Please Lightroom Replacement!

[wonderings]

4 minutes ago, AndrejSK said:

@wonderings    And that is the reason why i like Serif rather than Adobe. Its just my dream to have full app suit (for photography) from Serif Let's see what the future and Serif brings 

Not sure what the reasoning is there, you want a program like Lightroom from Affinity, but Affinity is much much smaller and does not want to spread themselves thin (my assumption) by offering to many applications it cannot properly support whereas Adobe has the resources and the applications to do anything you need to do. What is not to like about Adobe?

[wonderings]

1 hour ago, AndrejSK said:

@wonderings    And that is the reason why i like Serif rather than Adobe. Its just my dream to have full app suit (for photography) from Serif Let's see what the future and Serif brings 

Again not understanding, you like Serif better because it offers less? I would imagine the real reason is Serif is much much cheaper then Adobe which is why I think people keep asking for things like video editing apps among other things as they are hoping to get more quality software for very little money. 

[Paul_Hol]

20 hours ago, wonderings said:

yes and lots of people think a video app, or animation tools, or pdf viewers, or a host of other things would be a perfect asset as well. Serif is not an Adobe or have the resources that Adobe has. I am sure in time with success with the current 3 products they will add some new applications, but I don't think it will be anytime soon. 

I think you're missing how little, comparatively*, needs to be added to make Affinity Photo work more like Lightroom. Photo already has the core functionality of a raw conversion engine, printing functions and Publisher, via the persona system, could handle book production. Serif would need to add the ability to save develop settings, a glaring omission in Photo now, then just add some DAM functionality.
Some bells and whistles of Lightroom, like the map and slideshow modules might be harder to bring in, but also their omission won't put very many people off. 

*Compared to building entirely new products serif has no experience of eg video editing, CAD, etc

[dominik]

2 hours ago, Paul_Hol said:

just add

@Paul_Hol

I think you are (tremendously) underestimating the effort it takes to add DAM functionality. Especially if one wants to do it right.

d.

[Glevum Owl]

4 hours ago, Paul_Hol said:

I think you're missing how little, comparatively*, needs to be added to make Affinity Photo work more like Lightroom. Photo already has the core functionality of a raw conversion engine, printing functions and Publisher, via the persona system, could handle book production. Serif would need to add the ability to save develop settings, a glaring omission in Photo now, then just add some DAM functionality.
Some bells and whistles of Lightroom, like the map and slideshow modules might be harder to bring in, but also their omission won't put very many people off. 

*Compared to building entirely new products serif has no experience of eg video editing, CAD, etc

Firstly, Serif has extensive experience of writing video software having spent almost a decade on its Windows-only MoviePlus software.

Secondly, and more importantly, domink is spot on with his comment. As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread, a DAM requires an entirely different programming paradigm to any of the current Affinity products. Serif would practically need to start from scratch building a product centred around a database. That takes time and lot of very careful planning to get right first time.

I'm itching for a fully-integrated, non-Adobe workflow environment as much as the next user but decades of working in IT has taught me that what appears easy on the surface usually isn't.

[Paul_Hol]

1 hour ago, Glevum Owl said:

Firstly, Serif has extensive experience of writing video software having spent almost a decade on its Windows-only MoviePlus software.

"Extensive" ?? MoviePlus has hardly registered on most video editor's radar, just a low end amateur product development stopped almost a decade ago.
Proper video editing software would be a ridiculously difficult market to break into when products such as Resolve or Avid Media composer are free.

Quote

Secondly, and more importantly, domink is spot on with his comment. As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread, a DAM requires an entirely different programming paradigm to any of the current Affinity products. Serif would practically need to start from scratch building a product centred around a database. That takes time and lot of very careful planning to get right first time.

I'm itching for a fully-integrated, non-Adobe workflow environment as much as the next user but decades of working in IT has taught me that what appears easy on the surface usually isn't.

A DAM is just a glorified database, Lightroom just uses SQLite. One of the market leaders for photo DAMs, iMatch, is just made and developed by one person. It wouldn't be difficult to recruit a couple of specialist programmers to pull it together if Serif don't have capable people in-house already.

[dominik]

13 hours ago, Paul_Hol said:

It wouldn't be difficult to recruit a couple of specialist programmers to pull it together

Serif several times commented in this forum that it is very hard for them to find programmers who have the required skills and experience.

See e.g. this post (that is actually from another thread about a DAM):

d.

[Paul_Hol]

2 hours ago, dominik said:

Serif several times commented in this forum that it is very hard for them to find programmers who have the required skills and experience.

The real problem is probably not availability, but cost.

The key bit there is  "In time we have said we will have a DAM that compliments the current applications" so it's on it's way, but we'll have to wait. 

