Affinity Photo Photoshop Plugins

[Desiderato Merriwether]

Iwould like to test the plugins from Retouch4me (retouch4.me). The plugins are designed for Photoshop. I have installed the software but not sure how I can active the plugin in Affinity Photo. Any idea ?

I did indeed. They claimed first that their plugin is only compatible with PS. Now, given that Affinity Photo is able to handle PS plugin, I asked for more info. They tried to contact Affinity, but yet were not successful.

Why not try it and see. You need an .8bf file for it to be compatible. In Photo goto Edit > Preferences > Photoshhop Plugins , click on Add and enter the location of the .8bf file. Tick the box to Allow unknowns. You will now have to restart Photo.

During the installation of the retail version, one installation step should have asked you where to install the plugins (according to their videos). You should be able to point to that folder, as @John Rostron mentioned above. (The trial version apparently skips that step, and only installs the trial as a standalone application.)

It does actually say on their webpage "For Adobe Photoshop & other photo editors, MS Windows and MacOs". I don't know how good these plugins are, I've never heard of them before, but one look at the prices put me off! ?

I could not find any detailed info about which "other photo editors" their plugins support. From the reply @pburki got about them waiting for a reply from Serif, it seems likely that they have not done much if any testing to see which ones are & are not compatible with them.

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

I would feel more comfortable if I had seen this in the video, but the install for mac, as shown in the video, does not prompt for a location to save the plugin in. I have asked retouch4me to confirm.

We've been checking how to fix that Affinity Photo doesn't support our plug-ins, and it seems that Affinity doesn't provide PS Channel Port Suite, which means we can't get any information about the document channels, bounding box etc. How are plug-ins supposed to work without this information? Is there any developer here who can help to solve this problem?

Come on Affinity Team! Here we have the developer of one FANTASTIC plug in willing to work with you guys to make their plug in work. Please, please.. make it happen. I want this plug in to work with AP, it would do wonders to my workflow!

@Oleg, I have one question about the standalone version of your plugins. Will they generate a PSD file with layers or is this only for the plugin version?

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any library for writing layered PSD files, so it's impossible to create preprocessed files with retouching layers ready for manual editing without Photoshop (and hopefully Affinity in future).

Thank you! It seems we've found some workarounds to make Retouch4me plug-ins compatible with Affinity Photo, so hopefully there will be a new version of the plug-ins soon! But the problem is Affinity seem to not support plug-ins inside macros (or actions). It still won't be as comfortable to use as in photoshop. You'll have to manually duplicate the layer and then switch it to soft light mode. =( Or am I missing something?

Unfortunately, our developers have stated in the past that we don't offer 100% of the features for Photoshop Plugins. I'm waiting to hear back from the lead Photo developer to see if he's planning to support Channel Port Suite in the future.

Here's another quick tip about Affinity Photo. When I first wrote about Affinity Photo, one of the questions that I got from many people was: "Can you use Photoshop Plugins with it?" The answer, you may be pleased to know is a yes. I've tried the Nik suite of plugins from Google (which is now free) and they all work perfectly well in Affinity Photo. There is one difference that I've noticed, which I'll talk about in a minute, and it's something that's important to be aware of it if you're planning on using plugins in Affinity Photo.

Setting Affinity Photo up to use photoshop Plugins is actually pretty straight forward. Simply go to the Preferences by choosing Affinity Photo > Preferences and then selecting Photoshop Plugins. Here you can add your current Photoshop Plugins folder to the search path by clicking on the add button underneath the Plugin Search Folders section of the window.

One of the big difference that I've noticed when using the Nik plugins is that, when running them in Photoshop, they will return the processed image to a new layer, but in Affinity Photo, they overwrite the layer that you had selected when you invoked the plugin. The simple solution is to just duplicate the layer before you run the plugin.

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It's been a while since I started using the whole Adobe Photography plan; I really love to use Lightroom to create a searchable catalogue of all my shots, and then make the first adjustments on the raw files.

Moreover, the (obvious) perfect integration between Lightroom and Photoshop make the Photography suite a great choice for creatives. But in the end, it is quite expensive; last but not least, Photoshop is working great, but I need more and more external plugins.. so the total cost is getting even higher!

Usually, switching from a well-known software to a completely new one is a nightmare. For example, I have to admit that in the past I tested DxO Photolab and Capture One, but the initial effort was so high that I gave up immediately. My fault, of course... but I'm not an R&D department, so I have to make choices based on a costs/benefits approach.

Do not worry, you won't miss the friendly sliders of Camera Raw, that we are used to!

As soon as you open a raw file, Affinity Photo shows a window with the typical settings we have to apply to a file before switching to the "real" post production.

The only thing I was not able to test is the availability of lens profiles. Affinity was able to identify my Sony SEL lenses (and to apply a correct profile), but not my Laowa. This is quite obvious because Laowa does not have a chip. so it cannot pass exif information. But Affinity does not have a drop down field to manually select a profile.

I did another test with my Parrot Anafi DNG, and even in this case Affinity was not able to set a profile (Lightroom is able to get it).

Probably the most important thing for landscape photographers is the ability to use luminosity masks to selectively control the adjustments; at the beginning I was quite worried to loose them, working in Affinity Photo. But a very short research showed me that in AP there is an even more powerful tool for doing the same, and it is called "Blend ranges": the point is that you can choose how an adjustment layer blends in the image, based upon the luminosity.

In fact, for every adjustment layer you can choose "Blend Option": a new panel appears, and in the right graph (as per figure) you can choose where the adjustment will be applied and where not, based on the pixel luminance.

As a nightscape lover, many times I shot more pictures to stack them, in order to strongly reduce the noise of the image. Even if there are many third party softwares that can do the stacking, I prefer to use the native function inside Photoshop: create a smart object, and then set the stacking mode as "mean" or "median".

I find this technique extremely powerful, and reminds me when I was a biophysical student working on non destructive testing with digital imaging....

It is possible to use the same approach in Affinity Photo: select "File" -> "New Stack".

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