usually process hundreds of photos on lightroom at a time. This would make it impossible to move my workflow to AP. Lightroom offers synchronizing settings between photos.
In one of the above mentioned 3 photos I went back to modify the white balance to make it look similar to another one, but I discovered that once I press the develop checkmark, it converts the photo to a JPEG and it loses all the development history. Please make it non-destructive.
The shadow and highlights adjustments are very weird. When increasing the shadows all that happens is that dark areas become more uniformly grey. It doesn’t recover any details. Same for highlights. What is the deal with that? That's the whole point of RAW development.
In one of the photos, I started developing and before pressing the develop checkmark I went to the crop tool. Once I made my crop, I wasn't able to confirm the crop and get back to development. So I pressesd “Cancel” on the crop tool, and all of a sudden all of my development settings were gone and the picture became very dark and under-exposed. It happened twice. I was able to get around the issue by completing the development then cropping afterwards. That's very awkward.
Once I finished processing all 10 photos, I was presented with a weird exporting module. I wanted to simply save the photos to my iPad Photos library. I always export JPEGs at 3000 pixels wide and 85% quality. First, I had to export each photo one by one. And in each photo, I had to choose JPEG, enter the new dimensions, choose the quality, then for some reason press the share button instead of export and choose the “Save Image”. This could have been made much easier. You could offer custom export settings (JPEG/3000px wide/keep aspect ratio/85% quality). You could offer batch export. You could offer to export directly to the Photos app.
That sums my first use of AP. I hope you had some useful insights and ideas for future use. And please accept my apologies if I sounded agitated. But AP is why I bought a new iPad and an Apple Pencil. I really appreciate the work done in developing this app, but I believe you can make it a much more powerful tool with just a few additions.
Thank you.
