Affinity Photo iPad for serious photo editing

[Eftaliotis]

I'm experimenting with doing serious photo editing on the iPad Pro and I just upgraded my old Gen1 12.9" iPad Pro to the 2020 model specifically for working with Affinity. I'm a photo artist using Fuji cameras and normally I work with Capture One Pro, Photoshop, Luminar 4 and a wide range of plugins, including tools from Topaz, DxO, Imadio and others. I like a lot of what I'm experiencing with Affinity. Everything that does work works very well. The tools, the range of functions and the quality of the output are all excellent. Once you get used to the user interface it makes sense. The handling of Fuji RAW files is outstanding, and much better than Lightroom, but only if you can live without the Fuji film profiles, which I can't most of the time. 

Unfortunately, there is also a whole range of weird and inexplicable limitations that make me wonder if Serif is really serious about making Affinity a pro level application. These are the things that I have found counter-productive so far:

• No support for Fuji film profiles for RAW files. This is probably the one item that will eventually kill Affinity for me if it doesn't get changed. And no, LUT approximations are not the same thing. The Fuji profiles are the result of Fujifilm's many decades of experience in photographic color technology and nothing available from any other camera manufacturer comes close to them. Importing in Lightroom and applying the profile there isn't really an option because of Lightroom's miserable handling of Fuji RAW files. 
• No way to import photos directly from the SD card. At this point this should really be possible. You shouldn't still be forcing us to import to Photos and then from there to Affinity. 
• No way to close all open files. You can’t even close all the files in a single project together. You have to close every single file, and you have to know whether it needs saving or not before you close it because Affinity DOES NOT TELL YOU.
• Double-tap on the Pencil is simply unusable and has to be switched off to be able to use the Pencil at all. Otherwise you are constantly accidentally committing or undoing actions while you are in the middle of them. And no, I’m NOT double-tapping. Affinity just thinks I am, every couple of seconds, if I change my grip on the Pencil by even the tiniest fraction. Since there are no sensitivity settings for this the only option is to turn it off entirely.
• The management of ”Closing” and “Saving” images is much too restrictive. There should at least be the option to save automatically, both when you exit an image and when you close it. And Affinity should KNOW when an image contains unsaved edits — at the moment it doesn’t, or at least it’s not willing to tell you. Even when you actively close an image you don’t have the option to save if it isn’t saved, and it doesn’t tell you whether it is saved or not. So even if it IS saved, you have to exit and save just to be sure, which is a royal waste of time. 
• Once you have closed an Affinity image the only way to open it again is via the Files app. Affinity itself cannot open an Affinity image from its OWN storage sandbox from within Affinity, once it has been closed, if you are saving “on the iPad”. WHAT???
• When you rename an image it doesn't change the name of the image file in storage. Also, projects are only projects within Affinity. All the files in the Affinity sandbox in iPad storage are just in one big chaotic bucket. So there is no easy way to transfer an entire project to external storage for archiving in the original editing format.
• Palm rejection is pretty much not there at all and is driving me insane. Even if you switch touch to “gestures only” working with the Pencil is all too often a frustrating nightmare. The developers seem to assume that you are NEVER going to rest your hand on the screen while doing something with the Pencil. When I’m tidying up small details with the Inpainting tool or doing some other fine detail work the screen will frequently jump to a different position or zoom level as soon as I rest the edge of my hand on the screen so that I can use the Pencil accurately. That’s not the way tools like this work in human hands, at least not in mine. You need a hand rest for small, accurate movements with your fingers.
• The lack of functioning palm rejection gets even worse when I’m trying to adjust spline curves accurately. As soon as the edge of my hand rests on the screen so that I can fine-tune the spline with the Pencil the curve window closes. The only way around this is to use a mouse or trackpad as well as the Pencil, which reduces the flexibility of the iPad a lot. The whole point is to be able to sit down anywhere with the tablet and the Pencil and do some serious editing.
• No batch export, no export recipes , no user-definable export presets. Affinity doesn’t even remember the settings for the last export you did ten seconds ago. You have to adjust ALL the settings in the ENTIRE export screen for EVERY SINGLE IMAGE. WHAT???
• No compression option for saved Affinity images. At the moment every image I edit (Fuji RAW 24 and 26 MP images) is around 350MB in iPad local storage, and this would be even worse if I had to upload it all to cloud storage. Even just for ongoing work I’m now really glad I went for overkill and got the 512GB version of the iPad Pro. Holy crap.

All this is becoming more and more grating the more I work with Affinity Photo, and it’s calling the whole experiment of using the iPad Pro for serious photo editing into question. I would happily pay €100 or more for it if it had the features needed for an efficient workflow and comfortable editing. At the moment it’s a strange mixture: A lot of pro class features that work well, but so much is still missing that it’s just too restrictive a lot of the time. Affinity Photo is certainly a lot closer to being a serious app than anything else on the iPad at the moment, but the whole platform is still in a kind of no-man’s land of not-quite-there-yet. 

Edited May 19, 2020 by Eftaliotis