Some RAW Editing Workflow Ideas

[Christoph Müller]

Hi,

I am a professional photographer and sometimes use Affinity Photo for RAW development. But unfortunately RAW development of multiple files is a big weakness of Affinity Photo.

 

I know there are many requests for a complete DAM.

But from my point of view, it actually doesn't take that much effort for Affinity Photo to be a very good RAW developer.

 

For example, I prefer to manage my images in the macOS Finder. I don't like photo databases. In the Finder I can use tags and folders and search for tags. So I hardly need a DAM to organize pictures.

 

But I would like to develop multiple images with Affinity Photo. There should be the possibility to open multiple RAWs and display them in an overview. The one or more selected RAWs can be edited together using the sliders. There needs to be an easy way to transfer RAW settings. Single and all settings.

Further it would be good if the RAW development settings are not gone after developing. I often change RAW parameters again afterwards. Currently, with Affinity Photo, when you reopen a RAW image, you always have to start from scratch. It would be easy to save the RAW parameters in a parallel file.

 

But what bothers me most about the typical RAW development process in all programs is that an image is developed and then when you want to apply further processing to the image, where an image editing program like Affinity Photo is needed, a pixel copy is created from the developed RAW image that is no longer connected to the RAW image. Here is always a hard cut. Subsequent changes to the RAW parameters no longer affect this pixel copy. Further, the Affinity Photo format is also not supported in many DAMs and is often not even displayed.

 

Suggestion of a RAW layer

That's why I would find it most awesome if a special RAW layer is created in Affinity Photo after developing a RAW image. With this layer you can do everything you can do with a pixel layer. Live effects, masks, inpainting brush.I can change this RAW layer with all the development parameters later. The new development parameters will immediately affect the image.  It is also conceivable to have more than one RAW layer with different parameters for different development variants. 

I can also make parameter changes or transfer RAW settings to several marked RAW images in the overview, which then affects this layer. 

Each of these RAW images can be saved normally as an *.afphoto file. The original RAW could also be embedded in the Affinity file.

 

The ability to have multiple RAW layers in one .afphoto file would also open the possibility for Panorama, Stack, HDR Merge and Focus Stacking to be based on the actual RAW files. So one could select the RAW layer of a part of the panorama and restore the highlights of it for example.

 

That would be really extremely powerful! And actually not so particularly complex to develop.

 

Wish you all the best,
Christoph