How Affinity Photo 1.10 Just Revolutionized My Retouching Workflow
Affinity Photo blows…
…the competition out of the water. Speed, UI and overall UX are the main reasons why I started using it 5 years ago for all commercial and art projects.
But with the recent (free!) update, they improved the most important feature for retouching portraits:
Frequency Separation
There is no professional, natural retouching of portraits without frequency separation in my humble opinion. For those who haven’t heard about it yet, it allows to separate an image in a high frequency layer containing all the image details (e.g. skin texture) and a low frequency layer with all the image’s tones. This allows for retouching skin tones and deficiencies without creating waxy, unnatural looking portraits. Once you start using it, you won’t go back to any other technique.
While previous versions of Affinity Photo were capable of performing frequency separation, the new version now offers three different methods:
Gaussian
Bilateral
Median
The Bilateral mode is just magic - it separates the details and tones in a far better way. The control over the separation process has vastly improved. Also, I find it to work considerably better when the the face has low resolution.
All in all, it helped me cutting time spent on retouching in half while improving the quality - this is truly a game changer.
Bilateral frequency separation in Affinity Photo v.1.10
To conclude…
I am super happy that now I can offer my clients even better results while spending less time doing so!
