James Ritson

Hey, have you checked out the Designer tutorials thread here?: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10815-in-house-affinity-designer-video-tutorials/ For Beginners and For Beginners Too should help you get started. Hope that helps!

Hi rjan, I appreciate it's not the most accessible approach, but the Shadows and Highlights adjustment is really just for compressing the tonal range. For actual recovery, you'll want to be using the filter version instead (found either on the Filters menu or under Layer - New Live Filter Layer). See this video for more information: Hope that helps!

Malcham, I have replied to your previous thread where you asked a similar question, have you seen the reply? You have downloaded Affinity Designer (presumably the Windows beta?) and the tutorials you are watching are for Affinity Photo, a different application entirely. Photo is not yet available on Windows but will be in the future. That is why you cannot find the tools mentioned above. Remember to check the titles of the videos you are watching, they contain the product name (Designer or Photo). Can you provide any more information as to why the instructions leave a lot to be desired? We work hard on the support material so comments are welcome. Are you aware of the plethora of tutorial videos available for both Designer and Photo? Designer Tutorials Photo Tutorials .. as well as the in-app help? (Accessible from the Help menu) - You should find every tool and feature documented in the help.

No problem, glad you're getting much better print results. Have you profiled your monitor at all using a display calibrator? If you're having trouble with colour accuracy and prints being too dark or bright this might be the next step to consider..

If you're trying to colourise a grey area the easiest way is to use some brush work on a new pixel layer with an appropriate blend mode like Add or Screen (and a low-ish opacity). You could also use vector shapes with a fill colour. There are a couple of tutorials that would help with this: Creative Painting Colour toning with shapes If you're replacing colours rather than adding them (for example blue to red), you can also try painting onto a new pixel layer with a Colour blend mode set. See the above videos for how to create these layers, set up your brush and blend mode, then experiment! Hope that helps

That's not a 16-bit issue (both the Develop and Photo personas are in 16-bit in your example), the difference is something we're aware of, will keep you posted!

Most raw files are 12 or 14-bit, and most of that extra precision is kind of superfluous to creating a basic image with a pleasing range of tones, hence why 8-bit JPEGs with a logarithmic tone curve straight from the camera are well-regarded by many. The issue we're faced with regarding panoramic stitching is not related to lack of bits, but rather that the result is rasterised as a pixel layer, with there being no tonal options previous to this happening. 32-bit float is going to be very useful, but it's not going to solve shadow and highlight tonal range issues like a magic bullet... 16-bit editing is more than enough for working with raw files. Even medium format digital backs peak at 16-bit!

Have you tried previewing at 100% and then applying? The noise looks different if you're zoomed out less than 100% because the noise is being applied to what is essentially a different render or preview of your image. I believe some software (raw conversion) warns that certain filters or effects won't be previewed unless you view the image at 100% size or greater, for example noise reduction or defringing. Basically, Photo chooses to render filters regardless of preview size so you're always getting a preview. A bit divisive, perhaps, but for now the best way is to simply preview your filters at 100%. Hope that helps! [edit: beaten!]

Hi Chris, If you develop with raw files or 16-bit images, the path should remain 16-bit (you mentioned 8-bit so I'm not sure if you're referring to the format after Photo has finished stitching the panorama). As for the exposure averaging, currently there's no way to change how it works. I tend to develop each image separately: I remove the tone curve and pull back the highlights, match the histogram between each shot as much as is reasonable, then export them as 16-bit tiffs and stitch those. The result should be a much tonally flatter panorama (in 16-bit) which you can then adjust further. I appreciate it's more manual work and doesn't negate the requirement for some more tonal control. If you want to give it a try however there are a couple of videos that cover removing the tone curve and pulling back highlight detail: Custom Tone Curve: Raw Development Quality: Hope that helps!

Hi Malcham, you are correct, you're using Affinity Designer (I presume for Windows?) which is for vector graphics and illustration work. You're watching Affinity Photo videos. Photo is currently only available on Mac, but it will be coming to Windows in the future. Hope that helps.

