Affinity Photograph 2 Evaluation

Affinity Photograph 2 at a look:

Value: £59.99
Internet: affinity.serif.com

• Real professional Photoshop various
• Model 2 brings new options
• Layers, masks and retouching instruments
• HDR merge, panoramas, focus stacking
• Adjustment layers and Reside Filters

Affinity Photograph 2 is simply concerning the closest direct various to Photoshop available on the market. Like Photoshop, it’s designed for classy, detailed and superior picture manipulation, although it can be used for comparatively fast and easy picture enhancements too.

Like Photoshop, Affinity Photograph is an all-round design device, not only a picture editor. It helps vector graphics for creating illustrations and kind layers for including textual content. It’s clear that the design neighborhood that is the place a lot of Affinity’s focus lies. However what we’re taking a look at right here particularly is Affinity Photograph 2’s potential as a photograph editor – and it has a lot.

The value is a slight improve over the earlier model, however nonetheless low for software program of this calibre. Affinity Photograph is likely to be priced like a price range program, however it’s removed from that. And Adobe refugees can be delighted to study that not solely are there no subscription plans, and that till model 2, each single replace since launch had been free.

Affinity Photograph just isn’t actually designed for rookies, it has no cataloguing and shopping options and it doesn’t provide one-click insta-ready ‘appears to be like’ in your social channels. That is an old-school picture editor, Photoshop fashion, however with out the money outlay or the subscription.

Affinity Personas

Affinity Photograph affords 5 totally different workspaces for various duties. These aren’t simply totally different configurations of the identical instruments. The instruments are totally different, and you employ them at totally different phases of the workflow.

So as of look on the highest toolbar, these Personas are the Photograph Persona, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping and Export Personas. You don’t undergo them one after the other in a linear order. You possibly can swap between them manually as required and in some cases they may open routinely.

For instance, in the event you open a uncooked file, you’ll go straight into the Develop Persona the place uncooked processing is carried out. It’s a bit like Adobe Digicam Uncooked, however built-in into the Affinity Photograph interface. And in the event you create an HDR Merge, you’ll be taken straight to the Tone Mapping Persona to make your changes.

You’re unlikely to spend so much of time within the Liquify Persona, until you do some heavy retouching and like Dali-esque actuality enhancements. The Export Persona is for selecting file codecs, color and compression settings. Affinity Photograph saves pictures in its personal bespoke file format, so that you want these export controls to supply common JPEG or TIFF pictures for sharing or publishing.

Many of the work in Affinity Photograph takes place within the Photograph Persona, so let’s check out that first.

Photograph Persona

The Photograph Persona is specified by the identical approach as virtually each common picture editor. Down the left-hand aspect of the display is a vertical strip of instruments, whereas on the suitable is a set of panels for layers, changes, filters and extra. These panels may be dragged off and floated individually on the display, or recombined in any association of tabs and panels that fits you.

Most common changes in Affinity Photograph are non-destructive. Once you apply an adjustment, it’s added as a brand new adjustment layer and may be altered at any time sooner or later. Every adjustment layer can have its personal masks and mix mode, which is simply how Photoshop works.

You possibly can add non-destructive adjustment layers in Affinity Photograph, identical to Photoshop, however you may as well create adjustment presets with thumbnails. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

Affinity Photograph can ship wonderful outcomes however it doesn’t provide quick-fix presets and appears, so that you’ll want to offer your personal inspiration. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

Nevertheless, Affinity Photograph additionally affords adjustment presets, which seem within the adjustment panel as small thumbnails exhibiting your picture with that preset utilized. If you happen to make handbook changes, it takes solely a second to save lots of these as presets too. This can be a actually neat system that permits you to save and re-use your favorite changes.

Affinity Photograph additionally affords a big number of non-destructive Reside Filters. You possibly can apply noise discount, depth of subject tilt-shift results, even advanced lighting results in a very reversible approach. That is the benefit of utilizing the bespoke Affinity file format – as a result of this ‘editability’ is preserved if you save, shut and re-open the file.

Reside Filters are considered one of Affinity Photograph’s strengths. That is the Reside Depth of Subject filter, which might present round or horizontal blur results reside. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

After all, you may mix common picture layers in Affinity Photograph. Certainly, Affinity says the variety of layers supported is infinite, although you’re more likely to run out of reminiscence in some unspecified time in the future, we’d guess.

