How much editing in RAW development do you do in the Develop Persona compared to the Photo Persona?

[ekeen4]

In the portrait tutorial here made by Affinity, we see that the editor doesn't do much editing within the RAW develop persona. 

Is this a matter of personal preference or rather a good editing workflow? 

And as a follow-up, does applying something like shadow recovery in the Develop persona perform any better or worse than the shadow recovery layer in the Photo persona?

[Gregory St. Laurent]

I believe it is personal preference, although you work a lot more lossless in the Photo Persona. I have done it both ways and see pro's and con's to either way. I find the Shadows and Highlights work better for me in the Develop Persona.

[James Ritson]

11 hours ago, ekeen4 said:

In the portrait tutorial here made by Affinity, we see that the editor doesn't do much editing within the RAW develop persona. 

Is this a matter of personal preference or rather a good editing workflow? 

And as a follow-up, does applying something like shadow recovery in the Develop persona perform any better or worse than the shadow recovery layer in the Photo persona?

Hi, it's more of a preference based on how I prefer to work, but it also plays to Photo's strengths—the real flexibility comes from working with a flat "base" image using a wide colour profile and making use of all the non-destructive features like adjustment layers, live filter layers, pixel layers with blend modes/ranges for painting and retouching, etc. It's a case of experimenting and finding out what works best for you—tweaking sliders in the Develop persona is a more straightforward approach but I would only ever use it as a starting point. Others, however, will do 90% of their work in this persona and then maybe do a couple of edits in the Photo persona.

As far as functionality, the Shadows/Highlights sliders in Develop are similar to the filter version of Shadows/Highlights in the Photo persona—the adjustment version simply compresses the tonal ranges and is more used for tonal effect rather than recovery. Clarity also behaves differently (I prefer its Develop version), and the noise reduction is also slightly different—in Develop, it works off a base scale that is calculated individually for each image when you load it. Saturation is also more conservative in Develop, so if you want to seriously saturate colours then you'll want to do that in the Photo persona. Think that's about it though!

Hope that helps.