Installing Plugins

[A. J.]

Hi, folks:

 

I'm an Affinity newbie and I am in need of some assistance. I have PS, LR, ON1, Luminar, and Aurora HDR 2017 installed on the same drive on which I installed Affinity Photo. Whether or not any of these are as yet functional in Affinity Photo, I would appreciate instructions on how to install them as plugins (or where to find the instructions) for Affinity Photo.

 

Thanks in advance for your help

 

A. J.

[MikeFromMesa]

There are two parts to your question so let me try to address them separately.

 

1) As good as it is in pretty much every other way, Affinity Photo (AP) still has plugin issues and many Photoshop plugins will not work or will not work properly. There are technical reasons for this (AP is sold through the App Store and so much live by Apple's rules while Photoshop is not sold through the App Store and thus can do what it wants so there are what the developers refer to as "sandbox issues" having to do with memory restrictions) and AP is working on them but none of your listed apps will work with AP as plugins. That is, none of the OnOne plugins will work if called from AP, Luminar will not work as a plugin from AP and, in fact, Aurora will not work (or at least the old version of Aurora, I have not tried the new one) and ACR will not work as a plugin.

 

There are many that will work - for example many of the Topaz plugins will work, and you can get the Topaz general plugin photoFXLab which says will will run many other 3rd party plugins, and use that as photoFXLab will work when called by AP, but many others will not. It is still a work in progress.

 

2) The process for installing plugins into AP is as follows:

 

a - Open AP or APB (Affinity Photo Beta) and open the Preferences dialog box (Affinity Photo -> Preferences),

b - You have 2 ways to install a plugin.

      1 - add the plugins directly to the default plugin folder. You can open a Finder window to do this by pressing the Open Default Folder in Finder button on the top left of the dialog box

      2 - copy the plugins directly to the specified folder. AP will look in that folder to see what plugins it should use and add them to the Filters drop-down box for use

      3 - check the "Allow 'unknown' plugins to be used" check box

 

and/or

      1 - Add folders to the Plugin Search Folders list box by using the Add button on the right of the dialog box. You can also remove them by selecting them and pressing Remove,

      2 - Add your main disk folder (/) to the Plugin Support Folders list box in a similar way.

 

c - when you have added all of the plugins you want press the Close button for the dialog box and restart AP or APB. This is necessary as it reads that information when it starts and will not see any new information until after the restart.

 

I think that should do it for you but remember that there are still issues.

[A. J.]

Hi, Mike:

 

Thanks for your response. I think I didn't make my question clear. What I want to do is be able to send a file from inside Photo to "Edit In" LR, PS, etc. None of the other apps appear in the Plugin menu. I don't see that option in either the File Menu nor the Edit Menu. Is there a way to do that?

[MEB]

Hi ajd1170,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

No, there's no "edit in..." another app functionality in Affinity Photo. You have to export the file manually and open it in the third party app you want.