In every single place you flip in Affinity Photograph, you discover instruments of surprising energy or usefulness. Portrait retouchers might admire the frequency separation characteristic, and amongst all of the common cloning and retouching instruments is an easily-missed ‘inpainting’ device that you should utilize to color over objects you need to take away – immediately.

Affinity Photograph’s inpainting brush can shortly take away ugly particulars like this energy socket. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

There’s an superior array of changes within the Photograph Persona. This one known as ‘Recolour’. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

New options in Affinity 2 embody the flexibility to mix masks non-destructively and create Reside masks layers containing luminosity vary masks, hue vary masks and ‘band move’ masks. These and new ‘Layer State’ choices might show helpful for photographers.

Develop Persona

Affinity Photograph 2’s Develop Persona is the equal of Adobe Digicam Uncooked in Photoshop, now with the choice of non-destructive enhancing. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

That is the place Affinity Photograph processes uncooked pictures and it opens routinely with uncooked recordsdata. It has rather a lot in widespread with Adobe Digicam Uncooked and affords a variety of changes for optimising uncooked pictures, earlier than processing them into an editable kind for the Photograph Persona.

What’s new in Affinity Photograph 2 is that this uncooked processing can now be non-destructive. You need to use a ‘uncooked layer’ and return at any time to vary your settings. The Affinity Develop course of want not be the one-way course of it was earlier than.

The Develop Persona options overlays (native changes, in different phrases), in order that right here I’m brushing on a masks to tone down the highlights on the water. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

Right here’s the identical picture within the common Photograph Persona. I’ve created an HSL adjustment (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) to make the greens richer. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

Affinity Photograph just isn’t designed round automated corrections and fast fixes. It is going to open uncooked recordsdata as they’re and can depart you to do any tweaking or fettling wanted in its 5 tabbed panels.

You employ the Primary tab to regulate publicity, distinction, readability, saturation, white stability, shadows and highlights and extra. Not all the instruments are enabled by default, and the White Stability checkbox is fairly inconspicuous. It doesn’t provide scene kind WB presets, both, so that you’ll need to kind in your personal temperature/tint values or use the sliders.

There are not any automated perspective correction instruments like these in Lightroom, however the handbook instruments within the Develop Persona work nicely sufficient. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

Within the Lens tab you must see that Affinity Photograph has routinely chosen a lens correction profile, however you may as well perform perspective corrections right here too. Affinity Photograph will apply chromatic aberration correction from the lens profile, and will give even higher outcomes utilizing the ‘Estimate from Picture’ choice.

The Particulars tab affords, as you would possibly anticipate, noise discount instruments, however right here is also considered one of Affinity Photograph’s many hidden gems. The ‘Element Refinement’ checkbox reveals a pair of straightforward sliders that improve the definition and readability of positive element much more successfully than common sharpening instruments and with out the halos and edge results.

The Tones panel has instruments for adjusting curves, black and white conversion and cut up firming, however these are stuff you would possibly elect to do within the Photograph Persona.

With the Cut up Firming adjustment, you may give pictures a retro color look – cut up firming is not only for black and white. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

The ultimate Overlay tab additionally illustrates the potential crossover between the Develop and Photograph Personas. You possibly can perform native changes within the Photograph Persona, however the benefit of utilizing the Develop Persona is that it could actually entry the prolonged tonal data in uncooked recordsdata.

Tone Mapping Persona

This would possibly seem to be a specialist device, however it’s price a more in-depth search for a few causes. The primary is that HDR is not only an in-your-face particular impact that’s (arguably) had its day, however an necessary technical device for any photographer making an attempt to handle very excessive brightness ranges within the scenes they {photograph}.

The Tone Mapping Persona is successfully an HDR device, and it’s remarkably efficient at ‘levelling up’ excessive distinction scenes in a pure trying approach. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

The second is that Affinity Photograph’s Tone Mapping Persona is extraordinarily good at it! It may well routinely merge a stack of bracketed HDR exposures, however it could actually additionally tone map a single uncooked file – and fairly often, a uncooked file could have all of the prolonged tonal information you want.

From there you may select a Tone Mapping preset – and these are superb – or make changes manually. It’s typically easiest to begin from a preset after which wind again the settings (or beef them up) to swimsuit the scene and your personal style.

