James Ritson

Hello all, apologies as the online help had been updated since Thursday but I didn't get around to updating this thread. Affinity Publisher has now been added to https://affinity.help and there have been a couple of new features added: Search: we've implemented our own bespoke search for the online help which is fast and accurate. Access it via the tab system along the top left. Favourites: you can add topics to your favourites list to easily access them during future browser sessions. Simply click the + (plus) icon next to the "Favourites" tab to add the current topic.

Hi csj, don't worry, I've got more videos planned soon including perspective-related tutorials. It won't be this following week as I'm taking a (hopefully well-deserved) holiday break, but when I'm back the plan is to start gradually building up the library of tutorials. Watch this space

Hey all, just a quick update to say there are three new videos available to watch: Canvas resizing Metal compute Blend ranges Blend ranges in particular should be quite helpful to people. As always, hope you find them useful!

Hey all, just updating you with a new tutorial: HDR from one exposure The list in the first post has been updated too. This video looks at taking advantage of Photo's 32-bit unbounded colour format to tone map a single RAW image and make the most of its dynamic range. Hope you find it useful! Hi Dave, I can definitely say that it makes a big difference. I think people naturally engage more if they see the person presenting, but I believe it benefits the presenter equally. When you're constantly on camera, it becomes more of a performance and you have to engage with what you're saying. It makes the speech and flow more natural because it's as if you are presenting to someone rather than at them—that's what I've found anyway It also encourages a single take process, as opposed to having the crutch of being able to edit the video afterwards. With the exception of a couple of videos (e.g. noise reduction stacking where creating the stack takes some time) the Photo videos are all done live (including the fade in/out) and it's something I'm keen to continue. It is quite challenging however! The whole one take, live studio concept is still relatively fresh so I'm evolving things as I go. Thank you for your suggestion of cropping, I may well give that a go. Regarding swapping the iMac direction, some videos actually put the picture-in-picture in the Navigator panel area so there would always be an issue of which way the presenter is facing. I'm aware of Unmesh, he's great. The whole studio concept came about from watching a variety of teaching channels. There are some consistent themes between them all like having a studio "set" and using picture-in-picture. We wanted a live environment where the presenter could mix on-the-go and have a video file at the end which can be uploaded straight away, so everything is tailored around that approach. Colour grading for the camera, audio EQ and compression, fading in and fading out—these are all applied in real time as opposed to part of an editing process. In terms of presentation style, I believe I'm a bit dry compared to Unmesh, he's a very lively character

Hi all, thanks for the feedback so far! (Pinpointing has been renamed ) I'm aiming to get a few more videos done over the next 2-3 weeks (there is of course the Publisher launch to think about as well...). For now, here's a new one that covers how to use the new HDR/EDR display support. EDR support on macOS is limited to the newer MacBook Pro and iMac Pro panels (other models may be supported but I'm not sure), plus the new XDR display that was announced at WWDC. If you have a Windows machine you stand a better chance of using this feature since you just need an HDR-capable display and suitable graphics card. For example, I used my HDR TV at home to get the clips in this video! The video has also been added to the list above. Hope you find it interesting!

Official Affinity Photo Desktop Tutorials New to the latest update of the app (1.7), we've got a brand new set of tutorials that follow a more structured approach and are sorted into logical categories. You can access them by following this link: https://affinity.serif.com/tutorials/photo/desktop Please note that the previous thread is now considered legacy and has been unpinned. The videos linked in the thread are also considered legacy—they will remain accessible (albeit unlisted) but ultimately my goal is to produce suitable replacements over time using the new studio setup with live mixing and picture-in-picture. There's been a clear increase in quality of teaching and production values since Affinity Photo was first released back in 2015, and we hope to continue this moving forward. The videos listed at the above link are hosted on Vimeo. Alternatively, please find a list below with YouTube links: Basics UI overview Light UI Open and save Placing images Moving, scaling and rotating Layers Advanced layer options Selecting layers Mask layers Undo, redo and history Exporting Resizing & resampling Canvas resizing (New: 18/06/19) RAW development Metal compute (New: 18/06/19) Advanced Adding lens profiles Colour management Compression efficiency Channels Channels: Selections HDR merging HDR ghosts removal HDR from one exposure Liquify Stacking: Object removal Stacking: Noise reduction Stacking: Exposure blending Focus merging Panoramas RAW advanced development HDR/EDR workflow Macros 360 live editing OpenColorIO setup OpenColorIO baking colour space transforms Blend modes Blend ranges (New: 18/06/19) LAB Luminosity masks from layers Masking vs clipping layers Paste/move inside Isolating layers Corrective & Retouching Inpainting Haze removal Dodge, burn and sponge brush tools Clone brush tool Sky replacement Creative Tools Colour picker tool Gradient tool Paint mixer brush Selection refinement Fill layers Filters & Adjustments Curves Levels Masking adjustment layers Filters Live filter layers Displace filter Shadows/highlights Gradient map Denoising/Noise reduction Radial blur Clarity Channel mixer White balance Black & white adjustment Export Persona Exporting slices Workflows & Techniques Editing infrared photography Relighting 3D renders Hope you find them useful! James

