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Libraries for Affinity Photo (a la Luminar 3) ?


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Purchased recently a copy of Luminar 3 with Libraries because it seemed a good value for money, very clever program which saves me time, specially with its sophisticated Tone Mapping facilities (which I believe to be one step ahead to Affinity's). Very pleased with it as far as it goes (a few quirks and rough edges here and there) but I'm particularly happy with its its Library Management functionality. I cannot think of any editing that cannot be done, one way or another, in Affinity (my editor of choice from day 1)  but I was left wandering if this functionality is something that may be coming to Affinity in the foreseeable future?. Luminar people do publish a road map that tell us what enhancements/improvements they are working on next and I found that very helpful.

 

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Hi GinesJJ,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
There's plans to develop a DAM (digital assets management software) as an independent application that will work seamlessly with the rest of the Affinity Suite but we are still far away from there. Affinity Photo - as far as I'm aware - will remain as a photo editing app primarily without library/management functions.

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18 hours ago, MEB said:

Hi GinesJJ,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
There's plans to develop a DAM (digital assets management software) as an independent application that will work seamlessly with the rest of the Affinity Suite but we are still far away from there. Affinity Photo - as far as I'm aware - will remain as a photo editing app primarily without library/management functions.

You'll be waiting... It's been three years and no Library Management or DAM. Luminar sounds like it's worth a look, perhaps similar to On1 Pro 2019 which is also a combo (a la Adobe Lightroom CC) app. I would have hoped that Affinity would have (should've?) done so by now. They seem to feel it's not something they want to tackle or the market is too crowded as to make it unable for them to compete. Maybe something to that as I discovered several worthy apps in both a combo and standalone app. In some cases the library functions can be further defined as tools for data management, ingest control, preprocessors, media browsing. 

Some DAM software is open source, some is designed for large media management users - corporate, high volume users like media outlets (TV news) and other media banks. Read expensive for smaller organizations. There several web locations that you can review and narrow your search. I have not tried many of these, but my search continues. 

A few choices in this crowded group then would be sprinkled from one of  the many current, feature-packed, standalone DAM apps, while keeping AP (Affinity Photo) as the image processor (as opposed to dumping it or starting over with the above) of choice. They are from several segments of the market, in no particular order :

  • Photo Mechanic
  • Shotwell
  • Adobe Bridge
  • Darktable
  • XnView MP

Good luck! Let us know if you found something worthy of consideration. else 

techworkspro_v4_300x80.gif.1b0b1c7df511aeb341fc0dbba972a9bf.gif

MBP 2017, MacOS Mojave 10.14.6, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, (Trial) Publisher

iPad Pro, iOS 12, Affinity Photo, Designer

https://techworkspro.com 

 

 

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53 minutes ago, Techworks Pro said:

They seem to feel it's not something they want to tackle or the market is too crowded as to make it unable for them to compete.

It isn't that. It is just that they are currently focused on improvements to Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo, & bringing the much anticipated Affinity Publisher app to market, which is still in beta & needs more work before they say it will be suitable for production use.

They realized some time ago that they needed to refactor a considerable amount of the core 'under the hood' code to implement some of the improvements they already had planned to add to the apps (like the items on the roadmaps) & to optimize it for future improvements. The 'under the hood' work has largely been completed & incorporated into the three beta apps, but there is still work to be done before any of them are ready for production use. (See the beta forums for more about that).

Since their goal for the Affinity DAM app is to work seamlessly with the other apps in the suite, it would not have been very practical to work on it until all three of the others were production-ready & included the v1.7 improvements (which among other things requires changes to the native Affinity file format).

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Hi and thanks for the comments.

I have been a delighted Affinity user from the day it came into the UK market (and GIMP previously). Really object to being manipulated by Messrs Adobe & Co. into this 'yearly license' malarkey, so however good their products may be ... I'll find some alternative, thanks. Would think of myself as a semi-professional photographer with several years experience and as mentioned, cannot believe how good AP really is. So ... if they want to take their time to fine tune their product range before looking into providing us with a DAM facility, I'll be more than happy to wait and will probably look into it (with the intention to purchase) when they do so. 

