A question before purchasing affinity products

[jordey92]

Hey all, 

I've been looking at changing from adobe suite to affinity recently as I've heard some good reviews/recommendations and the pricing is obviously much better. However, I have 1 questions which is quite important to me and have had a read through the FAQs and not found a definitive answer or an answer I'm satisfied with.

Basically, I mainly use photoshop, and I love using the camera raw filter. I've seen Affinity Photo has the develop persona which look reasonably similar. My question is, can I import my presets at all so I don't need to remake them? And if not, can I actually remake them or is there certain things the persona cannot do?

For example, I can change the curves, exposure, highlights and so on but I cannot find 'color mixer' for individual colours to change the hue, saturation and lumination. The closest I can find is the Tones section and split toning option but it is only one colour I can choose to edit.

The three options I normally use, that I cannot find are Color Mixer, Color Grading and Calibration. For me, it is quite important to be able to use these tools and would make moving to Affinity a little more difficult. However, I've only used the trial a little so it may be that I haven't found these options yet. Does anyone happen to know if it is possible? Any help would be extremely appreciated.

[NotMyFault]

Welcome to the forum.

Affinity differs in probably relevant aspects from PS. You won’t get a 1:1 replacement of your workflow. In principle, you can achieve the same results in most cases (exceptions see below), but you need to learn to use a different workflow. If this is a showstopper for you, make your choice. 

Affinity lacks behind in support for new Camera models and Lenses (could take 12-18 month to be included)
No support for e.g. xrite color correction, or camera color profiles.

 

Regarding workflow: Affinity has the powerful concept of non-destructive workflows. The Develop persona is one of the rare exceptions. This means it is best practice to do only the absolute necessary steps there:

• Basic exposure/ shadow / highlight correction
• Lens correction 
• CA correction

For everything else, you switch to Photo persona where you can find all you need in form of non-destructive adjustments and filters.

To save you settings, you can define presets in both personas, and use them to get a quick baseline setting.

To be totally honest, Develop Persona is weaker than PS in several aspects. Photo unfolds its actual Power only after leaving Develop Persona. 
 

I Personally prefer to use Camera brand RAW develop apps, export as TIFF and do all remaining steps in Photo.

Photo is great for all creative aspects, and many special functions like HDR, stacking, panorama, liquify, frequency separation, astrophotography. And this forum is a great source for help and inspirations.

Edited November 9, 2021 by NotMyFault

[jordey92]

Thanks so much for the quick response.

I know it's going to be reasonably different from Photoshop, but from what I've had a look at so far, I feel I will be fine to everything I do already within Photoshop inside Affinity Photo and I'm ok with a learning curve to get used to a different tool.

I believe I can do most of my graphics in Affinity Photo no problem, and I can move my InDesign files to Publisher seamlessly it seems.

My concern is I have a client who I have created a template PSD for where all I do now is change a cutout person and then apply the same camera raw preset filter, so I would need to try and make it as close to that basically. If I didn't have this template, it wouldn't be an issue.

I guess I need to see workout how difficult it will be to make the same graphic, or just create a new template... anyway thanks for the reply, really appreciate it and helps with my decision making.

[Joachim_L]

7 hours ago, jordey92 said:

and I can move my InDesign files to Publisher seamlessly it seems

There are some pitfalls. Especially the handling of tables in APu is different (not good would be a good description). But IDML import works well to a certain degree. ID has some benefits over APu with e.g. tables, forms, multipage spreads, footnotes to name a few. In the end APu is even now a good alternative to ID depending on what you need, for the rest you have to work-around.

[jordey92]

10 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

There are some pitfalls. Especially the handling of tables in APu is different (not good would be a good description). But IDML import works well to a certain degree. ID has some benefits over APu with e.g. tables, forms, multipage spreads, footnotes to name a few. In the end APu is even now a good alternative to ID depending on what you need, for the rest you have to work-around.

Yeah, I expect to find things here and there, but my main Id files that I've checked so far all seem fine... again, I don't mind having to work around some things and I don't use Id too much, so not a huge deal for me. The important one is camera raw filters on Ps, so just need to see what I can do before my trial ends.

And, thanks for replying, really appreciate the advice.