Hi, is this your first 1.7 beta? The colour format fly-out on the Document menu is now found on the Convert Format / ICC Profile option (still under the Document menu). It allows you to convert bit depth and colour profile at the same time. You could for example go from 32-bit sRGB (which is unbounded) to 16-bit ProPhoto/ROMM RGB to preserve values that would have been out of bounds with sRGB but still available in 32-bit.

I appreciate it's from last year but I've only just seen this post because of the thread bump. Based on your more recent posts I've read, however, I would ask you to reign in your combative attitude: it's counterproductive and contributes nothing to the overall goal of this forum. The assumption that the purpose of my response was to somehow undermine and contradict you is incorrect. I was stating that you cannot create initial out-of-bound colour values in the Windows version because of a UI bug. Whilst I would ordinarily agree that the statement was wrong, I had to point out this inconsistency for the benefit of the user, and also cover how you would go about creating out-of-bound values within the user interface, since that was not actually explained.

They're not set by default, but you can assign them by going to Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts. You should see them straight away if you're on Mac. If you're on Windows, scroll down slightly to see them. Worth noting that you'll need to switch to another persona category at the top (e.g. Liquify) to set a shortcut for the main Persona (Photo, Draw, depending on the app). Hope that helps!

Hey again, the issue appears to be specifically with how the RAW images are aligned and merged in Photo 1.6—notice on your screen grab (and mine) that there is a column of black pixels to the right of the image. If I merge the JPEGs I don't get any issues and can effectively tone map the image. Out of interest, I tried both the RAWs and JPEGs in our current 1.7 public beta and both were fine. I believe 1.7 includes some improved handling of RAF files. I would still either use JPEGs or pre-process the RAWs to TIFFs, since merging the RAW files directly results in some discolouration around the sun—plus you don't get automatic lens distortion correction. Can I just double check that you've tried merging JPEGs in Photo 1.6 as well? As mentioned above, I had no issues when doing so, and I'd recommend trying that if you haven't already. Another option is to download the latest 1.7 beta (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/34-photo-beta-on-windows/ - look for the stickied thread at the top). It sits alongside the release build and doesn't interfere, but I think you'd be pleasantly surprised at the improvements, particularly with the speed of tone mapping. I've attached some screen grabs to this post to illustrate the results I'm getting. Hope they're of some help! In order, they are: 1.6 RAW files tone mapped 1.6 JPEG files tone mapped 1.7 RAW files tone mapped

Hey SrPx, the shimmering you describe sounds like the initial low quality draw pass followed by the higher quality pass. Under certain circumstances, like if you have a complex layer stack and you're doing brush work, Photo will only redraw with a high quality pass on the canvas tiles that are affected, and will use a render cache for the other tiles so as to avoid redrawing the entire layer stack. As I understand, this performance-saving technique was disabled for a while (including build 293), but has actually been re-enabled since it was slowing down more complex documents. Have you tried a more recent beta (e.g. 331) to see if the shimmering now appears again? Of course, you might not be seeing the shimmering regardless because there have been some huge performance improvements for 1.7 on Windows—big improvements in threading and memory management—that might mean the redrawing is fast enough for you not to notice any shimmering. If that's the case, great! Build 293 is quite old now, so it's worth trying out the latest beta and seeing if your experience is the same. Hope that helps.

