Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Moving between Affinity Photo and Lightroom


Recommended Posts

I am running Lightroom 6.14 and because I am quite familiar with it I do most of my straightforward editing in it at present.LR allows me to click 'edit in Affinity Photo'. This creates a copy of the photo in LR and opens it in Affinity photo as well. When I have finished working in APh is there a way that I can send it directly back to LR? If I try to 'export' (or save for that matter.) I only get a list of drives and main folders such as Desktop and Documents, I cannot bring up any subfolders or see a link to LR. At the moment I am having to export to Desktop or a recently used folder and then import it back into LR using LR's import function, which is very longwinded. Any help would be appreciated.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I also use Lightroom 6.14 and switch between Lightroom and Affinity, with Affinity set as External Editor but I am at the moment looking at moving completely over to Affinity as on the next IOS Update sometime in October / September Lightroom 6.14 will not work as they are setting for operation of 64 bit programmes only and Lightroom 6.14 is 32 bit, hence my panic of trying to move across but due to the edits of raw files in Lightroom being in a Library I don't believe all my edits are able to move across to Affinity and I have literally thousand of images that have been processed in Lightroom

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dear George,

I am no expert but I would suggest that it would be better for you to post this as a new item. as the problem seems to be different to the one that I asked and got an answer to. Otherwise your question may get lost and not answered. 

I AM HOPING THAT SERIF WILL BRING OUT A LIGHTROOM EQUIVALENT THAT WILL ALLOW ALL OUR IMAGES CURRENTLY IN LIGHTROOM TO BE SIMPLY TRANSFERRED TO THEIR NEW PROGRAMME AND EVERYTHING WILL STILL HAVE FULL FUNCTIONALITY !!!! THAT WOULD REALLY PUT A BIGGER DENT IN ADOBE'S MARKET SHARE AFTER THEIR DECISION TO 'RENT' THEIR PROGRAMMES OUT ONLY.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Deadeyedox said:

I AM HOPING THAT SERIF WILL BRING OUT A LIGHTROOM EQUIVALENT THAT WILL ALLOW ALL OUR IMAGES CURRENTLY IN LIGHTROOM TO BE SIMPLY TRANSFERRED TO THEIR NEW PROGRAMME AND EVERYTHING WILL STILL HAVE FULL FUNCTIONALITY !!!!

Unless the format of the LightRoom library files, and the sidecar files, are fully documented and free from copyright (or perhaps licensed in some compatible way), I doubt that will be technically or legally possible.

-- 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, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4

Link to comment
Share on other sites

45 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Unless the format of the LightRoom library files, and the sidecar files, are fully documented and free from copyright (or perhaps licensed in some compatible way), I doubt that will be technically or legally possible. 

Walt, while I have not tested this myself, this seems not at all unrealistic. Here's a Lightroom migration guide by a competitor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Unless the format of the LightRoom library files, and the sidecar files, are fully documented and free from copyright (or perhaps licensed in some compatible way), I doubt that will be technically or legally possible.

See digiKam and how they make use of LR metadata here. - BTW, Darktable has also a Lightroom import module.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Hi there, 

Considering Affinity and have a few questions.  First of all, can I transfer all my files from lightroom to Affinity photo or can I only use it as an external editor?

I make photogravure prints and use Quatone rip to control the printer.  Is this compatible with Affinity?  Part of my calibration process is marking the output levels of a file to match the capabilities of the substrate I'm working with, does Affinity have this capacity?

 

Thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

Hi @Telepyleia,

Welcome to the forums :)

8 hours ago, Telepyleia said:

First of all, can I transfer all my files from lightroom to Affinity photo or can I only use it as an external editor?

Unfortunately Affinity Photo doesn't have any 'library' capabilities, similar to Lightroom, and is designed to be used as an editor of singular projects - it cannot store or retain documents & images and does not have a browser/library system. This means you can't transfer your library from Lightroom to Affinity, however you can certainly use it as an external editor. (Similar to using Photoshop & Lightroom together).

8 hours ago, Telepyleia said:

I make photogravure prints and use Quatone rip to control the printer.  Is this compatible with Affinity? 