McDuff, it's because currently only Affinity Designer is in beta for Windows (it has a different set of tools geared towards vector design). You'll need Affinity Photo for tools like the Inpainting brush - it's not available for Windows yet, but keep an eye out as it won't be too long!

Hmm, do you mean perspective-wise wrapping as well? The perspective transform would have to be done manually, but you can use clipping to restrict the music note image to the violin (assuming your violin has a transparent background or can be cut out). Sounds like a job that requires several techniques. Try these in order: Clipping vs Masking Live Perspective Displacement (helping to blend the music note into the texture of the violin) .. And if you need to remove the background from the violin image, Cutting Out: Hope that helps!

Hi Jo and Andy, Rather than converting your document to a different colour profile, have you tried using colour management at the print stage? To do this, don't convert your colour profile (keep it in Adobe RGB/sRGB if you're working in RGB). Instead, once you go to print, under the Colour Management section (I forget exactly what this is called but it should be labelled something similar) you'll have the option to either let the printer manage colours or use ColorSync. Choose ColorSync and from the drop down select your Sawgrass profile. Then just choose your other settings (quality, paper type etc) as normal and click Print. That should hopefully give you better results. Photo does have soft proofing if you want to check what your print output will look like. It's implemented as an adjustment layer (Layer - New Adjustment Layer - Soft Proofing) and will allow you to select your Sawgrass profile. Make sure it's at the top of the layer stack so it affects the entire document. And finally, don't forget to delete or disable the layer before you send to print! (It influences the image like any other adjustment layer) Hope that helps!

I'm fairly low tech, I use Finder to preview my raw files and I organise them into dated folders! For example "2017-03-25 Cumbria" or "2010-09-18 Jake and Amy's Wedding". Then I just drag the raw files into Photo and develop them individually. If I need more advanced organisation I tend to use FastRawViewer (by the LibRaw team) as it's cross-platform and works well with .xmp metadata, so ratings and colour coding work from other software.

Hi Sean, coincidentally I have just put up a tutorial today that covers this! It might be worth a watch for you, it basically goes over what Matt has said above and walks through some basic settings to improve the quality so it's on par with Apple's Core Image converter - here's the video: Thanks, James

OK, a new video for the weekend: Raw Conversion Quality This one is quite close to my heart (!) as I see a lot of criticism over Photo's raw development quality. This video aims to tackle why that seems to be the case (Photo does not automatically clean up and refine raw images) and talks you through some procedures that you can use generally for every image in order to get a good result. Have a good weekend, James

Just a quick tutorial to keep you going for now: Diffuse Glow Filter Thanks for the feedback Luis, I'll pass it on to the developers. Photo does have a high pass filter that you can use as a live filter, so you can alter the blend mode and filter strength on the fly.

It's all relative, most people would argue that there's no advantage in using a 16-bit printing path unless you have a printer that supports it - and even then, improvements may be negligible. Some say gradations in the print are smoother; your mileage may vary. 16-bit precision is recommended if you're doing lots of gradient work and/or heavy tonal adjustments, where the extra precision can be put to good use. Good rule of thumb is that if you're seeing noticeable banding when working in 8-bit (perhaps if you're using gradients with blend modes), you should try using 16-bit. It's worth bearing in mind that if your source image is a JPEG, that will be 8-bit. To make the most of 16-bit you'd ideally want to start with developing a raw file, as they're usually 12/14-bit precision. Another reason to use it might simply be just because you can: if you find the editing speed and larger file sizes acceptable then there's no disadvantage to maintaining a 16-bit path, only potential advantages in the future. My work all comes from raw files and I stay in 16-bit throughout the whole process, never had any issues with it. Hope that helps!