[RedLetter20]

Affinity Photo already has what a majority of users need as far as processing and editing goes, what’s missing is management.
 

Something that might be a very good compromise would be to add in the ability to open a folder of images, when you do this you get a filmstrip at the bottom of the screen just like Lightroom. As for adjustments, layers, etc, make it “non destructive” by saving everything as a “.affinity” sidecar file that simply references the original photo. 
 

so basically just make it part of Affinity Photo, and skip the “library” or “catalog” part and just use sidecar files, I imagine doing it this way would be significantly easier to develop and maintain. Plus it gives users the added benefit of their entire library being portable and can be opened in any version of Affinity Photo without having to deal with re-importing and catalog files.

[Paul_Hol]

32 minutes ago, RedLetter20 said:

skip the “library” or “catalog” part 

That would be a major omission. The ability to sort, search and group is a VERY important feature of programmes like Lightroom, Capture One etc. It would also be very useful across the whole Affinity suite. 

[RedLetter20]

I agree that it is important, and personally I’d love to see a full blown DAM setup like Lightroom. However, doing all that and having the ability to keep things in sync between mobile and desktop would be a pretty big undertaking, but a good chunk of the features could be implemented without the need for any of that.

so let me try to expand on my idea a little. 
 

First would be to add a “gallery” and a “film strip” view. this could be done by either selecting a folder or drive to open, or even better would be to add the ability to tie into WebDAV/smb/nfs so people with a NAS or cloud storage can tie right in. The gallery view could be setup as another persona but with file management tools instead (I’ll touch on this more in a second). As for the film strip it could just be added as a pinable panel on the right side that stretches the full width of the screen, this will show all images in the range of images you have selected in the gallery persona.

Now as far as the organization goes, that could all be handled using file tags, or an xml sidecar file. Things such as rating, color label, and any custom tags you could want can all be written directly into the file or a sidecar file from the gallery persona. The gallery view would also allow searching and filtering by these tags. Doing it this way doesn’t require any kind of database, only the ability to read and write tags which is a pretty basic thing.

lastly would be the non destructive editing. The best way to do this if it’s possible would be to create a “.afphoto” file beside each original image that references the original image and contains all the edits, you could even have more than one for different edits of the same picture.

I think this would get a majority of people 90% of the way there, plus it is completely portable between installations of AF, even between different systems, users, and mobile. Plus, if you chose to write the tags and other metadata into the file instead of a sidecar, then most of your tags and rating will be available in other photo apps, as well as in the iOS files app, finder, and Windows explorer. Best of all is you don’t have to worry about corrupting, syncing and backing up a catalog file, and you could even use an external program to bulk edit tags, etc...

just my two cents. 😁

[Snapseed]

1 hour ago, RedLetter20 said:

I agree that it is important, and personally I’d love to see a full blown DAM setup like Lightroom. However, doing all that and having the ability to keep things in sync between mobile and desktop would be a pretty big undertaking, but a good chunk of the features could be implemented without the need for any of that.

so let me try to expand on my idea a little. 
 

First would be to add a “gallery” and a “film strip” view. this could be done by either selecting a folder or drive to open, or even better would be to add the ability to tie into WebDAV/smb/nfs so people with a NAS or cloud storage can tie right in. The gallery view could be setup as another persona but with file management tools instead (I’ll touch on this more in a second). As for the film strip it could just be added as a pinable panel on the right side that stretches the full width of the screen, this will show all images in the range of images you have selected in the gallery persona.

Now as far as the organization goes, that could all be handled using file tags, or an xml sidecar file. Things such as rating, color label, and any custom tags you could want can all be written directly into the file or a sidecar file from the gallery persona. The gallery view would also allow searching and filtering by these tags. Doing it this way doesn’t require any kind of database, only the ability to read and write tags which is a pretty basic thing.

lastly would be the non destructive editing. The best way to do this if it’s possible would be to create a “.afphoto” file beside each original image that references the original image and contains all the edits, you could even have more than one for different edits of the same picture.

I think this would get a majority of people 90% of the way there, plus it is completely portable between installations of AF, even between different systems, users, and mobile. Plus, if you chose to write the tags and other metadata into the file instead of a sidecar, then most of your tags and rating will be available in other photo apps, as well as in the iOS files app, finder, and Windows explorer. Best of all is you don’t have to worry about corrupting, syncing and backing up a catalog file, and you could even use an external program to bulk edit tags, etc...

just my two cents. 😁

Thing is, there's already a ton of DAM/RAW edtor softwares already out there and it is just a matter of finding one that suits your individual workflow.

For example, professional photographer Joe Cristina has endorsed Affinity Photo as a repplacement for perma-rental Photoshop CC and he was using Exposure X5 with Affinity Photo.

