The sun is shining but I’m inside wondering how this new Affinity program works. Intuitive it isn’t, but when things come together and the program starts to make a little sense I realized it has some fine tools.
You may never before have worked with Photoshop and not expect to do so in the future but when it comes to working with Affinity Photo that could very well be an advantage, because you’re not bringing a raft of preconceived ideas of how things should work to the program.
For those new to the potential of image manufacturing (that’s what I label it): what you’re going to need is concentration; if you can supply that, this program may open up a raft of potential with the way you present the final image, because it’s not the image we start with that’s counts but the picture we finish with.
Why does the program have potential, because it’s going to be cheap, and can lift the creative weights, that then is something wonderful for the people like me. The major problem I see, which could derail the project, is that the program, in being difficult to navigate and learn, might make people give up on it too quickly and it then slips into obscurity, like many other attempts at Photoshops domination. Adobe had many problems with Photoshop in the beginning, but interface ease of use was not one of them. The program was relatively user- friendly after a little practice and there was always how to manuals from Adobe.
The only way I can exemplify this is with the Save As command, it’s the first thing I teach people. With Affinity it has become Export and then a new dialogue block comes up. Why? I want to save a picture as a jpg, not change the world. It took fifteen minutes to work out how to save a file, and I consider myself a computer literate person.
That’s simply too complicated.
for those interested a tutorial can be accessed at the slink below.
But enough, the top picture was processed with Affinity Photo Beta (the round corners in PS) and I like the results a lot. It will be used in a story that is set in the deep past, yet it was taken only a few months ago. The bottom image is the original.
50mm, f2, 1/40, ISO250
The Day Diaries of a Photography Addict 