Having an Affinity for Photo Processing
Having been an avid Photoshop user since version 2.5, I thought I’d try something a little different. Here’s how it’s working our for me.
Working with Adobe products has been a love/hate relationship for quite some time now. Their performance and usability has slowly diminished over the years as they continue to dominate the market. Still, they are a necessary staple in any photographic workflow. But a few new players have arrived on the scene, and they could potentially unseat the champion. One of those players is Serif, with their suite of applications which includes Affinity Photo.
Serif is running a Covid19 special…an extended 90-day trial and 50% off purchase afterwards. So, given my hectic shelter-in-place/work from home schedule, I thought I’d give Affinity Photo a try.
Unlike Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo integrates a development module and a pixel editor all in one application. In the Adobe camp, Lightroom and Camera Raw are separate applications from Photoshop, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Because they stand alone, images can be exported to their final destination directly from these develop modules without having to bring them into Photoshop at all. With Affinity Photo however, you must first process them in the Develop “Persona” (the term Serif uses to describe these application modules) after which they move to the Photo Persona at which point you can edit them at a pixel level, and also continue to apply non-destructive filters and adjustment layers just as you can in Photoshop.
The user interface is well-done, and in the Develop persona some of the controls are actually arranged more logically than in LR/CR. But, sadly they have made a fatal error. There’s no ability to assign a Camera Profile, an essential first step in Raw processing. This actually makes the app fairly useless use under certain workflows.
Adobe has actually added more functionality around this important aspect of color management in their latest iteration of LR/CR. They’ve always included the ability to interpret the color in the Raw files using DCP’s—DNG Camera Profiles—which match the Picture Control (Nikon) and Picture Style (Canon) settings in your camera. Adobe even provides their own versions of these, and the “Adobe Color” profile is used as the the default setting for those who haven’t learned how to select their own camera’s profiles yet.
What this means is that Affinity Photo has only one way of interpreting the color of your Raw files, and it may not be the way you need it to. That means if you’re doing UV/IR photography and need to create a custom profile with the necessary white balance shift, you’re dead in the water.
Not quite as serious are the missing Whites, Blacks, Texture and Dehaze sliders. Other than those, all the tools you’ve come to know and love in LR/CR are in the Develop persona. In the Photo persona there are other departures from the Adobe standard that are quite useful, as well as those that are annoying.
For example, in an RGB image you can actually apply a curve not only in the RGB Color space, but also in Gray, CMYK and LAB. Sadly though, these are only simulations, and not the same as applying the curves in their native color spaces. And when you apply a curve, you cannot select and drag off a single point on the curve to remove it…you must reset the entire curve.
Happily when you double-click in any slider, it resets to its original position, as it does in LR/CR. I wish Photoshop did that.
Unlike Camera Raw, you cannot open Raw files directly into the LAB color space. You have to first open them into ProPhoto RGB and then convert them to LAB. And with that, there’s another problem; a color shift.
When converting from ProPhoto RGB to LAB, there should be absolutely no perceivable change in color. The color gamut of ProPhoto is extremely wide, but not even as wide as LAB which can store every conceivable color (and even those colors which are impossible). So, there should be no discrepancies. Even though you may not be using LAB just yet, this does not bode well for Affinity Photo’s color management accuracy.
Once you fix the misconversion however, you’ll discover that all the adjustment layers available in RGB are also available in LAB. Whether or not they’re working correctly is another issue, but since they’re not in Photoshop anyway, there’s no way to test. In fact, due to the absence of camera profiles, there’s no way to get consistent color between LR/CR/Photoshop and Affinity Photo; Affinity seems to do it’s own thing. But that might be just fine for most users.
Affinity will allow me to explore a new level of LAB processing possibilities. For now I can do the necessary RGB to LAB conversions in Photoshop, and then work them Affinity with the myriad of filters and adjustments available.
There’s so much yet to explore in this application, the jury’s still out. But for now I will say that it has a lot of potential. I don’t think Adobe has anything to worry about just yet. But it’s only a matter of time.
