A new astrophotography processing contender Affinity Photo has entered the Mac…and PC race. Affinity introduced it’s suite of applications to compete against Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator a few years ago. They are extremely capable applications and in their effort to remain competitive come at a very nice discount in pricing compared to Adobe’s applications. Currently Affinity Photo is for sale at a 50% discount.
They’ve recently upped their game to add features beyond Photoshop’s set of tools by getting into the Astrophotography realm with the following new features in their 1.9 update:
Dedicated Persona for stacking
RAW and FITS image support
Stack light and calibration frames (dark/dark flat/flat/bias)
Stack, tone stretch and retouch entirely in 32-bit
Stack files from different sessions using file groups
Create full color, composite (HaRGB, SHO), grayscale or false color images
One advantage to Affinity Photo compared to existing astrophotography stacking and calibration applications is that it takes advantage of the GPU in your Mac for very fast processing and stacking. I calibrated and stacked a set of 12 images in about 1-2 minutes on my iMac Pro. This compares to about 10 minutes in APP and PixInsight.
Not only does this program calibrate and stack your images, but it’s a full fledged photo editing program, so you have all the tools at your disposal for stretching, sharpening, color enhancement, mask manipulation, and more with a vastly superior interface for ease of use.
Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision. Born to work hand-in-hand with the latest powerful computer technology, it’s the only fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS. Affinity Photo’s User Interface Is Divided Into Workspaces One of the differences you will notice is that Affinity Photo is divided into personas or workspaces, that is accessible through buttons at the top bar. The difference personas group related features together and only shows it when you need it.
You can use the brush selection tool in Affinity Photo to cut out a subject in a photo. With the subject on a separate layer, you can apply adjustments, filters and effects to just the subject or the background. You can also copy and paste the subject onto another background image. Mac Video Tutorials and Tips for Apple Users. Affinity Cellular provides pay as you go cell phones and no contract phone plans. AAA members can also receive additional benefits.
Here’s a set of tutorials to get you up and running with Affinity Photo’s new features.
Astrophotography stacking: LRGB composition (mono cameras)
I take a fair share of photos on my iPhone and more times than not they get safely synced to iCloud. In my experience HEIC is not a format that plays nicely in Windows 10 without adding the extension package. Even with the package installed I've had less than ideal experiences working with them in file explorer. I recently took a bunch of screenshots of my son using the Animoji heads that I had a creative idea to use in a nice collage of sorts.
Affinity Photo For Ipad Review
The HEIC format has been around since iOS 11 and has its advantages in terms of file compression which reduces the file size. While I considered changing the default photo format to JPEG within the iPhone settings, what I really wanted to do is find a way to automate the conversion process on my Windows machine.
Thankfully Affinity Photo came to the rescue in a single step using Batch Jobs. Find it in the File menu and select the group of photos you'd like to convert, set your output options and you're good to go!
While was one of the more simple examples of what the batch tool is capable of, I could see it being useful for resizing web asset for multiple screen sizes or adding a water mark to a group of photos.
Affinity Photo For Ipad Manual
** Here's what I ended up using the photos for on my sons iPad lock screen