Now official, the 1.5 release is out of Beta and available at a 20% discount!! This program is available for Mac and for Windows - the files are cross platform. Check it out at https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/.
I have been using it for several months and can attest to the great functionality, and got to love the price!
They've finally begun to settle this in. It has replaced Photoshop in my workflow and it is much faster. A couple of wonky little “get used to it” things but mostly an improvement over Ps. Licensing alone is so much better.
At the beginning of the year I adopted Affinity Photo as my primary photo editing software. I’m now actually considering shifting to Capture One Pro 10 for 98% of my needs (of course it is a lot more expensive so it might not be a preferred choice for everyone). Affinity has many great features that Capture One doesn’t but Capture One also can do some things much better than Affinity. One driver for my choice is that load time for RAW (NEF) files in Affinity is very slow (10 seconds) and saving edited photos (in Affinity format has started generating image files greater than 1 GB in size!).
I think you will enjoy the results of RAW processing in C1. Any editing that is not possible can be round-tripped into Affinity - it will create a tiff in the C1 catalog.
Bill Booth
Thanks Bill, so far I agree, I’m liking Capture One. The only key feature that I suspect C1 doesn’t have is “frequency separation”. I’ll have to experiment with how the best work flow would be for a round trip to Affinity and back. Easy enough to export a TIFF to use in Affinity, but all the “non-destructive” edits would basically be lost by round tripping it back to C1.
Mithel,
When you round-trip, a new file.tiff is created in your C1 catalog, so the original RAW file plus non-destructive edits are still available in C1. You could also keep an Affinity formatted copy in a separate directory, just for Affinity files that you did some heavy lifting in just in case yo need to revisit the image.
Bill Booth
Ah, that makes sense. C1 creates a TIFF, Affinity edits that and if you needed to keep all the non-destructive Affinity work you could always keep a separate .afphoto. But probably rarely as they are so huge but these might not be as huge because the TIFF is probably a lot smaller to start with than the .NEF (RAW) file you started from. I love Affinity and I was willing to tolerate some 500 MB files, but when I started generating multiple 1+ GB files I realized that wasn’t sustainable.
Years ago, I used Photoshop and then switched to Lightroom and Aperture in that order. I took an involuntary break from editing my own stuff and settled for Apple Photos. I am now 73 and have the time to “dig in” but don’t know whether Capture 1, even knowing I am not going to use every nuance of the program, is too steep a learning curve. Where can I see all the capabilities that Apple has released for Photos in its quest to satisfy previous Aperture users? Thanks in advance. Will the responses come to my email or do I need to sign in here again and look for replies?
Bob Spector
Robert,
I have been usung C1 for several years since the demise of Aperture. I have found the results of developing RAW NEF files noticably superior to Aperture. While there is no cmaprison in the DAM, I have found that you need to go with the flow as C1 does it. There are lots of well presented tutorials online on all aspects of C1. If you want to try before you buy, be prepared to do your evals eithin the month … there is a lot to learn. Your age should not disuade you … I will be 72 next month. Always ready to learn.
Bill Booth
Now that was a great reply. Thanks
Bob Spector
I do well more than 95% of my post processing in Capture One. If you can handle learning Affinity Photo then you can handle learning Capture One. It is powerful so it’s “dangerous” and easy to not understand what you did or mess something up, but with some practice and watching the webinars, Capture One is terrific.