Integration with Affinity 3

[Stan01]

Operating System

1. Windows 11

Hi. I'm trying to integrate LR15 with Affinity 3. Problem is that LR doesn't show thumbnails of *.af files. Being able to see it, would make very efficient workflow, with very low memory footprint. Passing RAW files to Affinity through provided Edit in... path - using tiff or PSD format - creates huge files filling hard drive quickly. I would appreciate any relevant experience shared on the forum.

Stan

 

[clee01l]

The Affinity 3 file type is not recognized as a valid image file type by Adobe and probably other image editors. If I understand the Affinity 3 app description, this is not a single image but a project container. You will need to save your Affinity output into one of the commonly accepted image file types like TIFF or JPEG. I don't think it likely that any image editor besides Affinity will ever adopt the proprietary Affinity filetypes.

We are well past the time when one needs to be concerned over disk space. Disk storage is abundant and cheap in today's computer world. Camera captured images north of 40 MP are common and file types like TIFF accommodate multiple layers. All making image file output huge. If you want to shoot photos with a modern camera, get more disk space and accept that as normal.

 

[Stan01]

Hello Clee.

FYI, the *.af file is Affinity’s equivalent of *.xmp file. It contains all processing history of the original file, plus embedded JPG to depict output status after processing. DAM software like Photo Supreme can display *.af thumbnails using this JPG (BTW, Windows Explorer also can do that). So using Photo Supreme is very efficient to handle my workflow – I have only 2 files stacked together - *af (~10MB) and original RAW (~35MB).

When using LR15 and provided Edit in… path, I end up also with 2 files, but muuuch bigger - tiff or PSD (150 to 300MB!!!) and RAW (~35MB). This size of memory for a single photo is excessive, even for today’s memory sizes. Issue here is not so much the cost, but time - backing up and synchronizing files between multiple machines take a lot of patience.

So I have a proper solution with Photo Supreme, but I like LR Library Module much more. Actually there is no DAM on the market that compares to LR, always something is missing.

Thanks for your input.

Stan

 

[clee01l]

FYI, the *.af file is Affinity’s equivalent of *.xmp file. It contains all processing history of the original file, plus embedded JPG to depict output status after processing.

An XMP file contains edits settings not history and not any image data. Affinity image settings are not understood as edit instructions that are common to Adobe products. It would seem possible that importing an image into Lightroom might also include the *.af file as a sidecar. However the Edit in process is not concerned about any sidecar files only the derivative image file. This is wht you do not see it when you use edit in.

Until your post I was not aware of Photo Supreme as a DAM tool. While it looks interesting, I do not know that it has all of the features included in Lightroom Classic. Certainly no built-in Editor which is the one big issue with PhotoSupreme as a replacement for Classic.

Photo Supreme supports lots of Image formats ( https://www.idimager.com/faq-supported-file-extensions ) but no mention of Affinity sidecar type files.

I can't see Adobe ever recognizing *.af files. I can see Adobe moving more toward integrating AI into the organization of your images. They already have Sensei in Lightroom and Assisted Culling has just been introduced.