Buying Affinity photo software

[Edintheclouds]

Hi, I'm thinking of buying the Affinity photo editing software.

I'd like to know if I can import any kind of image, including drawings and printed articles from a Twain device, such as a scanner.

I've been unable to find the information on the web site.

Maybe someone can point me the right direction.

Many thanks

[R C-R]

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/full-feature-list/ includes a detailed listing of all the file types AP can import from or export to.

 

I am not sure about TWAIN support -- I have an old all-in-one Canon printer/scanner that is not recognized by AP on my Mac but that may be because Canon stopped updating the drivers for it many OS versions ago. However, TWAIN is old technology that fewer & fewer apps support anyway, & it has largely been replaced by stand-alone software packaged with newer scanners that outputs tiff or other raster image format files that AP can open easily.

 

One thing to be aware of is neither Affinity Photo nor Affinity Designer supports auto-tracing of raster images to vectors or optical character recognition (OCR). There are other third party solutions for that.

[toltec]

16 hours ago, Edintheclouds said:

Hi, I'm thinking of buying the Affinity photo editing software.

I'd like to know if I can import any kind of image, including drawings and printed articles from a Twain device, such as a scanner.

I've been unable to find the information on the web site.

Maybe someone can point me the right direction.

Many thanks

No to twain

 

There are plenty of free software programs that do it for you, Faststone Vuescan etc. 

 

I use Faststone, it scans then one button launches the image into Photo. I've heard that VueScan is very good too.

 

Faststone is also a very good image organiser and basic editor.

[John Rostron]

I use VueScan for flatbed images and SilverLight for slides. In each case, when they are saved (as jpeg or tiff), they automatically open in Affinity. This is because I have set AP as the default program for opening these fomats.

Affinity have stated that the reason they do not offer direct scaner spport is because the available drivers are all 32-bit. This does not seem to have stopped other 64-bit programs though.

John

[Edintheclouds]

Thank you all for your help and advice.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, John Rostron said:

Affinity have stated that the reason they do not offer direct scaner spport is because the available drivers are all 32-bit. This does not seem to have stopped other 64-bit programs though.

As I understand it, they said this applies to poor support in Windows for 64 bit scanner drivers. The Mac version of Affinity Photo has an "Acquire image..." item on the File menu to scan images directly from scanners into an AP project, as discussed in the Scanning images help topic. But there is something odd about that topic:

Quote

Your scanner needs to be correctly installed to allow it to be used. You can check the scanner is installed by navigating to the Control Panel, then choosing View devices and printers.

I don't know why it says "Control Panel" -- I think they mean System Preferences > Printers & Scanners, but regardless, unless there is a scanner driver installed that is compatible with the Mac OS version the Acquire image window opens but there is nothing that can be done with it -- no image preview appears & all the buttons are greyed out.

Edited December 24, 2017 by R C-R
Fixed help topic link

[John Rostron]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

As I understand it, they said this applies to poor support in Windows for 64 bit scanner drivers. The Mac version of Affinity Photo has an "Acquire image..." item on the File menu to scan images directly from scanners into an AP project, as discussed in the Scanning images help topic. But there is something odd about that topic:

I don't know why it says "Control Panel" 

Windows and Mac users are still not aware of each other. I was writing as Windows user, where we have a "Control Panel" to configure devices such as scanners.

 

John

[R C-R]

43 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

I was writing as Windows user, where we have a "Control Panel" to configure devices such as scanners.

What I found odd was that the Mac version of the Scanning Images help topic mentions a "Control Panel," as if whoever wrote it was not aware there is no such item for Macs.

 

EDIT: I just checked the built-in help topic (which I probably should have done earlier). Unlike the online version it does mention "System Preferences" instead of Control Panel" & "Printers & Scanners" instead of "View devices and printers." Those are the correct terms for the Mac OS.

Edited December 24, 2017 by R C-R