Introduction to Affinity Photo 2

Why an introduction to Affinity Photo? In my usual style of biting off more than I can chew, I decided to make a video comparing Affinity Photo with DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom. Outside of the familiarity of the DxO/Adobe Camera RAW universe I very quickly realised there is a lot more to Affinity Photo than meets the eye. Affinity Photo is way more “technical” than either Lightroom or PhotoLab.

Whether that is a good or a bad thing is unclear, but there is enough complexity and technical detail in Affinity Photo to satisfy seasoned Photoshop afficianados. So I decided to break the exercise down into a series of videos simply explaining the features to photographers who may be tempted to experiment with an alternative to their current tools.

This article is about the Develop Module, the RAW processing module that compares to DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Camera RAW.

Introduction to Affinity Photo 2

Scratch the surface and it is immediately evident that Affinity Photo is a very sophisticated set of tools comparable at least in features with Adobe Photoshop. It also has a similarly steep learning curve.

What is of interest to DxO users is that Affinity Photo is very reasonably priced, has no subscription model, at least for the moment, and encourages Panorama sticking, layer based editing, opening the door to focus stacking, exposure stacking etc. Everything in fact that is missing from DxO PhotoLab. This potentially makes Affinity Photo a valuable addition to a DxO workflow.

Affinity Personas

The way Affinity tries to simplify the complexity of its toolset is through the use of the strangely titled Personas. Each Persona offers a different toolset thus shedding at least some of the options and in theory at least making the application more approachable.

The Personas are – Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping and Export. In terms of comparing to PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop we are primarily interested in the Develop and Photo personas. Liquify is for spatial adjustment, Tone Mapping for HDR. In addition to these personas, Affinity Photo offers routines supporting Panorama stitching, Stacking, Focus Merging, HDR Merging and Astrophotography stacking.

What is of principle interest to photographers is RAW conversion – this is found in the Develop persona and if you check in the program settings under Assistant, you’ll find you can choose between the Apple demosaicing process and the Serif process. I choose Serif because that automatically applies lens corrections. How it compares with DxO’s lens corrections will be the subject of another article.

Affinity contains no library management features at all, so you copy your files from card to file system in the same way you do with PhotoLab.

To open a RAW file, choose File, Open (not File New) and it will open the File directly in the Develop Persona.

The Develop Persona

The Develop Persona is similar to Adobe Camera RAW in that the adjustments are (mostly) global and you can view it as preparing a photgraph for more detailed finishing work. Everything achievable in the develop persona is achievable in PhotoLab and Lightroom. Both PhotoLab and Lightroom offer further, different adjustments.

In Affinity Photo, having opened the RAW file, you’ll see on the left and side a small set of tools with terrible icons, some of which are exclusive to this persona. The tools include View (Hand), Zoom, White Balance (Dropper), Redeye removal, Blemish removal, Overlay Paint, Overlay Erase, Overlay Gradient and Crop.

And on the right another set of adjustments which will be familiar to anyone who has used Lightroom or PhotoLab. A couple of things to note here –

• The adjustments are applied by ticking the box next to the title. Default is “off”. This gives a simple way of seeing before/after on individual adjustments.
• You can customise which tools appear in this workspace through the Windows menu at the top of the application.
• You set the working color space in Affinity Photo 2 menu: Settings – Colour – RGB Profile

The default adjustments in the Develop Persona include the Histogram at the top

Below the histogram which can be switched between RGB, R, G and B views. We have a set of modules accessible through tabs.

The essential workflow in Develop is to adjust exposure, white point and black point, set highlights and shadows, adjust for spatial issues (eg converging verticals) and crop. This could result in a finished image, but sometimes you’ll want to move into the Photo Persona to take advantage of layer based local adjustments.

Basic

The first tab is the Basic tab.

This contains Exposure where you can set the overall exposure, the white point and the black point.

Enhance where you can set global contrast, clarity, saturation ad vibrance

White Balance where you set Temperature and Tint

Shadows and Highlights where you can modify the dark and light areas of the photo

Profiles where you can check the effect of the output profile

All this except for the Profile will be familiar to PhotoLab and Lightroom users.

Lens

Lens Correction applies the profile correction on opening, but you can also further adjust the spatial properties of the image by adjusting Distortion, Horizontal, Vertical, Rotation and Scale sliders.

Details

Noise Reduction and Detail Refinement (Clarity) plus noise addition. Important to note there is no negative Clarity.

Noise reduction applies to luminance and color as you might expect.

Tones

Here is the RGB curve, Black and White channel mixer and Split Toning controls.

Overlays

Overlays in Affinity are Masks. You paint the overlay on, select it in the Overlays panel and then apply adjustments. The panel here lists the Overlays applied through the tools on the left that include Gradient, Paint and Erase. Paint and Erase allow you to add the overlay and then modify it through deletion.

Moving Between Personas

When you finish processing in the Develop Module, you need to commit those changes by pressing the Develop Button at top left. After that you can move to the Photo Persona (or any other Persona).

Saving Images to the File System

This is important to understand – Affinity only saves the changes you make to a photo if you choose to save it. The Save dialogue in the File menu saves an Affinity photo file with all the develop settings. This can be opened later to continue work on an image.

If you want to upload the file quickly to social media, click on the Develop button at top left and use the Export item in the File Menu – not the Export Persona.

Making Snapshots of your Work in Progress

The Snapshots panel allows you to record your work at any stage. This is useful if you decide to go out on a limb in your processing and it doesn’t work.

Otherwise you can use the history panel to revert to an earlier stage or the Save with History option in the File menu if you want to keep the history after saving out to the file system.

Conclusion

I anticipated an exploration of the Develop Persona to be a short and sharp process. I’m very well versed in RAW conversion. Instead it involved several hours of experimenting, checking and double checking equivalent tools and capability. What I discovered impressed me.

It’s clear that Affinity Photo is a very capable RAW processor. I haven’t tried to impose my own editing style on an image, simply to explore what is possible in the tools on offer, but other than a tendency to default to bright, contrasty images I can’t fault it on capability. At the current price of £35 (Black Friday) it is an absolute bargain. Note that the one off purchase price entitles you to that version plus minor fix packs as issued. Affinity do not upgrade versions all that frequently so this is a small consideration. And the current offer gives £25% off the discounted upgrade price.

After putting the Develop Persona through its paces, I’m impressed enough to buy the software. That being said the RAW Processor is not as good as DxO, but that is hardly surprising. It’s likely I’ll develop a workflow that uses DxO to process the RAW file and Affinity to use the layer based local adjustments where needed. This would cover all use cases for me.

In future posts and videos I’m going to focus more on the facilities available in the Photo, Liquify and Tone Mapping Personas and investigate the various uses of the Export Persona.

Download Affinity Photo

I have no commercial relationship with Serif, the company that owns Affinity Photo or with Canvas, the company that acquired Serif in 2024.

That being said, you can buy Affinity Photo here if you’re quick at 50% Discount (Expires 10 December) otherwise at the very reasonable price of €74.99 for a permanent license:

Buy Affinity Photo

There is also a 7 Day Free Trial of the entire Serif suite which includes Affinity Photo 2, Affinity Designer 2 and Affinity Publisher 2

Further Reading

DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo

Sharp Focus with Affinity Photo