I've been experimenting with affinity photo 2 and focusstacking quite a lot over the last 3 months. There's only one function I'm missing by a lot - or couldn't find out how to do it. Since most of us should know about the benefits of saving images in raw-format, there is no function to develop a bunch of raws with similar settings automatically. In case of focus stacking you'd have a lot of pictures (in my case 25 to 70 per focus stacked picture) that could easily be processed with the same settings. Affinity is able to do batch processing for other workflows - but not for raw image developement? At the moment this is my workflow: Loading the most relevant photo - in terms of focus - of a series of pictures. Optimize the picture with a bunch of settings and save them as presets. So far so good. But instead of loading the whole series and getting all of the pictures developed within several clicks in the next step - I have to load every single picture, load all the presets, check the whitebalance since these settings get sometimes messed up, develope the picture, export the picture, close it and start over with this process. If anybody has a suggestion how to automate these workflow this would be very helpful!
this, affinity is severely lacking in this area. i refuse to buy lightroom for this and i've yet to look into how tf you achieve it in rawtherapee, but it would be a gamechanger fr if affinity had a way to do it in-program
I congratulate you for the new tutorials where the image of the person who is explaining does not appear, since this image distracts and covers part of the program's interface. Congratulations!
Is there any reason why when you select "New Focus Merge" it doesn't simply open with browser to add files? Just seems like a wasted step to get a dialogue box where you are going to have to press "Add Files"?
@@mabian69 You can always use quickview to look at pictures beforehand, it is not connected to a new (and far too small) selection window. Also, it's a good practice to label each stack with colour labels beforehand and to delete the ones which don't fit into the stack.
My question now is, how do I create a merged, non-pixel layer of the stack so that I can increase the canvas size and clone stamp as usual. I am getting weird clone stamp errors at the moment with the whole stack being there and an increased canvas size. I seemingly cannot clone stamp blank areas from the larger canvas as it seemings to clone the original image size as reference as not taking into account the new canvas size.
As a still life/product photographer, this is a life-saving feature! So easy to use, and now with a more sophisticated algorithm. Just one small piece of advice for this feature, please add the 'Add Open Files' feature in the Focus Merge menu. I find it will be more time-saving because my workflow for retouching requires two software (from Capture One to Affinity Photo and back to Capture One again), so when I edit the RAW photo after tonal grading I can just use 'Open with Affinity Photo' and then directly start Focus Merging the photos that I opened.
I want to try focus stacking with my new canon R5. There are several videos here on youtube that compare affinity photo with photoshop. Mostly PS is the winner in quality. Are there any improvements with Affinity 2 concerning the stacking engine? The sample images in this video look amazing :)
The the focus stack function is there by long pressing new. The sources panel is MIA though and they’ve so far not responded to anyone wondering why everything they’ve printed in help files and feature lists suggests that it is.
(Speaking for version 1.X) I thought it defaulted to the clone tool after every merge, Affinity cannot know you/it did a good job or not, at least not yet. 😉
couple of unspoken things: Contrary to what James was doing with shortcuts, each click into the tool panel (to zoom in, i.e.) will make the final result permanent far too quickly, the panel with the stacked images disappears - little warning would have been nice. Also, especially in the Voigtländer Stack, tons of little issues remained unaddressed. So the only way is, working right after Affinity finished stacking and leave the final photo open until I did all retouching. That's a bit 90's, no? Why is it impossible to save a stack project and continue working on it lateron? Eventually losing all edits, all time consuming retouch moves (and sometimes superfluous, as other apps stack better in some situations) just with one wrong click in to the tool panel? Do you seriously need to annoy your happy customers?
The Sources panel will toggle when you have the Clone Brush (or another retouching brush) active-so it will disappear when you switch to a different tool, then reappear once you select the Clone Brush tool again. The main concern with saving the clone sources stack is simply the file size: you might be merging with 16-bit per channel bitmaps, and if you have 50+ of those (as you may well do, in some cases), that's a huge amount of extra data to save since it's all uncompressed. Perhaps an optional way to save them might be useful here, with a warning about potential file sizes...
wow impressed by these capabilities. explains why photographers take multiple shots
Affinity Photo is just amazing.
Great video! So glad you included the last segment on a hand held stack!
Brilliant! Not only the video provides the knowledge to use the tool properly but also gives you creative and simple, easy resources. Thank you!
best focus merging tutorial
Fine demonstration, thank you ever so much!
The part with the dragonfly was really impressive. I feel I need to buy this piece of software.
Is there a way to access the depth map?
Great tutorial but any chance of a video to fully explain how to stack raw files please
Thank you for this also excellent video!
