jimfastcar Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 Hello While I started my Photo editing learning journey with Affinity, I have since migrated to Lightroom Cloud - long story. I do however, own an Affinity License and it is installed on both my iPad and MacBook Pro. I am in the early days of experimenting / learning to Focus stack and have been looking into Photo merge the resulting images. I could add Photoshop to my Adobe subscription or use Affinity. My question is workflow - RAW images from Sony (*ARW) 42 MP Do I first photo merge in Affinity and then process Exposure, etc in Lightroom ? Will the merged Affinity file still be a RAW Sony file or will it be different in some other way, and if so, is there a workable solution ? Is there some other potential issue or problem I am not considering ? Thanks for your advice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 43 minutes ago, jimfastcar said: Will the merged Affinity file still be a RAW Sony file or will it be different in some other way, and if so, is there a workable solution ? Affinity doesn't write out RAW files, thus there will be no new Sony ARW file as a result! - It just reads your RAWs -if it supports your cam's RAW format- but doesn't alter or create/export new RAW files out of that, instead it can save in it's own Affinity file format or those bitmap files it supports for exports (TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF etc.). Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotMyFault Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 Hi, Best practice is to use preprocessed files, e.g. tiff/16 instead of RAW. This gives better results, e.g. wrt lens correction, CA, exposure, noise reduction. And Photo does not support all variants of ARW, e.g. compression. Never the less, you could stack directly from RAW. Focus stacking works pretty well in Affinity Photo. Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimfastcar Posted December 19, 2021 Author Share Posted December 19, 2021 If I understand then, if say, I have 8 images at various focal lengths, I should process them in Lightroom first, then bring them into Affinity to merge ? If I stack them first and export them from Affinity as jpg, tiff, whatever and then bring that file into Lightroom I will have lost most of the data that I would have had from having shot RAW in the first place ..... Perhaps I need to buy Photoshop to create the merge ? Assuming that because they are both Adobe they might marry better ? I am perplexed best course of action, or perhaps I am just not understanding the advice.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotMyFault Posted December 19, 2021 Share Posted December 19, 2021 5 hours ago, jimfastcar said: If I understand then, if say, I have 8 images at various focal lengths, I should process them in Lightroom first, then bring them into Affinity to merge ? If I stack them first and export them from Affinity as jpg, tiff, whatever and then bring that file into Lightroom I will have lost most of the data that I would have had from having shot RAW in the first place ..... Perhaps I need to buy Photoshop to create the merge ? Assuming that because they are both Adobe they might marry better ? I am perplexed best course of action, or perhaps I am just not understanding the advice.... You can probably do everything in Affinity Photo, with some caveats. It depends which actual Sony camera and RAW format you are using if it’s already supported or not, see links below. Before we continue to hypothesize- why nor simply give it a try? Affinity Photo is so cheap, and you can even do a trial with full functionality for a certain period. https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/#buy I highly recommend to use the Affinity store, not the Windows/Apple store. Nothing will be lost with a 2 step approach. All relevant data will be contained in tiff/16 files. Sony A1 (ILCE-1) A7R-IIIA (ILCE-7RM3A) A7R-IVA (ILCE-7RM4A) Sony ILCE-7 Sony ILCE-7C Sony ILCE-7M2 Sony ILCE-7M3 Sony ILCE-7R Sony ILCE-7RM2 Sony ILCE-7RM3 Sony ILCE-7RM4 Sony ILCE-7S On Apple (Mac, iPad) even more models are supported https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212821 Serif RAW (Windows and Apple) Old Bruce 1 Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Rostron Posted December 19, 2021 Share Posted December 19, 2021 I would support the recommendations above from @NotMyFault. Remember that a RAW file is that (and only that) produced by the camera. Once any processing has been done to the image, it is no longer a raw file, and saving as .afphoto format or exporting as .tiff/16 format would be the most efficient means of preserving your image data without loss. John Quote Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimfastcar Posted December 19, 2021 Author Share Posted December 19, 2021 Thanks, I actually already own a copy of Affinity on both my iPad and my MacBook. I had switched to Lightroom as all my friends use it and I can get help easily plus I like the Cloud feature as my iPad was getting a bit full with af files Appreciate the input all Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron P. Posted December 19, 2021 Share Posted December 19, 2021 18 minutes ago, jimfastcar said: I had switched to Lightroom I hope you're getting your money's worth out of them, and chose the Photography plan with Photoshop. 😉 I also have and use Lightroom, the last perpetual version 6.14. I used the Photog plan for a couple of years, purchased the perpetual and dropped the subscription. I didn't care for their cloud, and mobile. However Lightroom is a good app for photographers, well unless your a high-end pro. Then Photo Mechanic beats it seven ways and twice on Sunday! 😄 Quote Affinity Photo 2.4..; Affinity Designer 2.4..; Affinity Publisher 2.4..; Affinity2 Beta versions. Affinity Photo,Designer 1.10.6.1605 Win10 Home Version:21H2, Build: 19044.1766: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s);32GB Ram, Nvidia GTX 3070, 3-Internal HDD (1 Crucial MX5000 1TB, 1-Crucial MX5000 500GB, 1-WD 1 TB), 4 External HDD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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