Beacon Camera Club

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
The best bargain just got even more bargainfullness

Hi Malcolm (or others who read this)

How are you getting on with Affinity? It's getting some good write ups and I'm getting tired of Adobe's subscription model so was thinking of trying it.

Do you (or anyone) have an opinion how good it is

Hi Matt I've been using it for several months, it's bloody good

Cheers Brian,

For those who might be interested I have been playing with the 10 day free trial and am very impressed. I don't consider myself a slouch in the photoshop dept as I like to play with creative and composite images besides the more normal photo editing. I haven't been able to find any Photoshop feature (that I use) that I can't replicate on Affinity so far. The interface seems a little clunky or less intuitive than photoshop, but that could just be me after years of PS.

This left my with the problem of adobe lightroom and bridge, for which I do quick edits/basic adjustments or use as an image browser since they view RAW files. Due to my camera collection I have .NEF (Nikon), .ORF (Olympus) and .RAF (fuji) both on file and still actively shot,viewing all these types is a nightmare without lightroom (I've convinced windows to view NEF, but not the others). It's taken me about a week to crack it but this morning I came across 'RawTherapee' which is a free open source software (same principal as the GIMP image editor). It provides thumbnail views of all my RAW file types and has the ability to rank and colour label photos for sorting plus has a editor tab similar to lightrooms develop ability. It doesn't pick up your other image editors automatically, so when you right click you don't see what else you can open it in, but you can add a custom shortcut in the preferences so I now have a one button click to open an image in Affinity. If you rely a lot on lightrooms 'collections' or keywords it might be painful to change, but since out of habit I still sort my images into labelled folders before importing into lightroom it's not really going to make a difference to me.

I think I might be ending my photoshop subscription very soon....