Originally posted by interested_observer Now, having said that, the beta has only been out for something like a month and it looks like the are already going into a release candidate? That is really pushing things.
Affinity Photo is already an established program on the Mac, having been out since July 2015. So this beta is not about testing an entirely new software, but just about adapting it for Windows.
Quote: The problem that I have with it - and it is probably me - is that you do layers with in Personas. Then you essentially have to burn in your changes when you change Personas. To me that is a bit counter productive, but image editing is not my specialty.
Yes, but you will do almost everything in one or two personas - 'Develop' and 'Photo'. Develop is a RAW converter, and just as with LR and PS, you will have to turn your RAW into a TIFF (or similar) once you're done developing. The other three personas are 'Liquify', 'Tonemapping' (for HDR) and 'Export' - I can't speak for others, but I hardly use any of these.
Quote: The stitching capability was well behind Microsoft ICE (the original release several years ago). The compositing capability had limited functionality and had a masking deficiency (the result was not at all usable).
I haven't done panoramas myself yet, but I have seen online comparisons where AP did much better than PS at stitching panoramas.
Quote: It was somewhat slow in performance - but that would be expected in a beta. It seems a bit quick to go from a first release beta to a release candidate without any subsequent beta releases (with fixes).
This seems to be heterogenous - some people report AP to be very slow, but for most people it's quite fast. On my MacBook (mid-2012) it's definitely faster than PS.
Quote: For the price, I do believe it represents a good value. Now, having said that - for what I want to do, I think that I will need to go out and subscribe to Photoshop. Everything is there, it works the way one would expect, I have seen demos and results, but I still really do not like Adobe's user interface.
In fact, I believe that AP would still be great for twice the price. It may not have the same exact feature set as PS, but it is
very close. It actually does some things better than PS, such as removing objects (the inpainting brush is better than PS'), haze removal, or speed (for most people). I also think that AP's layer blend options are superior to PS' luminosity masks.
Originally posted by mee It loads PS plugins like PS loads PS plugins. (they work)
A lot do, but not all. E.g. four of the Nik plugins (Viveza, Dfine and the Sharpeners) do not work properly, with users reporting them crashing when they try to set a control point. For me these plugins actually don't work at all - they just crash AP.