Planetary, lunar and solar image processing
Affinity Photo has some great sharpening tools and low light level handling tools. The software can also be used to process planetary, lunar and solar images. We used these to help tease out fine and faint detail, enhancing colour on the planets and the lunar surface, and revealing faint prominences in hydrogen-alpha solar images.
and installed without issue. Four icons located at the top left, just below the menu bar, are the gateways to what Serif calls Affinity’s ‘Personas’, each of which changes the software to a particular role. We only needed to use two of these in our testing; one is the ‘Photo Persona’, where you make all the edits and adjustments to your images. The other is the ‘Develop Persona’, which is opened automatically when RAW camera image files are opened. Adjustments can be made from here, before opening within the ‘Photo Persona’ for further editing. For this review we didn’t need to use the other three options: ‘Liquify’, ‘Tone Mapping’ and ‘Export’.
Easy to use
The user interface is similar to most imageprocessing software and is easy to use, with a menu bar at the top, a tool bar down the left and lots of tabs to access different ‘Adjustment’ tools, including ‘Curves’, ‘Levels’ and so on. We liked the way that the interface layout can be managed. Tools can be switched on and off and their position on the screen can be changed to make it easier for the user to set up for their own convenience. But we found that the ‘Adjustment’ tools do not allow you to re-arrange them, neither are they arranged alphabetically.
So it can take a bit of getting used to finding the ‘Adjustment’ tool you want, but this is a minor niggle.
The ‘Adjustment’ tools work nicely, creating an adjustment layer above the image layer being worked on. These can be manipulated, moved about and even nestled within other layers. We did have an issue when saving TIFF files – these are saved as compressed files by default, which can cause problems if being used in other software. However, this default can be turned off.
Unlike Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo cannot use ‘Actions’ to carry out repetitive processing tasks by using just a single mouse click, but you can create macros and save many pre-set ‘Adjustment’ tool manipulations to do the same thing. Some Photoshop plug-ins can also be installed and used within Affinity Photo, which is a useful feature if you already own these.
Overall, we found that Affinity Photo is a well thought out and extremely powerful product. The latest version with the new image-stacking and astrophotography tools makes it the ideal package for an astro imager. If you’ve already used imageprocessing software, the transfer should be reasonably straightforward. What’s more, all this is available at a great price.