PLShutterbug Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 If this has been covered before, please help me with a link. I looked but didn't find anything in this forum. I've had Photo for about a year now and prior to that years of other photo editors. As a hobbyist photographer I don't use these tools every day and frequently find myself asking if I'm being the most efficient. My question: is there a suggested order to follow when editing a photo? Will performing some actions earlier make following actions faster, or dramatically slower, or affect those following actions in some adverse way? Things I tend to need to do: sharpening color correction levels, contrast, brightness correction cropping CR and fringing corrections local changes such as dodging and burning preparing for printing Another question is, which tool to use for some of these actions when tools are duplicated in different personas? The Develop persona has global controls for some of the above actions but so does the Photo persona. The Photo persona seems to offer more control with individual tools and in some cases the names for similar tools are different in Develop vs. Photo (i.e.: in Photo the unsharp mask uses pixels for the Radius slider but in Develop's Detail Refinement area it is percent). What do y'all tend to do in the Develop vs. Photo personas? I realize this will probably start a war between the "sharpen first" vs. "color correct first" factions, but I'll appreciate any suggestions. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 Well you could crop first, so you're not working on the area to be cropped, seems a waste of time and resources otherwise Secondly there is no point in colour correcting nor sharpening CR and fringing so get rid of the CR and fringing prior to most everything else Then colour correction Levels, brightness and contrast Sharpening; if needed ...and then a bit of dodge and burn prior to printing. Sound good? Quote iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toltec Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 12 minutes ago, firstdefence said: Well you could crop first, so you're not working on the area to be cropped, seems a waste of time and resources otherwise Secondly there is no point in colour correcting nor sharpening CR and fringing so get rid of the CR and fringing prior to most everything else Then colour correction Levels, brightness and contrast Sharpening; if needed ...and then a bit of dodge and burn prior to printing. Sound good? Almost. I was taught to always do sharpening last. Unsharp mask effectively put a fringe around the edges and the amount (radius) is important. If you then go resizing the image, defringing the image or dodging and burning, you affect the unsharp mask edge, reducing or increasing it, Not to mention "artefacts are us"! v_kyr 1 Quote Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 1 minute ago, toltec said: Almost. I was taught to always do sharpening last. Unsharp mask effectively put a fringe around the edges and the amount (radius) is important. If you then go resizing the image, defringing the image or dodging and burning, you affect the unsharp mask edge, reducing on increasing it, Not to mention "artefacts are us"! I think you're right toltec, that makes sense, in general I rarely do any dodging and burning so sharpening is where my editing normally stops. Quote iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PLShutterbug Posted November 23, 2018 Author Share Posted November 23, 2018 Thanks for the responses. Seems what I figured. Cropping: goes a bit to whether the edits are to create an “I will never change it again, including aspect ratio” final image or if I want the option to print as 4:3 or 16:9 or whatever at some point in the future. But I realize that is just my preference, and I can live with some operations taking a bit longer because I’m leaving wiggle room for later. The comment about artifacts (you and I will have to remain friends despite our language differences) is exactly what I was looking for. What are the editing steps that, if done earlier, adversely affect what I might do later? It appears that sharpening is the primary issue in this regard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Rostron Posted November 26, 2018 Share Posted November 26, 2018 Unless I have missed it, no-one has mentioned Noise. This will not be a problem for most new images, but where it is there (say after scanning, or with a high ISO image) then Noise Reduction should came first. John Quote Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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