If you read my blog, and I know you don’t, you’ll notice that I have limited access to post processing tools. Thanks to my subscription to Practical Photography magazine (via Tesco Clubcard points), I read a review about some of the best processing tools around. Affinity Photo by Serif was noted as being comparable to Photoshop in terms of functionality and performance, but at £48.99 for a one off payment, significantly cheaper.
So, I’m now day 2 into a free 10 day trial before I decide if I should buy. I’m notoriously a prograstinator, but so far, I’m liking what I see. As yet, I haven’t used any instruction manuals and it seems quite intuitive (for the basic stuff).
First bonus is that it actually accepts the RAW files from my Canon 750D. Previous softward hasn’t.
Let’s see if WordPress will upload an image that has been tinkered with in Affinity…Oh Pooh sticks. That’s a no. It claims the file type is not permitted for security reasons…Might need to have a read of this blog: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/speed-wordpress-save-images-optimized-web/ which talks about optimising images to make the files smaller, but I’m not sure how to change the file format. Oh, I knew I’d stumble. Only on the second hurdle!
And we’re back in the race again on Day 3 of the trial. Turns out I needed to Export the image whilst in Affinity, then I could select JPEG and the file size and quality. The image of Snowdrops below has been processed in Affinity from a RAW file.
I got a gizmo* (*code for, I’m not sure what it’s called…) for Christmas that allows me to fractionally move the camera every time a dial is moved in order to gradually focus on a different area of a subject. My husband and I practised on a few flowers to see the impact. He then went off and found some free software online so that the images could be stacked. This is where I lost of mojo as I didn’t want to be faffing around with software that I was unsure of. Thankfully, after watching a very brief You Tube video, I discovered Focus Stacking is quite easy to do on Affinity Photo. It’s also quite mesmerising to watch your images being converted. I think I’ll do a separate blog on this as I learn more, but the relative ease of the process in Affinity has given me a bit of hope that this is something I can play with in the future.
Next up, what I want to try is the Clone feature, as I haven’t really got a clue what to do with it. And still don’t to be fair. I instead had a little twiddle around with changing skies in Affinity to make them look more dramatic. I found a decent You Tube tutorial by Olivio Sarikas which went through a basic technique about what to do. In fact, whilst it was only a 7 minute video, it covered duplicating layers, gradient maps, ‘stealing’ sky colours from other photos, making your own sky presets and other generally helpful snippets I had to keep pausing the video to make sure I was keeping up. Whilst I did manage to adjust the sky and create my own preset, I also managed to change the colours of the entire photo, which wasn’t entirely planned. That then led me to an Affinity tutorial about masking and replacing the sky with another image.
On the whole, this little 10 day trial (sadly not used everyday due to family issues) has led me to believe that there is a huge amount of potential to explore within Affinity. There are a lot of “oooh, I could try that” moments. Most impressive is that it is an affordable and one-off price. Rather than paying £10 a month to get Photoshop CC for eternity, I much prefer knowing once I’ve paid, there are no further costs. A brief quote from Practical Photography.com and they conclude that Affinity photo is:
“…more than capable contender for Photoshop’s long-established crown…but the comprehensive list of features, intuitive design and price assure it the top spot…”.
And so reader, I am actually going to buy it. Woohoo. https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/