Affinity Photo for Editing scanned film images

Nodda Duma · Feb 7, 2020

Anybody use Affinity Photo for Windows? What are your thoughts?

I'm looking to transition away from Photoshop, which I know well but no longer love. So I'm particularly interested in comments from previous Photoshop users.

I've kind of narrowed down on that because I work almost entirely on scanned film images, and it seems like most other image processing software integrate a bit too much with digital cameras for me to get my money's worth.

Alan Edward Klein · Feb 7, 2020

I use Lightroom 6 (purchased) and sometime PS Elements.

removed account4 · Feb 7, 2020

hey jason

i have used affinity, it was OK ( sort of ) but there is no customer support so you kind of have to figure things out. PS has easy stuff like "save for web" affinity doesn't. PS has color channels, i couldn't figure that out on affinity. they have group / community based help board and some folks
are really knowledgeable, they also have a massive video ( 10 mins each so its not a huge investment of time ) library on vimeo ( i think? ) of how-to stuff. if i recall correctly, they have a 10 day free trial period so you can kick it around the block. my problem was i couldn't figure some stuff out, and my help-board-registration + question got "stuck in the pipe" so i wasn't able to get answers to my questions, and tried to get it sorted out by calling their mothership on the 1800# ... you know how sometimes customer service numbers are answered by people that shouldn't be anywhere near a customer service phone line. ... well a few years ago it was like this. maybe things are different now ? IDK...
for regular stuff like burn dodge levels, curves &c &c &c it seemed pretty good, and it was only $50..

Nodda Duma · Feb 7, 2020

jnantz said:
hey jason

i have used affinity, it was OK ( sort of ) but there is no customer support so you kind of have to figure things out. PS has easy stuff like "save for web" affinity doesn't. PS has color channels, i couldn't figure that out on affinity. they have group / community based help board and some folks
are really knowledgeable, they also have a massive video ( 10 mins each so its not a huge investment of time ) library on vimeo ( i think? ) of how-to stuff. if i recall correctly, they have a 10 day free trial period so you can kick it around the block. my problem was i couldn't figure some stuff out, and my help-board-registration + question got "stuck in the pipe" so i wasn't able to get answers to my questions, and tried to get it sorted out by calling their mothership on the 1800# ... you know how sometimes customer service numbers are answered by people that shouldn't be anywhere near a customer service phone line. ... well a few years ago it was like this. maybe things are different now ? IDK...
for regular stuff like burn dodge levels, curves &c &c &c it seemed pretty good, and it was only $50..

What'd you end up using? Still using photoshop?

-Jason

Kodachromeguy · Feb 7, 2020

Nodda Duma said:
Anybody use Affinity Photo for Windows? What are your thoughts?

I'm looking to transition away from Photoshop, which I know well but no longer love. So I'm particularly interested in comments from previous Photoshop users.

I've kind of narrowed down on that because I work almost entirely on scanned film images, and it seems like most other image processing software integrate a bit too much with digital cameras for me to get my money's worth.

What activity or editing are you trying to do on your scanned images? In my case, my main use is the heal tool (to eliminate dust spots), and I think Photoshop CS5 has one of the best ones I have tested. Pixelmator also has a good one, and the newest Pixelmator is only about $40.

removed account4 · Feb 7, 2020

Nodda Duma said:
What'd you end up using? Still using photoshop?

-Jason

yeah i ended up just subscribing to photo shop. it does everything i need it to do --- i've had a subscription for 2 or 3 years now and to be honest, it costs less than buying a cup of tea every day at dunkin'. i figure i don't get tea at dunkin' but i use PS daily... so its a wash

gdavis · Feb 7, 2020

Affinity Photo works well enough for me to completely ditch Adobe (which made me very happy). It's not as mature as PS but it does just about everything I want it too. Has some annoying quirks like not remembering a lot of tool settings. Raw processing is limited and the JPEG encoding doesn't seem to be as good, but I use Capture 1 for those things and just work with TIFFs in AP. As others have mentioned, support is mainly through their community forum which is quite active and there are many other sources of info on the net. I haven't had any trouble finding out how to do things. It's not totally compatible with PS but it's pretty similar.

Nodda Duma · Feb 7, 2020

I was playing around with it today and it seems fairly straightforward. It’s a bit more layer-centric than photoshop (I rarely used layers) but I guess that’s ok.

winger · Feb 7, 2020

I use On1 for all of my non-film photos, but haven't tried it much on scanned stuff. It does have decent healing and clone tools. I've usually used PS Elements for scanned shots because I was used to it. It's a buy and use for a few years instead of the subscription style. I'm using the one from about 2018 and it's fine. I have Affinity, but haven't used it enough to be comfortable with it.

Affinity Photo for Editing scanned film images

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