How do I round trip a photo from Aperture (or Lightroom maybe) through Affinity Photo?

[Chris.R]

I have set up Affinity Photo as an external editor for Aperture on my Mac. I can then call it by choosing Edit with Affinity Photo from the Photos menu in Aperture. This will create a TIFF version of the selected file, open Affinity Photo which will then open the TIFF. I want to do some edits in AP and return the edited file (flattened as a TIFF preferably, rather than a PSD file) into Aperture. I can't find a way to make this last step happen. If I try a few simple edits (like a Levels adjustment), when I click Save in AP it says the file contains non-pixel elements, and asks if I want to save a TIFF with layers, or Save As something else. I don't think Aperture wants layers, but if I choose Save As it wants to put the file somewhere else in the file system.

How should I do this?

[v_kyr]

See this thread here, especially MEB's response ...

Quote

You can only use one format to send the files between Aperture and Affinity Photo (PSD or TIFF). First set Affinity Photo as an an External Photo Editor in Aperture going to Aperture ▸ Preferences..., Export tab (on top) press the Choose button and point to Affinity. Then right below set the format you want to use for exchanging files between the two programs. You can pick TIFF or PSD (8 or 16 bit). Chose the format you want to use.

 

In Affinity Photo go to Preferences, General section and check Enable "Save" over imported PSD files, if you want to use PSD as the format to exchange data between them. This option lets Affinity save over the PSD file sent by Aperture so Aperture can keep track of the file.

You you prefer to use TIFF you don't need to set anything else in Affinity. When you save the Tiff back to Aperture we include all layer data with the file in private tags. If you later edit this TIFF file in Affinity Photo we are able to retrieve the layer data from it (third party programs are not able to read our private tags data so they are not able to see this layers structure/data).

For Lightroom there are other threads here in the forum which do discuss the procedure for that one, use the forums or Google's search feature to find those!