Bought Luminar 3, another remarkable piece of software, which in several areas seems to be ahead of AP (in my opinion) AND it comes with a rather workable DAM. So, after a few weeks of extensive trials and tests, will be using them both. AP for its superlative range of editing facilities and Luminar 3 for its sophisticated Tone Mapping and DAM facilities. Paid £44 for it ... which is a rather pedestrian evening out. Would be nice to have it all closely integrated but can live with it not being so ... 

Once again, thanks for your assistance gents.

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Hi GinesJJ,

Don't want to offend you personally, because I think your intentions are good. But Skylum is a different story for me!

Happen to have Luminar 3 and previous Luminar 2018. At the moment the DAM from Luminar 3 is a unstable, unfinished, unusable and ugly part of the application that the users have been waiting for for 2 years. (If they are even lucky to be able to open the application! Check the Luminar forum).

Luminar comparing with Affinity Photo is like comparing apples and pears.

Affinity Photo and Photoshop are allround image editors (that can even merge for HDR and don't need Aurora or an other $ 100,- app for that and are able to develop RAW images as well but I think the RAW part of Affinity needs some improvement). Luminar 3 is mainly  a RAW developer editor and  it excepts jpegs too. The Luminar plugin in Affinity Photo gives the wrong results to me and is unusable. Comparison with Capture One or Lightroom sounds more logic to me and then Luminar is a joke I think compare to those excellent applications. Tried it on different series of RAW images in Luminar 2018 and always ended up using Capture One at the end, because of the overall image quality. Yes you pay a little more, but the results speak for them self's.

Skylum proves to me not to be able to for fill their promises and are doing a heavy affiliate marketing (for Aurora HDR and Luminar) on YouTube and forums world wide attacking the competition like Affinity Photo, Capture One and Photomatix with  false arguments that if you don't know better they are what you want to hear before the purchase off a Skylum product and of course with a "discount".  

Purchased the app out of curiosity (not knowing their marketing methodes and track record at that time) and keep it  with the  (false?) hope that a future update will solve all the problems but are not intended to pay for any upgrade before everything is fixed and have my doubts about that happening. Did not discover any revolutionary parts in Luminar (you can enhance the sky in Affinity Photo too with a couple of clicks and don't need  "AI sky enhancer" for that). With the superb masking abilities of Affinity Photo you can be sure that nothing else then the sky in the image is effected! And in Affinity Photo you can easily do tonal adjustments and I think you have to see some of the terrific tutorials on YouTube about that.   tone mapping tutorial         an other tone mapping tutorial

In the meantime Affinity Photo is our replacement for Photoshop and we keep an old version of Photoshop for eventually actions, PSD's and other Photoshop related features. Serif has proven to be a reliable and professional company that is not asking for money all the time and can be trusted. 

And the DAM yes that would be great, but please more looking and feeling like Capture One (we have too) then Luminar.

Regards, 

David   

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Hi 'All Media Labs'. No offence taken. You are, of course, very entitled to have your own personal views. In this case, as they are based on first hand experience, I think they are a valuable statement that can help the rest of us. In that light, I accept your comments very gladly.

I myself find that after three weeks of extensive use (trials and tests as I mentioned earlier), Luminar 3 is robust and stable enough if somewhat slow. Wouldn't consider comparing it to AP which is a vastly superior in terms of maturity, breath of functionality and general behaviour. After several years of GIMP (relatively heavy) use, AP came as a gift from heavens so I have nothing but superlative praise for, and have (apparently) become an AP 'evangelist' amongst my friends and colleagues, carried away by my enthusiasm for the product.

Take the rest of your comments on board and mostly agree with you as I've found nothing that Luminar does that cannot be done in AP. Only in a bit more long-handed, protracted way. If Serif could/would look into enhancing the 'Tone Mapping Persona' (wish they'd chosen a different terminology) or look into giving us an integrated DAM or work on the Slicing tool in the 'Export Persona' amongst others, for me it would really expand the usefulness of their product no end. That is why I mentioned the need for a 'Road Map' which if published (I'm sure they have a pretty good idea of their development objectives and time-scales). If we have to wait for a while or pay for the upgrade, I for one would have no problems whatsoever. 

