Affinity Photo 2

Up until the present, I have been using Photoshop with various actions/plugins to do all my astro-image processing. This has only been possible due to the generosity of Noel Carboni who has provided me with yearly subscriptions. Unfortunately that has now come to an end as Noel has moved on from Adobe, so I only have one more year’s use of Photoshop. Oh dear, what to do. Last year my son persuaded me to buy the Affinity suite of apps which included Affinity Photo 2, image processing software, and yesterday I took my first look at AP2 to see if it could possibly replace PS as my main image processing software. A huge bonus was that it claimed to be able to incorporate PS plugins which would be a huge bonus,  if true. So I tried for an hour to get Rogelio’s Hasta la Vista Green into AP2 with zero success. It would have helped if I’d have read the label. To get a plugin into AP2 you have to specify the FOLDER that holds the .8bf file, not point directly to the file itself! Once I’d followed instructions HLVG went straight in and ran! Perfect. So gaining confidence (always a bad thing) I tried the same procedure with Noel Carboni’s Astroflat Pro plugin. Again straight in and running with no issues. This is getting too good to be true. But there was a final plugin that I was a bit concerned about, Russ Croman’s StarXterminator plugin. Now although Russ says that this is compatible with AP2 I did have my doubts. So I gave it a go – and – in it went, and it ran perfectly. Well now that’s changed the landscape somewhat. I have got the main plugins up and running in AP2, so now I’d better look and see if I can actually process a stacked image. The running of AP2 is a little different to the procedure in PS, but it is so similar that if you are less of a dinosaur than me I think you would find no issues at all. I had Dave Eagle’s book “Guide to Affinity Photo Astrophotography Image Processing – 2nd Edition” to hand, and its clear description of the procedure to follow for image processing was a great confidence-booster. So I opened an old Sky90 array calibrated image and went at it. Half an hour later I had a processed image that (to me) was indistinguishable from my PS effort. So that made my decision very easy indeed. Over the next year I will slowly wean myself off PS and move over entirely to AP2. A looming problem that I have been panicking over has now been sorted. I can hear you all shouting “Why didn’t you go to Pixinsight?” I am too old, and it looks way too complicated for my dinosaur brain, and the move from PS to AP2 was so painless, I’ll stick with what I’ve got. You will see over the coming months the difference between my PS and AP2 processing of my images.