Affinity Photo 2

[MouthBoy]

Does anyone use Affinity Photo 2?

I ask as I am wanting to move away from Adobe, and I need to replace Lightroom and Photoshop. This is for two reasons, the subscription fee and I am not generally liking what Adobe are up to these days.

I have downloaded the free trial tonight that lasts for 7 days and have been playing a bit, and my first thoughts are that this is steps back from Lightroom - but - is that a bad thing for what I personally do? I mainly do landscape and a bit of wildlife photography, I shoot RAW and like to develop 95% in RAW in Lightroom rather than jumping into Photoshop.

A few issues I have found;
- There is no DAM and so I would be using Windows File Explorer and dragging the photos I want to edit into AP each time
- Due to no DAM, there is no method for me to rate and favourite photos, which I do a lot of so I know what my best photos are quickly
- RAW editing is basic, and it seems like AP wants you to make basic adjustments and then move to their non destructive editor for the rest - this may not be a bad thing when I get used to it?
- Subject selection...I find myself using this a fair bit with wildlife photography, but due to "no AI" in AP, this feature is missing and its mainly manual selection

The pros?
- £79 for an entire suite of applications (around £33 just for the photo bit) and its a one off payment
- The tools that are available do seem to the commonly used ones, and if I get used to their workflow it may be ok?
- I don't edit "heavy" so the basic RAW editing may work for me?

Anyone else made the switch?

Also, any thoughts on Capture One instead? I know that is £290 but its still a one off and seems to be VERY powerful for photos and RAW processing, and it has a DAM too?

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

I’m a hobbyist photographer and I originally got the Affinity suit for other reasons before realising I could use it for my photos. I’ve also not used photoshop or light room.

I use Rawtherapee to rate and cull my photos and bulk processing. It’s a complicated piece of software that does seem really powerful but I’m yet to fully exploit its abilities. (As I was typing this I decided to search up if it was possible to send photos from RT to AP and it is. Well that’s going to help me a lot.)

I will sometimes take a picture I really like into affinity photo 2. There is a setting you can toggle that will make the raw development non destructive and will allow you to go back into the development mode at any point in time.

I’m not sure what you mean by basic adjustments in raw development mode. It seems to me to have a full suit of tools in there but that could be my limited exposure to other software.

 

[MouthBoy]

What I mean by basic is if you look at the tools just in the develop persona (mode) in AP there is far less than LR and they seem far less detailed. Also something I noticed is that AP never seems to find my lens for lens correction without manually doing it.

I got a trial of CO last night too and straight away it felt better, all lenses found, simple DAM features but they are there...but, it is 4 times the price.

Then I looked at DXO, and that may be an option. It seems very powerful and it's at a price I'm ok with paying. Still testing though.

Interestingly I opened up a RAW file in LR, AP and CO last night side by side and for some reason the AP one looked hazy and soft, where LR and CO appeared sharper initially. Unsure if there is some processing happening behind the scene, but it's a tad odd.

 

[MouthBoy]

Bought DxO and I am really impressed. Spent tonight sorting out my catalogue now that LR will not be managing it, but feels good to get rid of photos from around 20 years ago that I have no idea why I kept...

 

[Spleen Sauce]

When my Adobe subscription is up (I bought prepaid with cheap voucher deals) I'll be moving to Affinity Photo 2 (which I already have and is excellent) and DxO Photolab 7. I'd really like Capture One as I've got a lot of experience with it but I don't want a sub again and the purchase price is a bit too high for me.

 

[GMac11]

Does anyone use Affinity Photo 2?

I ask as I am wanting to move away from Adobe, and I need to replace Lightroom and Photoshop. This is for two reasons, the subscription fee and I am not generally liking what Adobe are up to these days.

I have downloaded the free trial tonight that lasts for 7 days and have been playing a bit, and my first thoughts are that this is steps back from Lightroom - but - is that a bad thing for what I personally do? I mainly do landscape and a bit of wildlife photography, I shoot RAW and like to develop 95% in RAW in Lightroom rather than jumping into Photoshop.

