Saving work in afphoto (project) file

[Ron P.]

I'm new to Serif Affinity Photo. I purchased it with hopes to replace PS of my photography bundle, I still use LR for the majority of my RAW conversion and processing. I tried searching for an answer to a problem I came across recently and couldn't find one.

When working on a project, I saved it, using the Save As, which of course saved it as an afphoto file. There were steps I used in this project that I wanted to later recreate. However sadly it seems they are not saved when I reopened the project. History starts all over, why? I would think that saving a project (afphoto) would retain this information. I do understand that the changes made in the Develop Persona are baked, as it is a RAW conversion. This however was not in the Develop Persona, but the Photo Persona. Here's what I done, and was hoping the project retained;

I first tried sending the photo from LR to AP, which was a TIFF or PSD file. Photo did open the file and I was able to work on it. I tried saving it to send it back to LR, without closing Photo. I then done a save as, to save the project. Photo did save a afphoto file, sadly the next day I discovered the file was empty, 0 bytes. So I had to try and recall the steps used to create the image file. Also Photo did not send the file back to LR. The PSD was created, just that for some reason, when installing Affinity Photo, it decided to associate my PSD files with itself, which prevented LR from using them in this round trip process.

Now, when I have been recreating this image, I'm seeing that none of my steps are saved in the History if I close the program. These are all in the Photo Persona;

1. Creating a duplicate Layer
2. Cropping
3. Applying the Mirror Filter

The crop and filter are baked in. However reflecting on this I guess this would be the same as PS's Smart Objects, and is something that Affinity Photo is not capable of, . However why does it save other filters? Perhaps I'm not going about it correctly? So is Photo able to save all the Filters applied in a project?

Thank you.

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, Ron P. said:

Now, when I have been recreating this image, I'm seeing that none of my steps are saved in the History if I close the program.

Since saving the history with the file can increase file size considerably, this is not done by default. However, if you check "Save History With Document" in the File menu, after dismissing the warning about that, it will be saved with the file. You must do this with each document you want the history saved with -- it is not a "sticky" global setting.

 

All the filters in the Filter menu are destructive, meaning their effect is 'baked in' once you apply them. But there is also an extensive set of Live Filters available in the Layer menu "New Live Filter Layer" flyout, which are non-destructive & appear in the Layers Studio Panel as separate, editable layers. Cropping is non-destructive -- the Document menu > Unclip Canvas item will reveal the cropped content.

[Ron P.]

Sorry for the delay in getting back, been a little busy lately. I'll have to get use to this, and take notes or something.

 

Thank you.