Hi Crimmy, nice shot, is that in the Peak District? I've shot plenty of HDR bracketed exposures pointing straight at the sun and Affinity Photo is definitely capable of merging them and producing good results. Not sure what's happened with merging your bracketed set, have you tried merging both the RAW files and the JPEGs? As an aside, I wouldn't merge RAW files at the moment—either use JPEGs or preprocessed TIFFs from the RAWs. Affinity Photo doesn't currently use its more advanced RAW pipeline for merge operations like HDR/Panorama so you won't be getting the most out of its conversion (we're aware of this limitation). Does the white halo effect go away if you reduce compression to 0% when tone mapping? What happens if you only increase local contrast? If you wouldn't mind providing your sample images privately, you could upload them to https://www.dropbox.com/request/6BFpR1crs5jTGb5BcXsx so we can take a look and see if we can suggest a solution—in this case, both JPEGs and RAWs would be ideal to compare them as well. The images are only used for support purposes and then deleted when no longer required.

At the moment, the Colour panel will reflect both the transform and document colour profile—so linear values will look different to non-linear, and the values will also change depending on the colour profile. Currently, however, there's no interaction with OCIO integration, so what you're seeing on the Colour panel isn't guaranteed to represent the device and view transforms you're using. It's something we're aware of, but I'm not sure when it might be addressed...

Hi Aardo, welcome to the forums. Hopefully these answers will be OK for you: RGB/16 is integer, we only support float in 32-bit. 16-bit and 8-bit are gamma corrected, whereas 32-bit is linear. By default, however, 32-bit uses an ICC display transform (i.e your monitor profile) for a non-linear transform to screen. You can configure this through View>Studio>32-bit Preview where you can choose between display transform, unmanaged (linear) and OpenColorIO transforms if you have a valid OCIO configuration set up. To create colour values below 0 and above 1, you can double-click on the current colour within the Colour panel and it will open up a colour dialog. At the bottom you'll have 32-bit options including an Intensity slider and interactive dialog where you can add/reduce the values in intervals. You can also colour pick values from your document that are out of range. Additionally, if you click the circular icon where it says Opacity on the Colour panel (beneath the HSL wheel/colour sliders) it will cycle between Opacity, Noise and Intensity—the latter of which again allow you to create out of range values. For OpenEXR export, both 32-bit and 16-bit options are float (or half-float as it were for 16-bit). Regarding your HDR and EXR documents, I believe the Info panel is always constrained to 0-256 values. You should be able to colour pick out of range values (as mentioned above) however. Bear in mind that there is a bug with the Windows version that clamps the colour picker and the colour dialog to 0-1. We're currently aware and this is being addressed for 1.7's release. If you're on macOS, everything will work as expected. The next Windows public beta of 1.7 (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/34-photo-beta-on-windows/) will hopefully fix the clamping issue. Hope that helps!

Hi Chris, it sounds like your issues will be vastly improved by version 1.7 when it's released. It has a number of threading/general performance improvements that dramatically speed things up for high-end processors—I think your Xeon is an 8-core/16-thread? I've just tried editing a 16k HDRI using live projection, inpainting and cloning and it runs really well (this is on an i7 4-core/8-thread). With a 35k HDRI in version 1.7 I would now expect good performance with your Xeon. You can actually download and use the 1.7 public beta (stickied thread at the top of https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/34-photo-beta-on-windows/) but it requires a valid license key to be activated, meaning the software needs to be purchased. There are two potential options: you could wait until 1.7 is released, download the trial and see if performance is improved for you. Alternatively, if you were eager to try it now, you could purchase 1.6, then download and install the 1.7 beta (it sits alongside the current release build and does not interfere). If you aren't satisfied, you could then request a refund citing performance issues—it's a 14-day return window if you purchase through the Affinity store (see https://store.serif.com/en-gb/help/). If you purchased through the Microsoft Store you would have to request a refund through their system instead. Apologies, as I realise there is no immediate solution for version 1.6—although you could tweak the performance options, they are unlikely to produce any significant improvements. 1.7 should present a huge leap in performance for the majority of higher-end PCs like yours. Hope that helps!