Anyway, nice corresponding with you and thank you for the info on Luminar.

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7 minutes ago, GinesJJ said:

That is why I mentioned the need for a 'Road Map' which if published (I'm sure they have a pretty good idea of their development objectives and time-scales). 

They have published roadmaps for the 1.x versions of both Designer and Photo. Note that items already implemented have been removed from the lists.

We do not know, and Serif will not expose, time-scales. We know only that these items, if implemented as they plan, will come via free updates to the existing applications.

They have also said they are working on a DAM, but again (and with good justification, in my opinion) they will not discuss the timeframe in any detail.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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Glad to hear that you already tested the tone mapping persona. Yes it needs further development and the whole RAW part as well. For Now I stick with Capture One  for RAW. You must be one of the lucky ones to got Luminar 3 up and running, because lots of people have problems with it like me.

Are you on Windows or Mac?

This is what's wrong with Luminar 3 now in Windows:

 Issues:
- Performance is key issue as everything is very sluggish
 - Both viewing and editing
- Viewing a folder with 636 images takes forever to load
 - Low res images previews populate reasonably quick however they look out of focus
 - Loading "proper" preview takes ages! and the process sometimes seem to get stuck as edits do not get updated
 
- Shortcut keys do not vork properly
 - Hitting "C" for crop accomplishes nothing
 
- Cropping presets work very flaky
- Choosing 16x9, for instance does nothing
- Fiddling around with selecting other aspects can get functionality working, but never initially
   
- Cropping takes ages to load
- After having opened a large image, in his case a pre merged panorama, which to a fair bit of time
- Selecting Crop opens crop view fairly swiftly but it takes ages to actually be able to crop as software is unresponsive
- After 15-20-30 seconds or a minute it actually lets you crop
- Closing crop with done takes minutes to update while screen flickers (CPU 100% , Mem 100%)
- Updating library preview is another minute... 
   
Annoyances:
- Library view and filmstrip in edit view have different size for images in portrait and landscape                                                                                                                          - Depending on mode a landscape image is half the size of a portrait image and the other way around in the other mode
- Granted this view type is adopted by other consumer grade programs like iPhoto and Lightroom CC (Not Classic)
- You can not change the size of thumbnails edit mode...
  
- Adjustments
- Default for RAW develop is lens adjustment turned off and profiles set to Luminare Default
- After a about 6 clicks with the mouse this can be turned on
- Now copying the adjustments and applying them takes some time for the 600 images... however
- Profile setting was not copied! Doing this manually for all images is a lot of usless work...
- Possibly an issue?
    
-  Histogram is virtually unusable
- The histogram is very small and course and not well visually defined
- Basically you can not see what you are doing with adjustments (you can turn on the warnings but as it is now it could be removed)
- Frame the histogram and then you can at lest see where your image resides... 

And then I don't even talk about the editing that go's wrong/not remembered, missing search possibilities and the export problems.

Nice talking to you too!!

Regards,

David

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Hi 'All Media Lab'.

Wow!. That is a LONG list of issues ... I would have probably considered not buying Luminar if I had known. Still, as mentioned, £44 is hardly enough to go out for a meal with the wife, so I'll take it as an opportunity to learn more about this 'Tone Mapping' arcana ... 

I run Windows 10 Bld 1809 on a home-assembled Intel i7 processor, 16GB of memory and a 2560x1440 Phillip monitor. Nothing to boast about but good enough for the job (also do presentations and slide shows with Photodex). 

Tot binnenkort

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Yeah.I'm demo-ing Luminar 3.0.7.1  for Mac. Seems to run OK in Mojave 10.14.2 and does its thing following their tutorial. Haven't tried Aurora. Their Library module seems to work with JPG files. RAW file import, I haven't tried as yet. Thanks for your list of issues, David. 

techworkspro_v4_300x80.gif.1b0b1c7df511aeb341fc0dbba972a9bf.gif

MBP 2017, MacOS Mojave 10.14.6, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, (Trial) Publisher

iPad Pro, iOS 12, Affinity Photo, Designer

https://techworkspro.com 

 

 

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