I've been experimenting with affinity photo 2 and focusstacking quite a lot over the last 3 months. There's only one function I'm missing by a lot - or couldn't find out how to do it. Since most of us should know about the benefits of saving images in raw-format, there is no function to develop a bunch of raws with similar settings automatically.
In case of focus stacking you'd have a lot of pictures (in my case 25 to 70 per focus stacked picture) that could easily be processed with the same settings. Affinity is able to do batch processing for other workflows - but not for raw image developement?
At the moment this is my workflow:
Loading the most relevant photo - in terms of focus - of a series of pictures. Optimize the picture with a bunch of settings and save them as presets. So far so good. But instead of loading the whole series and getting all of the pictures developed within several clicks in the next step - I have to load every single picture, load all the presets, check the whitebalance since these settings get sometimes messed up, develope the picture, export the picture, close it and start over with this process. If anybody has a suggestion how to automate these workflow this would be very helpful!
I have the same issue!!!! Apparently no one knows how to do it same as we would in Camera Raw???
this, affinity is severely lacking in this area. i refuse to buy lightroom for this and i've yet to look into how tf you achieve it in rawtherapee, but it would be a gamechanger fr if affinity had a way to do it in-program
Create a macro and apply that to a batch job. Works exactly like you would expect.
sometimes when editing, i will lose the layers in my sources panel. How do you recover?
Very cool! Thank you, James)
amazing video!
I congratulate you for the new tutorials where the image of the person who is explaining does not appear, since this image distracts and covers part of the program's interface. Congratulations!
Is there any reason why when you select "New Focus Merge" it doesn't simply open with browser to add files? Just seems like a wasted step to get a dialogue box where you are going to have to press "Add Files"?
...Because this way you can preview all the photos you are going to merge and possibly remove some / fine tune the selection beforehand?
@@mabian69 You can always use quickview to look at pictures beforehand, it is not connected to a new (and far too small) selection window. Also, it's a good practice to label each stack with colour labels beforehand and to delete the ones which don't fit into the stack.
My question now is, how do I create a merged, non-pixel layer of the stack so that I can increase the canvas size and clone stamp as usual. I am getting weird clone stamp errors at the moment with the whole stack being there and an increased canvas size. I seemingly cannot clone stamp blank areas from the larger canvas as it seemings to clone the original image size as reference as not taking into account the new canvas size.
As a still life/product photographer, this is a life-saving feature!
So easy to use, and now with a more sophisticated algorithm.
Just one small piece of advice for this feature, please add the 'Add Open Files' feature in the Focus Merge menu. I find it will be more time-saving because my workflow for retouching requires two software (from Capture One to Affinity Photo and back to Capture One again), so when I edit the RAW photo after tonal grading I can just use 'Open with Affinity Photo' and then directly start Focus Merging the photos that I opened.
I want to try focus stacking with my new canon R5. There are several videos here on youtube that compare affinity photo with photoshop. Mostly PS is the winner in quality. Are there any improvements with Affinity 2 concerning the stacking engine? The sample images in this video look amazing :)
pretty cool and useful
Thank you
Thank you for the great tutorial
👍👍👍❤
where is the function in the iPad version?
The the focus stack function is there by long pressing new. The sources panel is MIA though and they’ve so far not responded to anyone wondering why everything they’ve printed in help files and feature lists suggests that it is.
So if on Focus Merge, the Clone tool doesn’t pop up automatically…there are no discrepancies? Cool!
You could always choose the clone tool, I suppose.
@@ominous-omnipresent-they Yeah. Ok.
(Speaking for version 1.X) I thought it defaulted to the clone tool after every merge, Affinity cannot know you/it did a good job or not, at least not yet. 😉
couple of unspoken things: Contrary to what James was doing with shortcuts, each click into the tool panel (to zoom in, i.e.) will make the final result permanent far too quickly, the panel with the stacked images disappears - little warning would have been nice. Also, especially in the Voigtländer Stack, tons of little issues remained unaddressed. So the only way is, working right after Affinity finished stacking and leave the final photo open until I did all retouching. That's a bit 90's, no? Why is it impossible to save a stack project and continue working on it lateron? Eventually losing all edits, all time consuming retouch moves (and sometimes superfluous, as other apps stack better in some situations) just with one wrong click in to the tool panel? Do you seriously need to annoy your happy customers?
The Sources panel will toggle when you have the Clone Brush (or another retouching brush) active-so it will disappear when you switch to a different tool, then reappear once you select the Clone Brush tool again.
The main concern with saving the clone sources stack is simply the file size: you might be merging with 16-bit per channel bitmaps, and if you have 50+ of those (as you may well do, in some cases), that's a huge amount of extra data to save since it's all uncompressed. Perhaps an optional way to save them might be useful here, with a warning about potential file sizes...