It was mostly for daytime photography but read their raw converter wasn't up to par.
#Affinity photo reviews 2017 windows#
I have thought about affinity but since I'm not really a windows user I never did. Photoshop has more tutorials, support and other goodies like content aware. However I haven't figured out masking yet. I've gotten a little used to some of the Photoshop to gimp workflow, I can at least marginally process an astro photo with gimp and a little help from siril mostly to extract the background and remove green noise from my OSC when I was actually imaging.Īt the base level gimp can do some of what Photoshop can do, levels contrast color turn monochrome images into SHO color layers. Someone in here mentioned that PS CS2 os free, but honestly it seems outdated and idk how useful it will be for editing DSO's I have used Photoshop CS5 before but that was a few years ago and I haven't done anything on Photoshop since. For the most part this ought to be very straightforward if you have experience with this kind of software. The main shortcoming of Affinity as some have mentioned is you will not have the large existing base of information for PS to leverage directly - you will have to do some slight interpolation of the the PS techniques to the equivalent Affinity mechanisms. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing any capabilities but then I've evolved my workflow over 15 years so that I don't need alot of post-processing to get the results I like. Otherwise as far as what I have used in PS I have found Affinity matches or in some cases has a tool I now prefer. It has the all important Selective Color tool which many common narrow band workflows rely on. There are some differences which take awhile to get used to - such as how you can modified masks with tools - that I think I now have figured out.
#Affinity photo reviews 2017 software#
A lot of what you learn in it will not only carry over to other software but it will also help you more accurately appraise their worth to you when the time comes when you decide to try them out.Īfter using PS CS3 for about 15 years I took advantage of when Affinity Photo was on sale earlier this year for $25 and have moved my workflow over to using Affinity now. Cost is a factor and starting with Gimp lets you learn the ropes in your own time without committing $$$. Now that GIMP is in the picture though I'd probably suggest starting with that. These aren't things to worry about as a beginner but the point is that it does also give you a lot of room to grow. I'd also add that Affinity does let you work with a 32bit stack (which PS does not, not sure about GIMP) and is very accommodating of a non-destructive workflow (not sure how PS and GIMP fare on this front but probably just as well if you know what you're doing). It can cover a lot of bases if you're really trying to keep your workflow contained software wise for whatever reason. Outside of stacking it does have other astro specific features like a background and gradient extraction tool which works pretty well. Beyond that, as a stacker it's very easy to use, doesn't take too long and does include some nifty minor features like setting white balance based on the master flat. More importantly it actually produces very clean results compared to other stackers I've used which include DSS, ASTAP, Siril and Sequator. It doesn't offer many bells and whistles on the stacking front (no drizzle for example) but all the essential stuff is there. I have although it's not part of my usual workflow as I generally preprocess in Siril before exporting to Affinity. Do you use it to stack your images as well? If so, how do you like it?