DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo

A couple of weeks ago I posted a video on YouTube in which I mentioned focus stacking. I’ve had a few questions about it and a friend mentioned that he intended to use a combination of DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo instead of my favoured workflow (for layer based editing) of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

I was intrigued and decide to run some tests to see which one is better.

The results can be seen here

Video

Method

I decided to use Focus Stacking as my test bed. I recently had a few problems with Photoshop’s inability to distinguish between motion blur and focus blur, but that was not unexpected, its a difficult use case. I should mention though that Affinity Photo nailed it first time. So there’s that.

This time I decided to use a much more straightforward case. A wide angle lens, a waterfall and a rock in the foreground. It’s the classic case where there is no setting that will render something a foot in front of the lens with the same sharpness as a background that is thirty metres away from the camera.

I shot three frames, foreground, middle and background and duplicated them so the tests were entirely independent of one another.

In both cases I carried out basic edits adjusting light, contrast and tone.

Layer Based Processing in PhotoShop

I exported the three pictures as layers to Photoshop, ran auto-align and auto-merge. The results were good, as I had expected. Scrutiny of the masks however left a fair bit to be desired. The background mask had numerous holes in it using pixels from the middle layer where it rejected those from the background layer. There was very little difference in the sharpness of middle and background layers but photoshop seemed to select the majority, correctly from the background layer and some from the middle layer.

This is fairly common with Photoshop, but it shouldn’t be, especially in areas you wouldn’t expect focus to be equally sharp.

It is easy to rectify, simply render the mask visible and paint white (reveals) into it so that the entire background of the background layer is used in the merged photo. Then take the mask from the middle and foreground and paint black (conceals) over the areas you don’t want to see in the top third of the merged picture.

Layer Based Processing in Affinity Photo

I graded the images in DxO PhotoLab in the same way as I had in Lightroom, basic adjustments to light, contrast and tone. I then exported the images to the disk as 16 bit tiffs. I could have exported the files straight to Affinity, but I’m not an expert and wondered if that might open the files in the Develop Persona. I’ll check that at some point.

Instead, I exported the files to the file system and opened them in the Photo Persone, choosing New – Focus Merge from the Photo Persona menu.

The Blend took place in front of my eyes in about ten seconds. I inspected it at 100% size and it was immaculate. So much so that when I tried to demo the correction process fro the video, I found it impossible to find anything to correct.

Instead I used the correction process to revert a small section of the merged photo to the wrong layer, thus importing some blurred pixels into the background. I was able to do this and bring the correct pixels back without issue.

It’s worth mentioning that the way Affinity Photo corrects focus merges is by cloning the pixels from the layer you identify in the layer viewer. Since the images are perfectly aligned this makes some sense and it’s arguably easier for new photographers to do it this way.

Is DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo a winning combination?

I haven’t road tested Affinity Photo sufficiently, yet, to be definitive on this question, but in terms of focus stacking I preferred the output from Affinity and PhotoLab to that of Photoshop and Lightroom. A subjective view, but the Affinity/PhotoLab output looked more realistic, sharper and less “digital”. To my eyes at least.

What Affinity Photo brings to the DxO workflow is layer based processing. What this means is that you can extend the dynamic range of an image by using tone mapping (HDR), you can create composite photos, importing elements of one photo to use in another, you can do focus stacking with a reasonable mount of confidence and utilise all the blending modes to alter the look and feel of an image comprised of multiple layers.

Furthermore, Affinity Photo is cheap, a single purchase with no subscription plan and free upgrades within version releases. The company has been taken over by Canva in a move that doesn’t initially inspire confidence but lets’s see how that develops in the next twelve months or so.

Next Steps

I have Affinity Photo on a six month trial. That’s the full, unlimited version. I’d encourage anyone interested to give this a go. I’m sufficiently impressed to want to continue the trial and experiment with the rest of the application’s functionality. Expect to see more articles and videos on this topic!

Get the Trial Version of Affinity Photo 2

You can get 50% off the standard price until 15 August 2024 – so €37.49 or £32. There is also a six month trial available, fully featured, no watermarks. The smart thing would be to get the trial and decide before August 15th whether it’s worth the investment.

Affinity Photo 2 – Try or buy.

Further Reading

DxO PhotoLab 7 Review