[Thanks to the Developers] or an Ode to Affinity Photo

[DenysP]

Not far ago I bought Affinity Photo and received not only great software but good old feelings about working with it.
I mean those feelings when you opened a Christmas present in childhood and received a toy which you play all day long and forget about time. But now I'm an adult and rarely get this feeling, especially with modern software which has become almost all subscription based and rent oriented. And I don't want to even mention the ridiculous model “pay for time when you use it on a day by day basis”. As an adobe subscriber for more than 5 years it's such a relief not to have Damocles' sword in a form of year (or month) withdrawal just for using basic functions which were introduced in 2010 and haven't changed much after.
As a CG artist I can surely say that Affinity Photo has all I need and more than that.
But when I discovered non-destructive adjustment layers (oh hold me tighter!) I was so impressed that the smile of excitement didn't leave my face for a couple of hours. What a wonderful ability!
Photoshop always gots me mad that I can't step down and make corrections without breaking the layer stack and guessing every time new settings (highpass, blur, denoise and much more). And when it was wrong you must repeat this harmful process again.
Then I try to do the same thing in Affinity. Same texture refinement process as I did it before hundred of times (with bunch of denoise, blur, highpass and a lot of colour correction with blending), but in a non-destructive way. My amazement came when I picked Inpainting Brush, returned to the main pixel layer and cleaned some dirty spots. And all this happened with real time update to every layer which was added to this stack. I swear, I`ve seen real magic!
Of course this operation was a little bit laggy, which is more than acceptable for a 16 megapixel texture map. But it all happened in real time! And more than this, I could easily return to any layer and just tune the sliders and see every change on a final image. Wow!
And masks… What a miracle Live Masks is! With the ability to combine them with every mask I want in a non-destructive way. No 3-rd party plugins needed, no unrecoverable files, no constant crashes. Just charming.
Now I am at the beginning of my discoveries, but even now I am so happy that I finally use this powerful software.
Affinity Team, you're amazing!