cpgeo Posted February 13, 2015 Share Posted February 13, 2015 After a day of playing around in the various "personas," I certainly enjoy the UI of Affinity Photo Beta and am impressed with it's drawing speed with large image files. I also commend Serif for it's ambitious efforts to provide another suite of photo/image editing software. That being said, I have noticed many areas of improvement regarding a basic post-processing work flow. Note: I'm assessing this software as a landscape and astrophotographer who currently uses the Adobe suite for post-processing. My recommendations are highly biased, so take it with a grain of salt. Develop Persona: My biggest beef with this module begins simply with the importing of the image to be processed. Opening an unprocessed RAW image (in my case .CR2) within the develop persona apparently causes the program to analyze the histogram and produce automatic adjustments to the image, especially when using high ISO images or where much of the image may be over/underexposed. This processing produces a high degree of noise which requires significant luminance and noise reduction to return the noise levels to "as-shot" conditions, though of course with significant degradation of image quality. When compared to the unprocessed RAW image as viewed in preview, Lightroom, CameraRAW, or any other software, the Affinity photo histogram shows that it has been normalized to what it considers a properly exposed image. This is not the purpose of a RAW editor! Please leave the edits up to the user. I will attach a screen shot to demonstrate the difference between an unmodified image opened in Affinity Photo's "Develop Persona" and Lightroom. When viewing an image without lens exif data (i.e. produced by non-chipped lenses), exif data from other open images is still displayed at the top of the window even though it does not pertain to the image in the current edit session (also shown on screen shot). Add an edit history tab in this persona. When performing RAW edits, I prefer to have the option to jump back to a certain look in my edit history or even back to the original imported image. There are history tabs in all other personas. The white balance slider units should be in temperature kelvin rather than % deviation. Include lens correction profiles rather than just manual adjustment sliders. Include the use of the keyboard to nudge sliders side to side, as it facilitates quicker edits. Edits must be committed or canceled prior to entering another persona. Once the edits are committed, you cannot re-enter the Develop Persona even though the image is still in it's RAW format (although, a dialog box does appear stating that the ability to re-enter Develop may be added in future betas). Photo Persona: The crop tool is primitive. It only facilitates a free-crop with no ability to maintain aspect ratio and provides no aspect ratio options. Fix! Brush sizes can only be changed by clicking on pre-set sizes in the Brushes tab. Add on-the-fly brush size changes using the keyboard and/or mouse wheel. Export Persona: I see that the canvas size and document dpi are changed in the document preferences. It would be nice to see these on the Export Persona, especially since there's an awful lot of unused space on the persona sidebar. Macro Persona: Crashes almost every time I open the persona. Good luck with the beta testing and modifications. I look forward to the program developing towards it's real potential. Cheers. Patrick Connor and oliwetti 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Volker Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 i agree with your comments, especially regarding the default ajustments to the RAW image, especially when mentionning the noise levels which are particularly pronounced with my CR2 files (5DM2 and 5DM3) at standard ISO speeds. In fact, the high frequency color noise is very strong and requires to use high amounts of noise correction which hurts detail in the final image ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GEEKIO100 Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 Something I would love to see as a starter in photography, is brushes for effects such as, saturate, desaturate, darken, lighten, sharpen and soften. As I am forced to stay on iOS 7.X.X because I need iPhoto on my iPad for those functions. I would like to be able to move to a more professional program and I would that to be Affinity Photo. But these for me are really needed and useful features. I'm sorry as I was in a rush I did not read any of the above comments so I am sorry if this has already been suggested. Kind Regards Ash Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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