The drought finally broke in London today with rain showers in the afternoon becoming heavy and persistent throughout the evening and into this morning. I was supposed to be at the football last night but with no shelter at the training ground I decided it was too wet for the camera and stayed home to do some truck driving.
In this fitting screenshot my MAN TGX hauls a 55t mobile crane through northern Germany in heavy rain. The screenshot has been tonemapped in Affinity Photo which is image processing software I’m trying out as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop.
I’m only just learning to use it but initial impressions are good. The Layers are more intuitive for me than in Photoshop Elements (I can’t afford the full version). Also Affinity have a very useful set of tutorial videos at https://vimeo.com/macaffinity/channels . Although they’re based on the Mac version the PC version works the same. The one thing that Affinity doesn’t have is a library built in but I keep my images in date order and can usually find them without one anyway. If you use RAW then it has been suggested that the tool is not as good as the one in photoshop CS but I think it’s a lot better than the one supplied in Elements. I haven’t tried GIMP but I know some people speak highly of it. Hope this helps.
Yes, this does help. The one thing I miss in many imaging programs is the lack of layering. Gimp has it, but it is very complex with a steep learning curve, more so than PS. Each feature is in a different location than where I’m used to and hidden inside different modules so not intuitive at all.
Take a look at the Affinity tutorials and see if their Layers are better for you. Most of my photography is documentary so much of the time I only have to straighten and sharpen to complete the processing. But I think I can play a lot more in affinity than I have felt comfortable with in Elements or Lightroom.
The drought finally broke in London today with rain showers in the afternoon becoming heavy and persistent throughout the evening and into this morning. I was supposed to be at the football last night but with no shelter at the training ground I decided it was too wet for the camera and stayed home to do some truck driving.
Images from Finchley 
How does Affinity compare to PS? I’ve also been trying to find a replacement. Have you tried GIMP, the open source alternative?
I’m only just learning to use it but initial impressions are good. The Layers are more intuitive for me than in Photoshop Elements (I can’t afford the full version). Also Affinity have a very useful set of tutorial videos at https://vimeo.com/macaffinity/channels . Although they’re based on the Mac version the PC version works the same. The one thing that Affinity doesn’t have is a library built in but I keep my images in date order and can usually find them without one anyway. If you use RAW then it has been suggested that the tool is not as good as the one in photoshop CS but I think it’s a lot better than the one supplied in Elements. I haven’t tried GIMP but I know some people speak highly of it. Hope this helps.
Yes, this does help. The one thing I miss in many imaging programs is the lack of layering. Gimp has it, but it is very complex with a steep learning curve, more so than PS. Each feature is in a different location than where I’m used to and hidden inside different modules so not intuitive at all.
Take a look at the Affinity tutorials and see if their Layers are better for you. Most of my photography is documentary so much of the time I only have to straighten and sharpen to complete the processing. But I think I can play a lot more in affinity than I have felt comfortable with in Elements or Lightroom.