Serif says the Develop persona now has a much wider colour gamut and operates in a 32-bit ‘unbounded’ space, and it’s now possible to export 32-bit images for editing, preserving their extended tonal range and making it available for further adjustments in the regular Photo persona.Įven so, the results can sometimes look a little flat and lifeless if you’re used to rival raw converters like Lightroom or Capture One Pro, and the highlight recovery isn’t immediately impressive.
Previously, highly saturated colours had a tendency to clip to white much too easily, but this has now been fixed. The Develop persona’s colour handling has been improved too. There are also manual adjustment tools, but these now operate in addition to the automatic corrections – they don’t override them. This is enabled by default, so you don’t get a checkbox as you do in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. This is equivalent to Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw, but it operates within the main application window rather than in a separate one.Īffinity Photo has support for 70 new camera raw formats and, perhaps more important, it now incorporates ‘thousands of automatic lens and camera body profiles for automatic lens correction. When you open a raw file in Affinity Photo, it opens in the program’s Develop persona (each ‘persona’ is in effect a workspace dedicated to specific tasks). The Develop (raw processing) persona now has automatic lens corrections, a wider colour gamut and ‘unbounded’ 32-bit editing, but it still takes a lot of work to get close to the results you take for granted ‘out of the box’ with other raw converters. And you might, because this is one area that’s been improved considerably in version 1.5. If you intend using Affinity Photo as an external editor, you would need to check for conflicts with raw files if your host program processes them itself when you wanted Affinity Photo 1.5 to do it. Or, if you have image cataloguing/browsing software already, such as Capture One, for example, you could configure it as an external editor. If you use Affinity Photo on its own, you’ll need to navigate to your image folders using the File > Open command and old-school folder browsing. Raw editing in the Develop personaįirst things first. I’ve taken the liberty of using Serif’s own screenshots extensively in this review because if I tried to replicate all the new and existing features with my own images we’d probably still be waiting for this review a year from now. If you want image cataloguing and instant ‘looks’, then Affinity Photo is not really for you – although even this other kind of user occasionally needs more powerful compositing, masking and layering tools, and at this price anyone can afford to have Affinity Photo in their Applications folder for occasional use.
AFFINITY PHOTO REVIEW GENERATOR
It’s not an all-in-one image browsing, cataloguing, organising, enhancing and sharing tool like Lightroom, and it’s not a quick and powerful effects generator like Alien Skin Exposure X2 or Skylum Luminar. Version 1.5 does bring macros (like Photoshop Actions) and batch processing, but it’s still really a traditional in-depth editor. Like Photoshop, it’s a full-on, technical image-manipulation program designed for precise and detailed editing of single images and composites. Serif’s aiming for a fast and efficient workflow for enhancing, editing and retouching photos, but now is good time to explain what Affinity Photo is not… We’re used to mobile apps being simplified, dumbed down version of the real thing, but this is different – read our Affinity Photo for iPad review to find out why.
AFFINITY PHOTO REVIEW HOW TO
See also: Best image editing software – what to look for, how to chooseīut Serif has gone even further, launching an iPad version which sacrifices none of the desktop app’s power, usability or controls.The two platforms can even share a file’s undo history.
But now, with version 1.5, Serif has brought a Windows version too, with direct feature-for-feature parity and file compatibility. Launched as a Mac-only app with no immediate prospect of a Windows version, its appeal was obvious but limited. Apple was impressed enough to award it Best Mac App of 2015. Five years in the making, it was built from the ground up to be a fast, powerful, professional rival to Adobe Photoshop, but sold with a regular ‘perpetual’ licence and at a fraction of the original cost of Photoshop. Serif continues to surprise photographers and creatives with its Affinity apps, especially Serif Affinity Photo 1.5.
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