Selection Tool and Healing Brush

[TheJam]

Hi,

I've been using Affinity Photo for a bit and decided to try out Photoshop as I found a few issues in AP which really adds a lot of time to my workflow compared to PS. 

• Selection Tools (automatically detecting background, subject and sky)
  • In AP, I photograph a lot of cars and it takes a long time to use the pen tool to create an exact selection around the car to add to a mask layer.
  • In PS, it takes literally a second to click on 'Select Subject' and it's generally spot on - at most, I've had to just use a brush to include wing mirrors or take out something extra it's selected which takes a minute max.
  • This alone saves me about 20 - 30 mins an image.
• Healing brush
  • In AP, I find the healing brush is good for slight touch-up's but pretty bad at taking out larger objects in an image - whether it's cars on a road in the background, a bin in the frame or other objects which are bigger than roughly a 50x50px area.
  • PS isn't amazing either but the Content Aware Fill takes out a really decent chunk of the work. I worked on an image for an hour in both; in Photoshop, I managed to get good results in that time taking out cars in the background of a narrow road. In AP, I couldn't get an acceptable image, it just looked completely off and very noticeable.
  • I wasn't 100% happy at the results in either but doing client work, I've had clients happy where I could see the imperfections in Photoshop, whereas I wouldn't even consider showing the results in AP for some images I've tried.

I've used some apps in the App Store which does a really good job using AI to remove larger objects in an image - better than PS or AP but doesn't allow for work on RAW files which is important to some of my images. It would be great to see AP implement features like this.

I know the healing brush is more for touch-up's than full on image manipulation but the tools in Photoshop make it much more manageable and takes out a large chunk of manual effort.

In terms of my flow and what I photograph, I end up using PS and Lightroom for the majority of my photo's because of this. For general photography where I just need to balance a RAW image (of a landscape for instance) then both seem equally good to me but I just wanted to feedback as I'd much rather stick to AP rather than pay a monthly subscription for PS and LR.