My Early Impressions

[eths]

I've started to play around with the beta-software today, and my first impression of Affinity Photo is quite positive, however, unless I'm missing something:

 

1) The interactivity could be better, there is a marked delay between moving many controls and the visualisation of what one has changed. With a Mac Mini from 2012 (2.3 GHz quad-core i7, 16GB RAM) and a NEC 272 display, I am aware that I do not have the most powerful hardware for the fairly high resolution of my display. Better responsiveness might not be possible, without some form of really clever preview image manipulation - I have the impression that the software is using the entire hi-res image even if only a small segment is displayed or the display resolution is reduced.

 

2) In the development persona, I miss the ability to use the keyboard to make adjustments, especially the ability to make fine adjustments using alt+arrow keys. This is something I use a lot in Lightroom.

 

3) The white balance tool does not work very well, IMHO. Also I miss the seperate the colour temperature and hue adjustments from Lightroom.

 

4) Generally I find the controls (mainly in the development persona) to be too sensitive to mouse movements. Fine adjustments appear to me, to be hard to achieve.

 

The above comments are based on fooling around with RAW data from a Nikon D600 and a Sony A7r.

 

Also I had one crash while using the curves tool in the development persona, which I was unfortunately unable to recreate, so I can't really say much about it.

 

Nonetheless, for an early beta, this is an impressive piece of software development.