Develop Persona vs Photo Persona (Affinity Photo)

[Five Photos]

One of my biggest struggles with Affinity Photo, as well as with other photo editors, is to make a decision wether I should do the majority of my adjustments while developing the RAW file or later in the photo persona. For instance, right now I am working on an image which needs quite a bit sharpening (details), straightening, cropping, heavy exposure and withe balance work, and a gradient overlay to further adjust the sky. 

 

I could do all this in the develop persona. But I could also do all this in the photo persona with the benefit, that I can change my values for a specific adjustment whenever I want. I assume there must be a benefit of doing some adjustments in the development persona, but I don't see it. What am I missing?

 

I would like to know what kind of adjustment work you guys are doing in the development persona versus the photo persona for RAW files. Thanks!

[Callum]

Hi Five,

 

Welcome to the Forums :)

 

MEB wrote a large paragraph explaining the develop persona below you may find it useful!

 

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/17702-confused-about-the-use-of-develop-persona/

 

C

[anon1]

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[ekeen4]

For me, my workflow is to first edit RAW files in the Develop persona as much as possible, getting the exposure, sharpening, noise reduction done there before transitioning to the Photo persona. Photo persona I usually do more of the fine-grained editing (removing small objects, filters, selective edits, etc). 

 

 

[ctrubac]

I have the same question and no one seems to get it.

[mac_heibu]

Didn‘t you follow Callum‘s link?

[IanSG]

30 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

Didn‘t you follow Callum‘s link?

@MEB's post is interesting and useful, but it doesn't answer the original question in this thread.  I've got my own work flow, and I've seen a number of others described in this forum, but I haven't seen (or don't remember ) any explanation of why it's better to do something in one persona rather than the other aside from the "destructive" nature of the Develop persona.

[Xzenor]

Almost a year late to the party but since there's still no answer I like to bring back some attention to this.. 
Why not just skip the develop persona and do everything non-destructive in the photo persona? There seems to be nothing to gain from using the develop persona. It appears to be even worse because all adjustments are destructive.

Yet nobody seems to be able to answer that question.

 

[Minus44]

30 minutes ago, Xzenor said:

There seems to be nothing to gain from using the develop persona. It appears to be even worse because all adjustments are destructive.

The Develop persona is not truly destructive. It has no way to write to the file, nor can it recover previous adjustments. While not fully featured like true raw developer software, its benefits are very simple in allowing the user to work with raw files, albeit in a limited way. Hopefully this tool will get a lot more attention in the near future.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Ulysses said:

The Develop persona is not truly destructive. It has no way to write to the file, nor can it recover previous adjustments.

This sounds contradictory to me: While not writing to the file is non-destructive, the inability to recover previous adjustments is destructive.

However, the Develop persona definitely is destructive because you can't undo any of your actions once you have left the Develop persona. Then you continue with a virgin, empty History Panel and just 1 layer. Even going back to the Developer persona doesn't allow to refine or undo any previous action; the Develop persona has no Layers panel.

So, the only way for non-destructive is to close the file in AfPhoto, reopen it and start developing it again. From that perspective no application would be destructive as long you don't save your changes.

[Minus44]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

However, the Develop persona definitely is destructive because you can't undo any of your actions once you have left the Develop persona.

Gotcha. That’s certainly one valid way to look at “destructive.” 

While I doubt the developers will ever abandon or restructure the way the Photo and the Photo personas work relative to one another, they have mentioned that they expect to provide the ability to work non-destructively on raw files. However, there is no timeline given as to when this will happen, and we’re unsure where it sits in the priority stack. 

[Xzenor]

Quote

That’s certainly one valid way to look at “destructive.” 

Well, that's the way everyone else means it. Including the Affinity Photo Help.

 

You may want to adjust your own definition of "non-destructive", or a lot of help-pages and tutorials are gonna be quite confusing.

[Minus44]

12 minutes ago, Xzenor said:

Well, that's the way everyone else means it. Including the Affinity Photo Help.

You may want to adjust your own definition of "non-destructive", or a lot of help-pages and tutorials are gonna be quite confusing.

I apologize if my earlier comment was distracting from the real point that the original poster is discussing.  

This isn't about the definition of destructive and non-destructive editing (I was simply addressing a different aspect of non-distructive editing, not providing a definition. There are several different factors that contribute to non-destructive editing, not adjustment layers alone. 😎). 

This is really about how to approach our processing in our workflow — via either the Photo Persona or the Develop Persona. There's a measure of overlap, so I can see why some might struggle with it. I do not struggle personally because I only ever use the Develop Persona for initial work on raw files. I rarely perform any healing there, use of gradients, etc. My needs there are extremely basic, and then I finish the image in the Photo Persona, where I have more tools and more control over more complex processing.