No, shouldn't do, it's just a merge of what is being rendered. You're still working with uncompressed raster information at whatever precision you're editing in (8/16-bit). However, if you deliberately clip the image's tonal range using an adjustment, filter or pixel layer then merge, you won't be able to get that back unless you go back to using the original image underneath. Your query in that thread seems to be related to the resampling used when transforming layers. It's likely bilinear or bicubic: lanczos would be slower, and might introduce aliasing/ringing as it's sharper. You don't need to rasterise the pasted layer once you've transformed it - even if you did, there shouldn't be any difference in quality. The whole point of Photo's live workflow is that you don't need to rasterise scaled layers like that! Regarding the merge visible and Photo still rendering layers underneath a merged layer, this seems to be true as of 1.4.2 - will let you know if there's progress here.

Hi, there are certain features that can be quite taxing. The main one to look out for is using Live Filters (especially convolutions like blurring/sharpening) with large parameter values: for example, a live Clarity filter with a 100px radius. If you start adding multiple live filters in your layer stack this can begin to slow things down, especially if you're working in 16-bit. Be especially mindful about adding live filters to vector layers (that's really asking for trouble!). To mitigate this, you can either use the destructive versions of these filters (from the Filters menu), or make use of Merge Visible, which will produce a flattened raster layer of your current progress at the top of the layer stack. It's like Flatten, except you can still go back and manipulate your layers underneath in the layer stack. As mentioned above, processing in 16-bit precision is more demanding than 8-bit. If you don't need to make use of 16-bit, you may as well edit in 8-bit and get faster performance. Hope that helps!

Focus stacking is coming in 1.5, stay tuned! Edit: forgot to mention, seeing as this is an old thread, Photo has supported average/blend stacking since 1.4. You can do noise reduction, exposure merging, long exposure simulation, object removal and more. There are tutorials that cover all of these stacking techniques in the tutorial thread here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10119-in-house-affinity-photo-video-tutorials/

If you're going to be using gradients (especially with blend modes) and live filters like Vignette, you'll see reduced banding if you work in 16-bit. If you're just adding a few adjustments and doing some layer work you likely won't see any benefit. Any operation or filter that produces subtle gradations can usually benefit from working with increased precision. Hope that helps!

Jornerik, I think it's all relative. I was able to achieve defringing results using your raw file that I felt were fine. All of the fringing around the buildings was gone and unless you zoomed in past 100% there was no visible fringing in the branch detail. My benchmark is basically "how does it look at 100%?" (or, if you're using a retina panel, 50%). It's really about finding a balance between the three sliders (Tolerance, Radius, Edge Brightness Threshold). I appreciate it's more manual work: Photo is still in the early stages of development. All of the power is there but it needs some manual work to really harness it. A great example of this is the RAW development: there's actually nothing horrible about it, it's simply that people are used to raw developing software cleaning up their files for them. Believe it or not, your raw files actually look a lot closer to Photo's output than you think. Chrominance noise especially is always present, even in larger sensors. Photo doesn't automatically remove it, therefore it's left to the user to decide how much denoising to apply. It's the same with sharpening and lens artefact correction (distortion, fringing, CA). We do provide the option of using Apple's Core Image Raw decoder, which does some automatic sharpening, noise reduction and lens correction. It's always worth trying that and seeing if you prefer the output. Photo's CA reduction is more intended for extreme lens issues (see the tutorial video here for some really bad CA examples: https://vimeo.com/133350551) - for most cases I stick to the defringe filter. Hope that helps!

Hi pipkato, do stay tuned as I have a photo restoration video planned for the not too distant future. For now, however, here are two new tutorials: Scaling and Transforming - a basics video looking at how to scale and transform layers. Modifiers - a guide on using modifier keys with different tools. Thanks, James

Hello, just trying to ascertain what the main issue is here, are you able to actually open the Help by going to Help - Affinity Photo/Designer Help? Everything about the apps is concisely documented so you should be able to find what you need. If you're not getting search results, try opening the help and then using the search box in the help window rather than the one on the top menu - do you get any results from this? Hope that helps!