Speed compared to Adobe Photoshop

[amnon]

Hello.

I installed Affinity Photo yesterday to see if it can replace Adobe Photoshop for my needs. Note I don't use LightRoom so I am strictly talking about it as a RAW developer and JPG enhancer.

I use a Fuji X-T20 camera.

My computer is no speed demon, however it has served me well with Photoshop.

What I noticed with Affinity is that many actions, specifically opening images, takes a much longer time in Affinity.

Some examples:

RAW: PS takes about 5s, Affinity takes about 50s (10 times more!).

JPG: PS takes 3s, Affinity takes 4s (comparable here).

 

I also noticed I get very different results sometime, for example taking contrast down and cranking up clarity does very different things in PS and AP (in AP I get a very non-contrast image and clarity doesn't seem to add the local contrast like it does in PS). I actually found I can get somewhat similar results with tone mapping, but switching to that persona takes about a minute, which means that for that type of workflow it takes about 2 minutes in Affinity vs about 10 seconds (including adjustment time) in Photoshop.

 

Are there plans to improve performance? It is right now the #1 reason I may end up continuing my Photoshop subscription, as if the suggestion I'll get from Affinity or its users to buy a faster computer (10X faster than a quad with 8GB RAM and an SSD?) then it means an upfront cost of about $1,000 upfront which is equal to about 8 years of PS subscription.

 

Having said all this, my first impression of Affinity is favorable. It's the first such program I can see potentially replacing Photoshop for me, but definitely not as long as there are these performance issues.

 

Looking forward to responses from people who use Fuji X-Trans III cameras with Affinity or from Affinity.

 

Thanks,

Amnon

[dojima]

Same here.  For what I need in a digital image manipulation application, I actually prefer Affinity Photo, but until it's better optimized, I can't make the switch.  The program shows real promise.  Definitely keeping my eye on it and will try it again in a major version update or two.

 

Thanks for giving Adobe some competition.

[NobleValerian]

There's definitely room to optimize performance. I spend more time waiting on the software than doing design work with large and/or complex files.