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Right now, an Affinity Photo document can only be RGB, Grayscale or LAB at a time. However, there are several workflows where it would be beneficial to work in more than one.

 

Examples are:

  • Black and white conversion – you would like to end up with a grayscale image, but work with RGB data using channel mixers, HSL and so on and be able to edit these after the fact. The final image being saved as Grayscale is so important because it ensure that it ends up being separated into the CMYK black channel, leaving CMY clean.
  • Applying LAB mode corrections like LAB curves inside of an RGB mode retouch (could also be implemented as an implicit conversion as part of the curves adjustment layer like in PhotoLine though)
  • Manually fine-tuning the result of CMYK conversion by manipulating the image in RGB mode (possible through soft-proofing, but requires a manual CMYK-export in the end and you have to re-do any manual adjustments that may have been made on the resulting CMYK file every time)

These will be even more relevant once work files can be saved natively as TIFF retaining layers and so on since you can then actually place your working files in third party software and not have to export a bunch of separate files. Especially in the B/W case, you currently have to keep your RGB original retouch, then your BW conversion RGB file, and then a final single-channel BW exported file.

 

Currently, there seems to be no other way than to flatten the image and convert to another mode as far as I can tell (haven't tried placing embedded documents yet though). Photoshop provides a rather clumsy workflow where you can convert your entire document into a smart object and then change the colour mode of the enclosing document. But especially if you just want to quickly apply LAB curves a bunch of times in your retouch, the nesting just becomes unusable.

 

If you had simple adjustment layers along the lines of "Convert to LAB" and "Convert to CMYK", that would make it easy to mix the best of all worlds in one single document.

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