A few issues I have found;
- There is no DAM and so I would be using Windows File Explorer and dragging the photos I want to edit into AP each time
- Due to no DAM, there is no method for me to rate and favourite photos, which I do a lot of so I know what my best photos are quickly
- RAW editing is basic, and it seems like AP wants you to make basic adjustments and then move to their non destructive editor for the rest - this may not be a bad thing when I get used to it?
- Subject selection...I find myself using this a fair bit with wildlife photography, but due to "no AI" in AP, this feature is missing and its mainly manual selection

The pros?
- £79 for an entire suite of applications (around £33 just for the photo bit) and its a one off payment
- The tools that are available do seem to the commonly used ones, and if I get used to their workflow it may be ok?
- I don't edit "heavy" so the basic RAW editing may work for me?

Anyone else made the switch?

Also, any thoughts on Capture One instead? I know that is £290 but its still a one off and seems to be VERY powerful for photos and RAW processing, and it has a DAM too?

One thing to get straight from the outset is that Affinity is in no way, nor ever has been, a replacement/alternative to Lightroom. It is more akin to Photoshop.
For straight up RAW editing Affinity is not very good in my experience - although I admit I haven't used V2.

If you really want to get away from Adobe (I have actually just gone in the opposite direction) then you need a proper RAW editing program to run alongside Affinity. My choice for years (mainly because I shoot Fuji) was Capture One and that combination worked very well for me.

However, the cost of Adobe is very reasonable now compared to Capture One alone and the fact you get both Lightroom and Photoshop bundled as well as the mobile and tablet apps made it a no brainer for me.
I pick up a year's subscription to Adobe when it's on sale on Amazon (circa £80ish give or take). For an equivalent £6.66 per month it's an absolute bargain IMO.

 

[MouthBoy]

One thing to get straight from the outset is that Affinity is in no way, nor ever has been, a replacement/alternative to Lightroom. It is more akin to Photoshop.
For straight up RAW editing Affinity is not very good in my experience - although I admit I haven't used V2.

If you really want to get away from Adobe (I have actually just gone in the opposite direction) then you need a proper RAW editing program to run alongside Affinity. My choice for years (mainly because I shoot Fuji) was Capture One and that combination worked very well for me.

However, the cost of Adobe is very reasonable now compared to Capture One alone and the fact you get both Lightroom and Photoshop bundled as well as the mobile and tablet apps made it a no brainer for me.
I pick up a year's subscription to Adobe when it's on sale on Amazon (circa £80ish give or take). For an equivalent £6.66 per month it's an absolute bargain IMO.

Yea I found thos during my testing.

I have purchased DxO as my RAW editor and am going to pickup affinity suite for the gap that would have been photoshop.

 

[xaldub]

I use Capture One Pro for DAM and RAW processing ... love it, I'm used to its workflow and have zero desire to go back to Lightroom. The only thing I miss about Lightroom is the print module which is actually quite good. However, COP is not a substitute for Photoshop style edits ... that's where Affinity Photo ( 1 or 2 ) comes in. It's basically a Photoshop clone and shouldn't take much effort to adjust to its UI.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

I’d echo a lot of what’s said above. I ditched Adobe Suite a good few years ago, and initially jumped to affinity thinking it would take its place.

Standalone, Affinity Photo doesn’t and cant replace Lightroom. It is at best an alternative to Photoshop, and in no way manages your collection in the way that LR can do. If you’re dealing with a single image, it’s decent I think. I think the RAW adjustments are OK, and get the job done, and to the OP, yes you seem to do a core RAW development to get things to where you roughly want them, then bring it into the editor for the Photoshop style editing.

It’s the larger scale management of all your photos is where it falls down for me, and none of the others I’ve tried so far manage to integrate it all well enough where you dont think ‘but LR can do this’.

I think the Affinity Suite could make a killer combo if they added an asset manager to it which could manage images and documents of the suite.