Various issues in Develop Persona

[ch22]

Version 2 certainly is a huge improvement to working from RAW files, but there are still many points to be resolved or, at the very least, improved. Below is a short list (probably not exhaustive), ranging from clear-cut bugs to more debatable questions of software ergonomics. Its items are not listed in order of importance.

1.     The Highlights adjustment remains very poor (in fact, it's been a persistent weakness of the whole Affinity Photo from the start).

2.     The clipping alerts for blacks (blue) and partial clipping (yellow) are not reliable. This is all the more surprising as it works well when you open Develop Persona on a pixel layer, but not on a RAW file.

3.     In the online manual, the notion of "clipped (mid-)tone" is not sufficiently explained. In this way any fully saturated tones would be clipped tones. I'd have preferred to be spoken for black, white or partially clipped pixels.

4.     The online manual claims that once the Develop Persona output mode has been chosen, it cannot be changed.  On the contrary, it seems to me that a file with a linked raw layer can always be transformed into a file with an embedded raw layer.

5.     It would be nice to be able to rename lines in the Snapshots and Overlays panels. 

6.     The Show Overlay option should be an option in the Overlays panel rather than in the Brush and Gradient tools.

7.     The same set of adjustments cannot be applied to several raw files at once. At most, you can create setting configurations on a first image and then manually apply these configurations to subsequent images, one by one. It would have been nice to automate the procedure with a kind of batch processing. 

8.     In the layer panel, the RAW layer lines should have an identifier (i.e. the pictogram to the left of the thumbnail).

9.     The Colour Range and Tonal Range selection menus do not work on a RAW layer.