The underside line is that Affinity Photograph can Tone Map (it doesn’t use the time period ‘HDR’) at the least in addition to every other device available on the market and, in the event you like your HDR refined and never supersaturated, it’s truly among the best.

The HDR merge facility constructed into the Tone Mapping Persona just isn’t the one intelligent picture merging device. Affinity Photograph additionally affords focus stacking and panorama stitching.

Once you sew panoramas you inevitably get ‘wedges’ of clean area across the edges the place the software program has adjusted, repositioned and remodeled the person frames to suit seamlessly, and in Affinity Photograph you’re left to crop these out manually. It doesn’t have the intelligent Boundary Warp or content material conscious fill choices in Adobe Lightroom, however then it does do an especially good job of mixing pictures and, specifically, mixing publicity variations seamlessly.

This high-contrast black and white shot was made by merging 5 exposures with the Tone Mapping Persona and additional edits within the Photograph Persona. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

Affinity Photograph may edit 360° spherical pictures from cameras like the brand new Insta360 X3. These have to be in JPEG format and in Affinity Photograph you must swap to an Equirectangular Projection mode by way of the Layers menu. And in the event you simply went “What?”, welcome to Affinity Photograph. If there’s a technical time period for a course of, Affinity Photograph will quote it.

So sure, Affinity Photograph may be fairly technical. However so long as you’re able to study some new jargon and do some exploring, you’ll quickly uncover simply how a lot energy this program places at your fingertips. It could not have the floor gloss and novice hand-holding of rival applications, however it does get the job completed very nicely certainly.

Affinity Photograph has a steep studying curve, so if you wish to make your lunch look lush in your social channels, there are a lot simpler instruments than this. Picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

The actual points with Affinity Photograph 2, if any, are that it has a steep studying curve and that it lacks any sort of shopping instruments. The training curve received’t be an issue for extra skilled picture editors, however even they could have to spend a few hours studying the ropes.

What’s non-destructive enhancing and do you want it?

Non-destructive enhancing is the place your authentic picture stays unchanged and your enhancing software program successfully ‘previews’ your edits, saving them as processing directions slightly than making use of them on to the pixels in your images.

However with non-destructive enhancing, your edits are solely seen contained in the software program used to create them. Affinity Photograph edits are solely re-editable in the event you use the bespoke Affinity file format to save lots of your pictures, simply as your Lightroom edits are invisible to every other program.

Non-destructive enhancing offers you the liberty to vary your thoughts about your changes at any time sooner or later, however locks you into the software program you used to create them.

Affinity Photograph for iPad

Affinity Photograph for iPad is offered individually or as a part of Affinity’s new Common License bundle. Affinity successfully optimised Affinity Photograph for a small touchscreen interface lengthy earlier than Photoshop for iPad was launched. It’s true that Affinity Photograph for iPad can’t replicate the entire desktop interface or characteristic set, however it will get remarkably shut.

It’s a barely extra simplistic workflow than Adobe’s Inventive Cloud system, however one which doesn’t depend on proprietary servers or internet hosting. Affinity Photograph for iPad makes use of Apple’s personal iCloud storage system which, for Mac customers, is a part of the working system already and, maybe, their common workflow.

Affinity Photograph 2 Verdict

Affinity Photograph 2 is a big replace of a massively highly effective image-editor that matches just about something that Photoshop can do and improves on it in lots of areas. In that respect, its low asking worth is particularly spectacular. Simply don’t get the concept that is price range software program, dated, dumbed down ultimately or horrible to make use of. The alternative is true.

There are a few drawbacks already talked about on this evaluation. The primary is that it’s important to know your approach round a photograph editor or be ready to study. The second is that Affinity Photograph is a part of a broader design ecosystem, however there is no such thing as a centralised asset administration or cataloguing system. Additionally if you would like one-click presets and insta-ready ‘appears to be like’, you’re within the incorrect place.

Having acquired that out of the way in which, the underside line is that Affinity Photograph 2 is an exceptionally highly effective picture editor that may deal with every part from non-destructive changes by HDR, panorama stitching, focus stacking, 360 picture enhancing proper by to skilled retouching, multi-layer composites, illustration and authentic paintings. There’s even a 30-day trial that will help you make your thoughts up.

Featured picture credit score: Rod Lawton.

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