I don't believe you'll be able to access the RIP from within Affinity, however you can certainly export from Affinity and then print through your RIP/Printer software externally.

8 hours ago, Telepyleia said:

Part of my calibration process is marking the output levels of a file to match the capabilities of the substrate I'm working with, does Affinity have this capacity?

I'm not 100% certain what you're looking for here, my apologies. Are you looking for something like Soft proofing, where the document colours are adjusted on screen to closely match the output once printer, or are you looking for colour separation / sublimation tools?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/8/2019 at 10:55 AM, hifred said:

Walt, while I have not tested this myself, this seems not at all unrealistic. Here's a Lightroom migration guide by a competitor.

On1's image editor was designed relatively recently and is essentially a very slow and clunky raw converter/image editor that is a clone of Lightroom, with a bunch of "filters" to make things look nice.  The fact that many of Lightroom's features, keywords and edits can be imported into the On1 environment and rendered is not surprising, seeing as how they have literally copied Lightroom's approach - the migration utility is part of their marketing On1 as a replacement for Lightroom for people who do not like Adobe's subscription model.  Even if you can reverse engineer Adobe's editing pipeline, tone curves, profiles, etc., other image editors and raw converters are probably much different than Lightroom (in structure and editing controls/conversion workflow) so the "migrated conversion" may not really translate very well, or at all.

Imagine migrating thousands of raw image files into a new editing environment thinking that the results of translating your previous edits will be identical to their previous conversions in the old software and then realizing you have to reconstruct thousands upon thousands of edits....

The raw file contains the data from the scene you shot, but the rendered RGB files contain your edits.  Otherwise, you are depending upon the instructions from one raw converter being understood by another raw converter, which will rarely be successful.

Kirk

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello, 

My problem is trying to edit proprietary Affinity Photo files in Lightroom; LR simply does not see those files when I attempt to import.  I suppose this is a file association issue, but one of the first things I did after installing Aff software was to try and establish and external editor link ( several attempts and no success).

I need to find a path and preferably and easy one; the most obvious one of converting file formats back and forth does not sound easy, and trying to establish a link vis a vis the external editor path has not worked. I could use a little tutoring if you please. Oh and for what it's worth I am running Windows 7. I know what your thinking but I don't take it online and it works fine; if that stops working for me, I'll either put a gun in my mouth or buy a Mack, but Windows 10 I will never do!

Thank You and Regards    

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

Hi tombo,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

9 hours ago, tombo said:

My problem is trying to edit proprietary Affinity Photo files in Lightroom; LR simply does not see those files when I attempt to import. 

Unfortunately Lightroom (and any other non Affinity app) will be unable to open or edit the proprietary Affinity formats (.afphoto, .afdesign & .afpub) as these are restricted to editing in Affinity only, my apologies.

If you follow the instructions at the below link, can you successfully link Affinity as an external editor to Lightroom?

Many thanks in advance :) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello Dan, 
In this case I need to move in the converse direction, having created a panorama in Affinity I wish to apply HSL adjustments with Lightroom's sliders.  I suppose that I will have to convert from a proprietary Affinity format and into a generic format such as TIF in order to accomplish that? How would I go about copying and converting the format; I have not yet noticed this capability in Affinity?

Thanks and Regards -- -- Tom Hagood 

Edited by tombo
Got it on the way home, first question was immaterial
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, tombo said:

I suppose that I will have to convert from a proprietary Affinity format and into a generic format such as TIF in order to accomplish that? How would I go about copying and converting the format; I have not yet noticed this capability in Affinity?

Go to the File > Export... menu or use the Export Persona 

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

That's correct, as Old Bruce has pointed out you'll need to export your file directly from Affinity, then import this file manually into Lightroom as I don't believe there's a 'Share' option built into the Windows 7 OS, as there is available on Mac - my apologies!

Once the file has been imported into Lightroom, you can edit it there, then if you need to add further changes in Affinity you can use the above steps to send the file through to Affinity, then once you're finished this can be saved over the file in Lightroom.

I hope this clears things up :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.