Affinity Photo file size

[Bratières]

Hello,

I am testing Affinity Photo (try moving from LR/PS). I have been usinq serif Page plus which I like very much ! 

I use a .rw2 file (panasonic raw) which is 19.300 KB large. I develop it with AP and add just curve adjustment and 2 other "simple" (to me) filters. The .afphoto saved file is 119.150 KB large.

Is this an average ratio ?

 

Thanks.

J.Bratières

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

What are the pixel dimensions of your .rw2 file, and what bit-depth are you Developing it to (16, or 32)?

[Bratières]

Thanks, 4488x2713 RVBA/16

[walt.farrell]

Thanks.

So, you've got 12,175,944 pixels in your .rw2 file, and it takes 19,763,200 bytes in raw format. That's 13 bits per pixel.

Developed, you need at a minimum, 16 bits per channel per pixel, or 64 bits per pixel (R, G, B, A) or 779,260,416 bits = 97,407,552 bytes = 95,124 KB.

On top of that Affinity will have additional data for the other layers you've added, and it will also have a Snapshot of the original background layer. I don't know the size of the Snapshot for sure, but for my developed raw images it's approximately the size of the original raw file. So we'll guess 19,300 KB for you.

So that brings us to 95,124 + 19,300 or 114,424 KB as a guess for how big your .afphoto file should be.

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

That's 13 bits per pixel.

Let me just add - the "pixel" of the image sensor, whose exposure/illumination value is stored in the RAW file, is completely different from the "pixel" of the raster image, which is calculated when developed RAW data. These 'pixels", their numbers and data (byte) complexity are often incorrectly compared and confused.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

Let me just add - the "pixel" of the image sensor, whose exposure/illumination value is stored in the RAW file, is completely different from the "pixel" of the raster image, which is calculated when developed RAW data. These 'pixels", their numbers and data (byte) complexity are often incorrectly compared and confused.

Which is well explained in the RAW, actually Affinity Spotlight article. 😀

[Bratières]

Well ... I understand. Can I do something to have a smaller size (without changing picture definition) ?

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Bratières said:

Well ... I understand. Can I do something to have a smaller size (without changing picture definition) ?

1. You can delete the initial snapshot and save (approximately) the size of your raw file. You would do that via the Snapshot panel in the studio.
2. You an merge your curve and live filter layers, but that is of course a destructive action.
3. You can make sure you have not enabled the option to save History with your file.

Beyond that, there is not much you can do as far as I know. Developed files simply take more space than raw files, because they contain different data.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Developed files simply take more space than raw files, because they contain different data.

RAW files do not even contain a full sized photo image, just the data required to construct one. That is what developing the RAW file does.

[Bratières]

Thanks, I seem to believe now that Affinity Photo should be used only for some photos, not all (since disk space needed is six times larger) (a bit less if deleting original image).

My LR/PS problem remains.

(The explanation about Raw processing is very interesting).

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Bratières said:

(since disk space needed is six times larger)

6 times larger than the RAW file, but it would not be that much larger if saved to JPEG or PNG (if flattened).

[Bratières]

Of course, but if I want to keep the modifications made with Affinity, I have to keep the .afphoto file too.

[Granddaddy]

The huge size of afphoto files was introduced a couple of years ago to accommodate features of Affinity Publisher, not for any reason related to photo editing in APhoto. 

Huge afphoto file sizes have little to do with photo images themselves. Huge file sizes are not to be understood by considering only properties of your photos. afphoto file sizes were a small fraction of their current size when produced by APhoto version 1.5. At least that is the case when source images are in jpg format.

See my post at
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/113558-file-size/&tab=comments#comment-615372
and other posts mentioned there for more background.

One lives with the deficiencies of the tools one chooses to use. Everything is a tradeoff.

 

[R C-R]

49 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

The huge size of afphoto files was introduced a couple of years ago to accommodate features of Affinity Publisher, not for any reason related to photo editing in APhoto. 

Since the native document file format for all 3 Affinity apps is identical & all of them must support without loss or conversion any feature created in any of the others, this is unavoidable.

[PaoloT]

Hi,

I too have AfPhoto files becoming huge. In my case, it has nothing to do with RAW files. Here is what is happening with the recent edit:

1. I start from a TIFF file, 5453 x 2009 pixels, 300 dpi.

2. Save it into the native AfPhoto format.

3. Create slices.

4. Resize the document by 150%, using Lanczos separated for resampling. The final size is 8180 x 3014 pixel, still at 300 dpi.

The original AfPhoto file was 15.7 MB. The enlarged file is 51.3 MB. Way more than I would have expected by simply doing an arhythmic computation.

No other edit has been done to the file after changing its dimension.

What am I doing wrong?

Paolo

 

EDIT: Not the same with a sibling file where I didn't have slices from the Export Persona. The file went from about 15 to 20 MB, so increasing less than the number of pixels.