Affinity Photo Still Useless for Photographers without Batch RAW Processing

[StrixCZ]

The title says it all. I've bought the Universal License and I don't regret it (the price was worth it even for Publisher / InDesign replacement which I mainly wanted and I'm also glad to just support some much needed Adobe competition) but I'm unable to cancel my Photo Plan with Adobe until Affinity comes up with an alternative to Camera RAW (and most importantly, its film strip). Being able to only develop / change parameters for one RAW file at a time really is a deal-breaker for anyone shooting into RAW format.

My usual workflow is dropping a whole album (often hundreds of RAW files) into Photoshop (Camera RAW windows pops-up), applying some global adjustments to all the photos and then going through them one by one for more tweaking, yet often using the same settings on multiple files in a row (which you can select in the Camera RAW film strip). When I'm done with tweaking the parameters of the whole album I'll just use Image Processor to batch convert the files it into JPEGs.

Sadly, I can't do any of this in Affinity Photo as of now which unfortunatelly renders it literally useless for my main photography needs.

Fingers crossed for this being addressed in V3 - until then, it's more of Affinity Single Bitmap Image Editor rather than an actual tool for photographers to me.

Edited December 2, 2022 by StrixCZ
Spelling and clarification

[carl123]

5 minutes ago, StrixCZ said:

Sadly, I can't do any of this in Affinity Photo as of now

 

[StrixCZ]

2 hours ago, carl123 said:

 

Well, this is a (really clumsy) workaround at best, not a solution. Unlike the film strip, it doesn't allow one to do further tweaking on individual files after applying the batch parameter change, you get no preview, it takes much longer... Sorry, that's a no from me.

Edited December 2, 2022 by StrixCZ
Clarification

[carl123]

If someone wants further previewing/tweaking on selected RAW files you can try the technique below

But you are never going to get a film strip or all the features Adobe has at the moment (until Serif implements an update/upgrade).

Both my suggestions are for those users that don't want to keep paying Adobe but if you can afford it just carry on until Serif releases something better

 

[StrixCZ]

2 hours ago, carl123 said:

You are never going to get a film strip at the moment (until Serif implements an update/upgrade).

I figured out that much (hence this post ending with the hopes for V3 implementing this crucial option).

2 hours ago, carl123 said:

Both my suggestions are for those users that don't want to keep paying Adobe but if you can afford it just carry on until Serif releases something better

I appreciate the effort. But like you said, I'll have to stick with PS for now (luckily the Photography 20 GB plan is pretty affordable even for a hobbyist at $9.99 a month, with the only "limitation" being the cloud storage space which I never used anyway nor do I intend to). Still, I hope to be able to ditch Adobe altogether (even for freelance work) with future Affinity updates - we're just not quite there yet... 

Edited December 2, 2022 by StrixCZ
Spelling

[fde101]

Sigh...  this has come up SO many times here on the forum, and this was such a waste of a thread...

 

At least for now, that "alternative" is found in other apps - just as it is with Adobe.  The difference is that in your case, Camera RAW (which is separate from Photoshop) is bundled with it, while the Affinity suite simply doesn't bundle such a RAW development app.  Affinity Photo is the equivalent of Photoshop, without Camera RAW (the Develop persona is more of a bonus for when you are messing around with an image or two rather than working on an entire project).

There are numerous dedicated RAW processors on the market which offer what you are looking for.  Personally I prefer it this way: I use the RAW processors which are very good at what they do, to handle the culling and the initial development of the files, then for individual photos that require more detailed editing than the RAW processor can handle (most do not, a few often do), I then take the developed files and open then in Affinity Photo to do that extra work.

Affinity Photo is far from useless, it is simply not the complete picture - it is one piece of the workflow.

 

Examples of apps to try as replacements for Camera RAW:

Free: RawTherapee, DarkTable

Good ($): On1 Photo RAW

Best ($$$): DxO PhotoLab, Capture One

[StrixCZ]

4 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Camera RAW (which is separate from Photoshop) is bundled with it.

I don't really care whether it's technically the same app or not - it's an essential part of Photoshop for me (so it's equally essential for me to have similar option in any app that I'd use as a PS replacement).

4 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Examples of apps to try as replacements for Camera RAW:

Free: RawTherapee, DarkTable

Good ($): On1 Photo RAW

Best ($$$): DxO PhotoLab, Capture One

Thanks for the tips but I've tried the free ones and they lack a lot of options which are crucial for me. As for the paid ones, I've checked the pricing and since even the cheapest one you mention is just a little cheaper than the basic Adobe photo plan mentioned above (which gives me a RAW processor that suits all my needs AND the best bitmap editor on the market) it doesn't make any sense to me to pay that much just for a RAW processor itself...

