We are transitioning to Affinity Photo 2

Red-browed Finch [Nikon Z 9, Nikkor Z 800mm f/6.3 VR S @ 1/500s f/6.3 ISO2800]

When we started wildlife photography, we moved from Nikon’s own image processing tool call NX Studio to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The bundle used to cost about AUD15 a month. I managed to secure the old price by purchasing a 1 year subscription at the beginning of this year. The current pricing on Adobe’s website is about double that price. So we will be facing a 100% price hike next year.

A doubling of price is not acceptable for us who don’t make a living off photography. This has prompted us to search for an alternative before the Adobe subscription expires next year. After a few months of research, we have settled on Affinity Photo 2 from Serif. Unlike Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, we will only need to pay for a major version. This gives us access to minor upgrades. Historically, version 1 of Affinity Photo lasted for 7 years. The current version of Affinity Photo 2 which was released in November 2022 is about AUD96. This is quite a saving.

Affinity photo 2 is more like Photoshop than Lightroom. It is missing the catalogue management that Lightroom provides. We are fine with that as we find that we seldom search the Lightroom catalogue. Instead, We would process our photographs and ingest the final images on our NAS (Network Access Storage). If we need to search the library, we prefer to use the NAS and its associated mobile app on our phones. We will use Nikon’s NX Studio to evaluate and cull our photographs. NX Studio will still be an essential tool for us because Nikon’s Pixel Shift images can only be processed by NX Studio.

What convinced us to move to Affinity Photo 2 is the introduction of AI subject selection in version 2.6. We found that this capability is on par with Lightroom. While Lightroom’s subject masking is more accurate when the subject is large in the photograph, Affinity Photo works better with highly cropped subject. We also find that Affinity Photo selection refinement is easier to use and gets things right most of the time. Adobe’s masking refinement usually involves the use of the brush tool which can be time-consuming and error-prone.

The learning curve with Affinity Photo 2 is steeper but Serif made lots of instructional videos that made the learning process easier. The starting point for us was the video dedicated to wildlife processing. Having access to Adobe Lightroom provided us with less incentives to learn Photoshop. However, learning Affinity Photo 2 actually helped opened up more possibility for us in post-processing which we presume is also available in Photoshop.

Did we look at other alternatives? Yes, we did. Why did we choose Affinity Photo 2 over the other alternatives? Most post-processing software will satisfy our needs but Affinity Photo 2 has a true non-subscription pricing model. The alternatives (which shall remained nameless) do not sit well with us – they either have a subscription model like Adobe or have what we call a pseudo-subscription model. By the later, we mean that they release a new major version every year and you have to pay yearly to get the new version. If you miss a version, we have to pay more to upgrade. The advantage of a pseudo-subscription over a full subscription model is that you have a perpetual license to use the last software version you have paid for.

The above photograph of a Red-browed Finch was taken at the Skink Habitat at Royal Park on 31 May 2025. It was post-processed using Affinity Photo 2.6.3 using multiple layers and masking. While it took longer than with Adobe Lightroom, the result we have achieved is better. We suspect that we will have to resort to using Photoshop and expending similar amount of effort to achieve a similar outcome. While it is not the best photograph of the species, we thought it demonstrated how we can take an ordinary photograph of a bird and made it pop.

Until the Adobe subscription expires, we will be using both software side-by-side with a view to explore the features of Affinity Photo 2 that exceeds that of Adobe Lightroom.

Reviving this site

Common Starling

I was looking for a place to display my photographs. After looking at Facebook, Instagram and other Social Media platforms, I have decided that these platform offers little or no protection for the copyright of these images.

I was originally looking to decommission this site when I rebuilt my server. Given that I have a need to post my photos, I have decided to migrate this site to my new server. Apart from ebird.org, I will be posting the photographs that I find interesting to this site in the future. As a differentiation from ebird.org, I will also post other genre of photography on this site.

The photograph above was taken in the morning of Thursday 2 May 2024 in Royal Park. I like this photograph more than I really should. It is a photograph of an introduced species (Common Starling) occupying a nest box in Royal Park.

Nikon Z 9, Nikkor Z 800mm f/6.3 VR S @ f/6.3 1/800s ISO3600.

NBN has arrived in Brunswick

The NBN NTD

The NBN NTD

We were fortunate enough to live in the trial zone of the NBN in Brunswick. Today the NBN connection was installed. We have free 100Mbps broadband until October courtesy of iinet.

After some mind-taxing networking scripting, the server can now handle the 2 wan connections (ADSL and NBN). The speed is extraordinary. I don’t care what some people say, it is money well-spent by the government. It will raise Australia technological profile.

Check out the speed test.

Speed test result

Speed test result