[Paul_Hol]

13 hours ago, RedLetter20 said:

However, doing all that and having the ability to keep things in sync between mobile and desktop would be a pretty big undertaking,

But not everyone would consider that important or even useful.

The sidecar file approach will be important to ensure that Photo can create a non-destructive parametric editing system. No question about that.

The advantage of the catalogue approach is that it allows working with all files, not just the limited number of files you happen to have, or can cope with, in a 'gallery' or 'filmstrip'.
Once you start trying to find files across years, decades or tens of thousands of files across multiple drives, having to work with small groups becomes exceptionally limiting. 

[RedLetter20]

13 hours ago, Snapseed said:

Thing is, there's already a ton of DAM/RAW edtor softwares already out there and it is just a matter of finding one that suits your individual workflow.

This is true, but not for the iPad. Which I think would be the biggest target for something like this. Affinity Photo for iPad has literally changed my entire workflow almost overnight. 
 

2 hours ago, Paul_Hol said:

Once you start trying to find files across years, decades or tens of thousands of files across multiple drives, having to work with small groups becomes exceptionally limiting. 

The idea would be that the “gallery view” would be more or less a fancy file browser. So long as your images are organized in folders then you can browse back as far as you want. I do have a NAS at this point though so I am able to keep all my photos in one place instead of being spread out across numerous USB HDDs. I could see how this approach wouldn’t work as seamlessly for someone who has their data spread out over multiple devices. But for iPad users it’s still better than the nothing that’s currently available.

As far as the filmstrip, that would just work like it does in Lightroom and Capture One, it would just be used to provide quick access to the photos you currently have selected to work on. 

[Paul_Hol]

37 minutes ago, RedLetter20 said:

This is true, but not for the iPad. Which I think would be the biggest target for something like this. Affinity Photo for iPad has literally changed my entire workflow almost overnight. 

You highlight Affinity's problem in programme development; Who are they creating this software for ? the less advanced users working on tablets with maybe just a few thousand files or serious users who expect to use professional software on capable systems with 10s of thousands of files.
I wouldn't consider photo editing if I wasn't using a properly calibrated and colour managed screen. 

[RedLetter20]

I must be somewhere in between then because I have almost 200,000 pictures in my catalog, But I’m not a professional. For me it’s a hobby that I take very seriously.

[Karl Works]

I am looking at NOT Lightroom for organizing, the part of Lightroom that organizes is Bridge.  .   Affinity Bridge 

An Affinity version of Bridge is what we could use the most.  I was using Apple's Aperture until they bailed on it (like they do with most of their software) 

Bridge is free, even without any subscriptions, ( I believe, I may be mistaken on this ) 

I am in the process of setting up a test folder, however, from the "how to" videos I have seen it will organize the actual folders as well as provide tags.  

Just doesn't feel right/ fluid as it would as an Affinity Asset Manager.   (not to be confused with the asset manager that is limited to each project ). 

[dominik]

9 hours ago, Karl Works said:

Bridge is free, even without any subscriptions, ( I believe, I may be mistaken on this ) 

Hi @Karl Works,

there is a YouTube tutorial that quite well explaines how to use Adobe Bridge in conjunction with APh. The only drawback of Adobe Bridge is that it does not show previews of Affinity files. Even for that the tutorial demonstrates a workaround that I personally find a little too laborious, though.

d.

[burzum]

On 3/19/2021 at 2:09 PM, wonderings said:

Not sure what the reasoning is there, you want a program like Lightroom from Affinity, but Affinity is much much smaller and does not want to spread themselves thin (my assumption) by offering to many applications it cannot properly support whereas Adobe has the resources and the applications to do anything you need to do. What is not to like about Adobe?

They already got a RAW developer and other capabilities, they "just" need to build a catalog and UI around that. I would be happy even with a minimum viable product for the beginning.

What I hate in general are expensive subscriptions for software that would run  perfectly fine without on my computer. Adobe is there no exception just a very greedy one. I would blindly buy another LR version for 100-200€ but no damn subscription!

I'm sad to come back to this topic and still nothing new about Serif working on a replacement for LR.

[Gigiga]

On 7/15/2021 at 9:16 PM, burzum said:

 I would blindly buy another LR version for 100-200€ but no damn subscription!

I'm sad to come back to this topic and still nothing new about Serif working on a replacement for LR.

My EXACT state of mind right now.

The described use of Bridge and AP is nothing close to what I expected. I could use the Finder to do this. A bit sarcastic I know but basically not what I look for when I want a Lightroom replacement. Would gladly through some money at Adobe for a non-suscription version of Lightroom.

[Angelo Antonucci]

I’d rather stay in the Affinityverse for a Lightroom replacement. 
Further integration with Designer would be welcomed later, but I would love to see a Lightroom-esque app rather than a Bridge like one.