If anyone is interested, I’ve recently produced a series of videos on Affinity Photo 2 for Amateur Photographer, covering everything from new features in version 2 through focus stacking, HDR merge, object removal, non-destructive editing and panorama stitching. Here’s a list, with links:
1. Affinity Photo introduction
This is just a quick tour of Affinity Photo and its key features, plus some new tools introduced in Affinity Photo 2. Affinity Photo does pretty much everything that Photoshop can, but introduces a few clever twists of its own.
2. Focus merge in Affinity Photo
If you’re anything like me you’ve probably given focus stacking a miss because it looks like it needs a lot of effort and dedicated focus stacking software. Not true! As I’ve found out, all you need is a camera that does focus bracketing (a lot do now), a tripod and Affinity Photo 2.
3. HDR in Affinity Photo
HDR isn’t as fashionable as it used to be, perhaps because we’ve all got fed up of wild, oversaturated landscapes and all the technical jargon and software that goes with it. Affinity Photo can not only merge HDR brackets, it can also turn them into realistic looking images in its HDR Persona, which is refreshingly free of jargon.
4. Object removal in Affinity Photo
The real world can be very annoying, full of distractions and background clutter you really don’t need. Here are some tips on using Affinity Photo’s Inpainting, Healing and Clone tools to remove unwanted objects.
5. Non-destructive editing in Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo doesn’t do non-destructive image browsing and editing in the same way that Lightroom does, but within the bespoke Affinity file format, almost everything you can do to an image can be reversed, re-adjusted or removed.
6. Panorama merge in Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo is certainly not the only program to offer a panorama merge tool, as Lightroom and Capture One do too, to name just two. However, Affinity’s exposure merging and frame blending is just about the best I’ve seen.
There’s another video to come on the Affinity Photo iPad edition, which you’ll be able to see on the Amateur Photographer TV YouTube channel from mid-September.
These videos were sponsored by Affinity, so obviously I’m not going to say anything bad, but the fact is that there’s not much that is bad about this software. It’s massively powerful, ridiculously cheap, and while it does some things differently to Photoshop, it’s just as capable. You might even prefer it.
