Affinity Photo v2 HDR Image Sources

[Ian Homewood]

Hi

When I have done an HDR merge in Photo, are the image sources all still there and forming part of the file size, or are they flattened and discarded?

If the latter, how do I flatten and remove the sources, to reduce the file size?

Thanks

Ian

[NathanC]

Hey @Ian Homewood apologies for the late reply,

If you're referring to the .afphoto file, the HDR merge source images are likely being retained within the .afphoto file's overall size, though their contribution is likely to be negligible, as after running a HDR merge which had source images present, I created a new RGB32 document with the same image pixel dimensions and then copied and pasted over the Final Merged Pixel layer and then rasterised it again for good measure and then saved the new file, the file size compared to the original image I did the HDR merge on was essentially identical.

It's more likely to be the fact that the final merged image is saved as RGB/32 is contributing to the larger .afphoto file size, as changing to RGB/16 and even down to RGB/8 causes significant file size reduction.

The .Afphoto file size has been of some debate in the past, i've linked a few threads below which go into this topic in more detail.