Do Annie's Astro Actions (PS) Work in Affinity Photo?

[Guest]

Hi, 

I would like to be able to use these photoshop Actions in Affinity but the author doesn't know whether they will work.

Just wondered if anyone on here knows, the site is below?

https://www.eprisephoto.com/astro-actions

Thanks

Jon

 

[Alfred]

Unfortunately, we can’t use Photoshop actions in Affinity Photo.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

Unfortunately, we can’t use Photoshop actions in Affinity Photo.

Which is disappointing but understandable because Affinity Photo does not include any feature equivalent to Photoshop actions. The closest to that is Macros, but they are (not yet) very well developed & very limited in what they can do.

[John Rostron]

6 hours ago, midnightlightning said:

I would like to be able to use these photoshop Actions in Affinity but the author doesn't know whether they will work.

If you knew what the actions were actually doing, then it may well be possible to match the performance of these actions as Affinity macros. Looking at the descriptions of the actions on the web page, then I would guess that it would be perfectly feasible for some, but not for others. I suspect that those involving channels would be the most problematic.

John

[Eric5]

To the OP, the current answer seems to be that the "astronomy" actions originally designed for Photoshop will not work in Affinity.  I actually contacted the author of  Noel's (Noel Carboni) actions about possible development for Affinity and he has no interest, trying to instead encourage me to sign up with Photoshop. 

As others have pointed out, macros have a long way to go before they reach the level of actions: I started trying to use a trial of Photoshop CS6 with both Annie's and Noel's installed and displaying each action step while trying to emulate in Affinity.  With Noel's, almost immediately stopped since Affinity lacks a duplicate document function which is often the first step of Noel's actions.  It's going to take a lot longer than the 30 day trial period to try and emulate the actions with the macro's current state!   Unfortunately, there is no way to convert Photoshop actions directly to macro format either as they appear to be different in nature.   

[v_kyr]

@Eric5 that's right, there are huge (if not to say immense) differences between PS actions and Affinity macros in terms of their overall supported capabilities. There is often no direct counterpart or certain functionality is not recordable or available at all for Affinity Photo and it's current state macros implementation here. So a sort of 1:1 porting over from existing PS actions will be doomed to fail here most of the time.

[DigitalVisuals]

And this could be a breakpoint fo me to go back to PS.

[Guest]

Thanks for the responses, the conclusion is a little disappointing but not unexpected.

Affinity is still the way forward for me, PS is massively overpriced unless you are a professional using it daily. When I look at the cost over 10 years, given I might only use it a couple of times a month, it just doesn't make sense so I will stick with Affinity and in time I'm sure we will get the equivalent astro support.

Until then I will just have to learn how to do it the hard way, I know Affinity has the functionality, I just need to learn to use it :)

Jon

 

[v_kyr]

Good attitude and for recurring tasks, macros are also useful to make and use in Affinity Photo, as far as possible.

[Eric5]

Same here, essentially.  I didn't need Photoshop for more than a couple of times a month either, so it didn't make sense to pay a monthly fee.  I think Affinity is trying, but still have a few hills to navigate.  Missing actions won't break it for me, but the program so far still isn't totally stable on my system.  The developers are responding though and that's encouraging.  

One program I've reinstalled lately that I hadn't used in years is The Gimp.  It's functionality and compatibility has greatly improved within even the last couple of years and I was pleasantly surprised!  And still free!  I use it to supplement some features AP doesn't yet have, such as content aware scaling and it did a pretty darned good job.  There are plenty of portable Gimp versions around with its many useful plug ins already installed.       

[v_kyr]

Well one nice thing for GIMP here is it's scripting support, which with Scheme (Script-Fu) and Python (Python-Fu) language support offers a bunch of more powerful possibilities. Though PS offers in contrast here also good scripting support via JavaScript.