Affinity Photo - Save TIF Performance

[Christoph Müller]

Hi,

I have a iMac Pro 2017 with 3 GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon W, 64 GB 2666 MHz DDR4, 2 TB SSD and Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16 GB graphic card.

I use Capture One to develop my 61MP Sony A7rIV photos. Some of the photos need to be edited in Affinity Photo and I use a TIFF 8bit uncompressed AdobeRGB as format. The image has 9504x6336px size.

Saving the picture after edit in Affinity Photo takes a lot of time. It takes ~14 seconds for every photo!!!

Is that normal for such a high performance machine?
The Activity View does not show any heavy consumption of resources while saving in that 14 seconds.

Greetings,
Christoph

[Dan C]

Hi Christoph

14 hours ago, Christoph Müller said:

Saving the picture after edit in Affinity Photo takes a lot of time. It takes ~14 seconds for every photo!!!

Are you referring to saving the file in .afphoto format, or are you exporting the final image to a raster format, such as TIFF?

[Christoph Müller]

Hi Dan,

32 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Hi Christoph

Are you referring to saving the file in .afphoto format, or are you exporting the final image to a raster format, such as TIFF?

No i simply refer to saving the image in the TIF format Capture One is creating.

My workflow is clicking „edit with Affinity Photo“ in Capture One and choosing TIF format, as I found out that this is the best format for working with Affinity Photo.

Capture One than creates a TIF from the RAW and opens it in Affinity Photo.

I than edit it and simply save it in Affinity Photo with all my layers and adjustment layers and close it.

But it takes nearly 14 seconds to save and close the file.

Capture One than sees my edited TIF.

Greetings, Christoph

[Dan C]

Thanks for letting me know Christoph.

I've forwarded this to our QA team to investigate further, as we need to benchmark the results from saving back from Affinity as well as other apps (such as Photoshop) to compare the time difference.

Could you please confirm for me, what type of edits are applied to your images in Affinity? Roughly how many layers per image are transferred back to Capture one? The more information/layers in the file, the larger it will be and therefore the longer it may take to save/transfer the file. 

[Dan C]

Myself and a member of QA have been testing this issue today and we've found the following results -

With a RAW file converted to a .tiff in Capture One, I sent this file to both Affinity Photo & Photoshop CC - Affinity opened the file 2/3 seconds faster than Photoshop

With the file open in the editor, I applied 3 adjustment layers then used File>Save to send the file back to C1. Both apps offered to 'save layers' with the file, however the Layers in C1 for both files remained as a singular rasterised pixel layer - in this instance Photoshop was faster by around 3/5 seconds depending on the adjustments used.

If you're using Live Filters in Affinity (Layer>New Live Filter Layer) then the save operation will take longer when saving with Affinity layers due to how they're designed.

However as explained above, regardless of the editing app and the adjustment/layers used, C1 reported only a Pixel layer being sent back. Therefore I recommend using Document>Flatten Document before saving your file, as this will condense all your layers into one Pixel layer and the save operation back to Capture One should be a mere few seconds.

I hope this helps!

[Christoph Müller]

Hi,

Thanks for trying it out on your side.

I had no layers in my TIFF files that I tested. So I basically already had a flattened document on save.

I don't think Capture One every uses the layers in a PSD or TIFF file as Capture One layers. However C1 does not destroy the layers in the TIFF or PSD. I can have for example a gaussian blur filter layer in Affinity Photo and it saves the filter layer as real filter layer in TIFF files and also restores them correctly so I can change e.g. the blur factor. But in PSDs the filter layer is applied to the layer and is not restored as separate filter layer. C1 however does not destroy the layers as far as I know. It simply shows file as if it would be flattened.

Did you try it with a very big photo? I have a Sony A7r IV with 61MP which produces very big files (9504x6336px).

The time Affinity Photo needs to save the 9504x6336px photo is dependent on the file format that I choose in Capture One. TIFF format take the longest time to save. Using PSD format in Capture One is lets Affinity save the file much faster.

JPEG: 2,5s - File size: 35MB
PSD: 4,5s - File size: 168MB
TIFF: 17s - File size: 60MB
Affinity Photo Format: 1-2s - File size: 285MB

Affinity Photo Format is the fastest. But Capture One can not handle Affinity Photo files. If there would only be a "Capture One" from Serif...

I attached a 61MP TIFF file.
Could you please just open it in Affinity Photo, do a stroke with a pencil and save it? How long does it take?

Greetings,
Christoph

_DSC0131.tif