It’s the start of a new year and I hope that it’s a great one for your photography. There are lots of New Year Resolution posts and emails doing the rounds so I won’t add to them. Instead, I want to share an image that I shot back in October 2019.
This shows the view from Higger Tor in the Peak District at sunset, back in October 2019. It’s shot using a Fuji XT3 and Fuji 10-24 lens at 10mm. The exposure is 1/3 second at f/14.0 and ISO160 and I used a 3 stop Reverse ND Graduate filter on the sky.
The reason that I’m showing the image now, is that I reprocessed it the other day and for the first time got the colours looking the way that I wanted. Previously the yellows would come out too red and the blue would have a pink tint. This is the first time that I have been able to achieve what I call clean colours with this image.
Part of my problem was probably caused by a lot of smoke in the atmosphere. That’s why the cloud on the left is a little dark. The smoke was from a large moorland fire and was discolouring the sunset.
But there is another possible cause of the problem which is the colour handling in Photoshop. For some reason when I try to process the image using only Photoshop, whilst I can remove the colour cast, the colours appear off – the only way I can describe it is that they feel “synthetic” and false. This image however was processed using only Affinity Photo 2 and I’m rather pleased by the results. Even the RAW conversion looks great when I zoom into the detail and the colours are clean and natural.
So having said at the start that I won’t add another “New Years Resolution” post to your inbox, I will say that I’m making this my year to work more with Affinity Photo for processing landscape photography.
I hope you like the image and have a great weekend.
PS The January edition of my Lenscraft newsletter is out tomorrow. You can get it here https://lenscraft.co.uk/lenscraft-photography-blog/photography-newsletter/ if you aren’t already subscribed.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Hello Robin,
I look forward to your efforts to use Affinity Photo as an editor for more of your landscape photography. I’ve had it as my replacement for PS for some time, now using it primarily for all of my astro photography, but still using Capture One for landscape editing due to more familiarity with it as a Fuji X converter and editor. But I would like to better understand how to use AF for this as well. Cheers,
Jed
Thanks Jed. I’m hoping I will learn a lot more about how to get the best out of the software and share some of this. The results look encouraging.
Thumbs up for more Affinity Photo! I just dropped my Adobe subscription (after many years) since I mostly use Capture One and DxO Photolab. Although I have Affinity Photo, I tended to use Photoshop due to familiarity. I will certainly be using AP more now.
I’ll still maintain my Adobe Subscription as I need to support questions from my books. But like you, I’ve tended to default to using Photoshop because it’s familiar and I have a lot of masking plugins for it. Let’s see what we can do with Affinity Photo 2.
How do you find that Affinity 2 handles M43/ORF raw files? At the moment this software is on offer at a great price but I do not know if its raw file conversion will be any better than ACR/ LR.
I’ve found the image quality from the Affinity Photo 2 Develop Persona to be excellent with all the RAW files I’ve tried. That includes Fuji, Olympus, Nikon, Canon, Sony and Panasonic. What I would say is that the tools appear crude and underdeveloped in comparison to Lightroom/ACR. But then you don’t really need a lot of power tools for RAW development. You have the Photo Person for that.