[StrixCZ]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Affinity Photo is far from useless, it is simply not the complete picture - it is one piece of the workflow.

Also, I certainly didn't mean useless as in general - however, it is mostly useless for my (photography) use case in its current state since I do 99 % of photo tweaking directly in Camera RAW and I only do occasional extra tweaks in PS - which is a process I'm simply unable to replicate with Affinity. And the rather misleading claim on Affinity website doesn't help either - developing photos one by one is pretty far from "full RAW development" (feature set) IMHO. Not to mention the very limited options/capabilities of the Develop Persona compared to Camera RAW even when developing a single image...

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by StrixCZ
Clarification

[StrixCZ]

2 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Have you seen Hasselblad Phocus? It's free. 

Nope. I might a give it a try - thanks for the tip 😉

2 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I work with photos in a DAM first.

I'm a bit puzzled (even after some googling) what exactly would be an example of a widely-used DAM - are you talking about something like Bridge? If that's the case, it's actually something I've personally never used or liked (it just annoyed me to no end when I accidentaly opened it via PS/AI/ID while still being on the complete CC plan so I ended up removing both the "Open in Bridge" menu item and the keyboard shortcut) 😂 Then again, to each their own I guess 🤷‍♂️

[StrixCZ]

15 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

There's quite a few out there, including Bridge, Lightroom, ACDSee, even Phocus. DAM = fancy acronym for photo manager. Pedantry alert: it means digital asset.

I see. I guess I'm old school but I just prefer to organize my files with a well thought-out folder structure and 3rd party utilities to enable thumbnails for basically any format directly in Explorer (I know I'm missing stuff like tags that way but it works for me)...

It's also for this very reason (my distaste towards DAMs in general) why I mention Camera RAW instead of Lightroom throughout this topic (even though they use the same engine for development) - LR to me has always been Camera RAW + extra bloat which I couldn't care less about 😂

Edited December 2, 2022 by StrixCZ

[fde101]

6 hours ago, StrixCZ said:

since even the cheapest one you mention is just a little cheaper than the basic Adobe photo plan mentioned above

A perpetual license of On1 Photo RAW is normally $100, currently on sale for $75, and you are not forced to keep paying if you don't want the new versions.  The Adobe Photo plan is $10/month, or $120/year, and if you stop paying, you lose access to the software.

[Ldina]

I downloaded and tried out Hasselblad Phocus, which is a nice raw image processor. Unfortunately, on my Mac I have about 60,000 files mostly in DNG format, and features like highlight and shadow recovery, clarity, lens correction, etc, are grayed out and unavailable in Phocus. At least for me, this is a show-stopper. The user guide said this can happen, (see below extract from the Phocus User Manua). I still have a standalone version of LightRoom v6 and it works (so far) on my MacBook Pro and OSX Monterrey (v12.6), so I will continue to use that. LightRoom can handle all these features on the same version of OSX, so I guess it must be the way Hasselblad programmed it. To be fair, it's really designed primarily for Hasselblad cameras, and supports other cameras, but not quite as fully. 

"Other (Mac only): This group comprises a list of various formats, both raw and non-raw, proprietary and general. These files are initially read and processed via the integral Macintosh OS X support before they are adopted by Phocus. This means the contents of a folder containing a mix of image-format files can be viewed in its entirety in Phocus.

As these files can contain data that is written differently to Hasselblad files, there can therefore be a restriction on the effect that tools in Phocus could have. In practice this means you should expect the following tools to be inactive: Highlight recovery, Shadow fill, Clarity, Lens corrections, Noise reduction and Scene calibration."

[David Cake]

To what extent would scripting and automation support solve this issue? For example, if you could have a script that opened each photo, performed a bunch of operations in Photo, saved the changes, and did that for each photo in a batch of hundreds/thousands? 

[StrixCZ]

On 12/16/2022 at 7:23 AM, David Cake said:

To what extent would scripting and automation support solve this issue? For example, if you could have a script that opened each photo, performed a bunch of operations in Photo, saved the changes, and did that for each photo in a batch of hundreds/thousands? 

No because I need to be able to quickly switch between applying some parameters to all the photos, then selecting say 30 of them and tweak something, do some minor tweaking on just one photo, select/tweak couple dozen of them again, being able to quickly switch between files to check that their colour tone matches etc. - all with thumbnails and without opening/saving anything (until the final confirmation when it only generates XMP files with settings for every file) - Camera RAW allows me to do this. Affinity does not. Once you get used to this kind of workflow, anything else becomes unaccaptably slow/clumsy...