Photo as reference only

[piticfericit]

I recently purchased Affinity Photo and I love it, but there's a small feature that could make it so much more useful to me. Specifically, it would be great if it could replace other software like Aperture (already defunct), Lightroom, CaptureOne, etc.

When I shoot I usually develop my pictures with one of the above, but the nice thing of those is that they keep a reference to the image and when you save the changes it only saves the layer info (project info) without saving the image pixel data, that way there isn't any duplicate content. 

As far as I understand, Affinity Photo does have all the non destructive layers, yet it saves the image in the project file, even when using "place" it seemed like the project file was fairly large. I'd love to be able to keep my original images untouched while I save the files with edits as if they were "versions" of these images.

Is that possible? Should I make it a feature request?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

piticfericit

[Kodiak]

•

 

 

I have been in digital photography for many years

now and it did cost me a lot of time to pinpoint the

right solutions in terms of software and workflow.

 

What I know so far is that every time you develop a

file in a different RAW converter, the costs are mainly

your time and disk space storing each application's

side files or else.

 

I know as well that processing hundreds of RAWs in

the shortest time is a must and ask for a matured end

at selecting the right combo of software and workflow.

 

Since I have no limiting budget for soft/hardware but

hating to lose money, I had to do some serious home-

works to get the best tools and workflow.

 

LR was very early discarded as converter for the lack

of quality first and, second, it is an adobe product that

I came, much later after I took the decision, to delete

from all my machines.

 

So, in short, Capture One is the converter I selected for

my RAW shooting and Affinity Photo is the replacement

to PS after losing time, money and hopes on the OnOne

Perfect Photo Suite of which I kept their Photo Resize,

still the better choice in the industry.

 

I'd love to be able to keep my original images untouched…

 

RAWs are non alterable AFAIK, so no worry there.

 

while I save the files with edits as if they were "versions" of these images.

 

One simple way is to keep all apps sidecar files in the same

folder as the original RAWs and let the applications recognize

their own generated related files.