.AFPHOTO File

[HerrBill]

I recently acquired 'FastRawViewer' for viewing and culling raw images. In this respect it is really fine utility and a viable alternative to photo mechanic.

Despite supporting a variety of image types, the utility does not support the Affinity format. when I queried this with them, i was informed that .Afinity is not an open source.

Can anybody shed any light on their motive for not supporting the Affinity format?

 

[Ldina]

@HerrBill Many native file formats are proprietary and not shared openly. Even Photoshop PSD file format is proprietary to Adobe and many native features of PSD are not fully disclosed. Many file formats are open source...JPG, PNG, TIFF, etc, but many are not. AfPhoto has its own internal structure to support all the capabilities of Affinity Photo. The same is true of Adobe...PSD files are designed to handle all of Photoshops capabilities. 

It's been many years since I used FastRawViewer, and I didn't use it a lot, so I forget most of what I knew about it. An AfPhoto file is NOT a RAW file format. It can contain a link to a RAW file, or embed a RAW file, (if these features are enabled during Development using Serif's RAW engine in the Develop Persona), but the AfPhoto file format is not essentially a RAW file. Perhaps this may be why FastRawViewer doesn't work? I'm not sure. 

[HerrBill]

Thanks for filling me on the background to proprietary and open file formats.  It explains a lot.

[Ldina]

@HerrBill You're welcome.

This is probably more info than you want, but here is the PSD file format spec by Adobe. They mention that PSD is a proprietary format, and the spec doesn't cover how information in the file is interpreted (on purpose...they keep this secret), so anyone without a paid license from Adobe ($$$) would have to reverse engineer much of what's inside a PSD file, and hope it works properly. That can be hit and miss, especially if Adobe adds new features or changes things in the format over time. The first few paragraphs of the spec are all I wanted to read, but they make it pretty clear.

https://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/

Companies do this for a few reasons. First, they need a file format that fully understands ALL the features their software is capable of encoding. Second, they want to keep it secret so you are forced to use their software to access all the features and edit the PSD file. If they're too restrictive, the file format will not gain wide acceptance. If it's fully disclosed, people will not buy their software, especially if they can find a less expensive alternative that works well with their file format. Since Adobe's been around SO long and have been involved in the graphic arts and printing industry since the beginning, PSD is in very wide usage. AfPhoto file format is designed to understand Affinity Photo's code and support all its features. Photoshop is not capable of reading or properly handling all of the features that Affinity can encode, so it works both ways.

Fortunately, there are standardized file formats available that are fully specified and available to all, otherwise interchange of information would be a real nightmare. 

[walt.farrell]

21 hours ago, HerrBill said:

when I queried this with them, i was informed that .Afinity is not an open source.

While that is certainly true, they can access the thumbnails contained in the files using standard Windows or macOS methods.

[mopperle]

Opening an .afphoto file with FastRaWViewer doesnt make any sense, as a afphoto file is not a RAW file. Just displaying an embedded jpg is useless.

[walt.farrell]

On 4/10/2024 at 10:34 AM, mopperle said:

Opening an .afphoto file with FastRaWViewer doesnt make any sense, as a afphoto file is not a RAW file. Just displaying an embedded jpg is useless.

FastRAWViewer will show a thumbnail view of a directory, including for JPG, PNG, and TIFF files:

Thus, it could at least show the thumbnail present in Affinity files, too, if their developers wanted to do that.

There's not much they could do beyond that, except that its other DAM functions might be useful in managing the Affinity files, if the user could see them at all.

 

[HerrBill]

Hi Walt,

I have opted to save my edits as tiffs instead of .afphoto. As I use Bridge, which is free, it will allow me to read the tiff format with no problem.

As Affinity will also allow me to save layers to the tiff file, I see no further need to save either the .afphoto or raw file. This should save me considerable file storage in the future.

Thanks again for your input.

Much appreciated.

William