Feedback using Affinity Photo compared to PS CS6

[StevenS]

This is feedback is posted on behalf of a user who contacted affinity@serif.com 

 

to whom it may concern:

 

I did a download Affinity Photo 1.7 Win and would like to provide the following feedback:

 

Current work flow:

 

Current work flow is to prepare raw image sets for pano stitching in Capture 1 and export them as tiffs; The tiffs are batch processed in Piccure and batch aligned in PTGui as layered and masked PSB files; these file are batch blended in PS; from then on processing is essentially manual but aided by actions for my most common tasks; I was looking to what extent Affinity could replace PS CS6 in my workflow.

 

Overall summary of experience:

 

At this stage I feel Affinity does have potential, but is still quite far away from being a PS alternative to be used in my workflow.  However I wish it was an alternative to PS CS6, hence providing the detailed feedback.  I'm looking for non subscription based alternatives as only with charges for upgrades there are incentives to develop worthy features for new releases.  IMO subscription based offerings have the tendency to be stagnant with product considered to be mature and in maintenance mode.

 

Software environment:

 

Adobe PS CS6 x64

 

Various plugins from the following vendors: Nik; Topaz labs; Piccure; Imagenomic

 

Raw Converter: Capture 1 version 10

 

Pano Merging: PTGui

 

Computer hardware:

 

CPU: i7 4930k

RAM: 64Gb

GPU: Nvidia Quadro M4000  8Gb

Tablet: Wacom Intuos Pro L

 

OS: Win 8.1 x64 on dedicated SSD; swap file, paging file and temp environment variables on separate dedicated SSDs; PS scratch disk on PCIe SSD; project working files on twin SAS HDD in RAID0; final works stored on NAS systems   

 

Screen main:  32” 4k 3840 x 2160

 

Screen supplement: 22”  1080 x 1920 portrait orientation

 

Affinity photo tested with 39614 x  9968px stitched pano work file imported as a layered PSB file from PS:

 

Trying to set up the Studio tiles on the supplement monitor:

 

Is quite similar to PS but the lay-out cannot be saved as a custom setup; it takes a lot of time to set up from scratch from default and it got lost once after a program crash and needed to be set up again; every now and then I do something stupid in PS too and workspace gets messed up, but I just click on the various saved layouts to get them back; can't do this in Affinity

 

Scratch Disk:

 

I can’t see anywhere under “Preferences” that I can set up an overflow disk; with my files being quite large and plug ins being used, it would be preferable to manage distribution of data across the various disk drives on bigger systems like mine where there are choices.

 

Menu Font Size:

 

In Windows 8 there is no easy application based GUI font size scaling available and can only be affected via a manifest file; It would be good for Affinity Photo to include menu font size scaling options for high resolution monitors used with older OS.  During the test some of the pull down menus did reduce temporally to some very small lettering (4mm high on a 32” 4K monitor) for some time (glitch) before reverting back to same size as the other pull down menus.

 

Tool Icons:

 

The tool icons look nice and colourful, but are in my opinion hard to recognise; PS tools are a lot more graphic and hence more distinct; suggest to think about colour not to make icons more fancy, but as an aid to separate tools better

 

Tool settings:

 

I could not see the buttons on my graphics pen activate any tool option break out dialogue but haven't fiddled with the Wacom interface to perhaps get something set up.   

 

GUI custom brightness sliders:

 

The two sliders for brightness don’t seem have an effect at all, only the gamma slider and the bright/dark toggle work.  There is no indicator for the gamma slider to make this setting consistent with the contrast settings during display profiling.

 

Rulers:

I couldn’t figure out how to change the rulers from pixels to mm.

 

GPU acceleration:

 

Lack of GPU hardware acceleration is already acknowledged by Sarif as being worked on. As is, some manipulations with my test file resulted in lengthy processing delays with Windows showing message that program is no longer responding; it just did take a little time to catch up on occasions once I build up a layer stack

 

Blur and selection feathering limits:

 

At present  the blur limits (various tools) are just 100px which is nowhere near enough for smooth blending on high resolution images; I would not like to go back to anything less than a 5000px brush limit, 2000px Box blur, 1000px selection mask limit that is available in PS CS6.

 

Work file saving:

 

The resultant multi layer work file of the test session could not be saved.  The PSD export created an error (probably file size too large) but pressing just save also failed.  With this work file being based on an imported PSB file, I’m not sure whether this would require a “save as” approach, thought of this possibility too late.  Program should offer alternative formats of original document format is not available.  

[fde101]

47 minutes ago, StevenS said:

I couldn’t figure out how to change the rulers from pixels to mm.

https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/DesignAids/rulers.html?title=Rulers

 

48 minutes ago, StevenS said:

I can’t see anywhere under “Preferences” that I can set up an overflow disk; with my files being quite large and plug ins being used, it would be preferable to manage distribution of data across the various disk drives on bigger systems like mine where there are choices.

I believe the Affinity products use the document file itself for scratch storage, but that is based on a limited understanding and guesswork centered around comments I have seen tossed around the forum (and the fact that they do not respond well to "cloud storage" and network shares while working with the documents).  The applications are all 64-bit, so it is possible they could simply be relying on the virtual memory provided by the OS as well.  In any case, there is no equivalent to this option in the Affinity products.

 

51 minutes ago, StevenS said:

Program should offer alternative formats of original document format is not available.

Agreed.