Suggested External Edit Workflow

[James Mackie]

I’m trying to work out an ‘as seamless as possible’ workflow that lets me apply RAW edits and then shell-out to an image editor, Affinity Photo in my case – to do bigger stuff. I want to use a DAM – Nitro in this case – to do the majority of that work, let me shell out and then bring those edits back into the library. I’ve settled on using Nitro’s Finder workflow as it lets me switch between libraries of images better than a photos library.

The current workflow I have is to ‘Edit in External App’ choosing the Original Format so Affinity gets the .cr2. Do my stuff there which might include layers (masks, corrections etc) then save out an Affinity Photo file (which Nitro doesn’t see), export a 16 bit TIFF or JPEG (which Nitro does see) and then come back to Nitro. I then see 2 versions of the image; the original and TIFF

A couple of questions:

If I apply some edits in Nitro (RAW color, some crops etc.) and then send the .cr2 to Affinity, what edits will be sent along with it?
If none, what if I send a 16bit TIFF?
After editing in Affinity, what’s your recommended way to bring that back to Nitro?

I see that image stacking is on your roadmap and this might be a part of the solution here…

Thanks

[Nik Bhatt]

If you apply edits in RAW Power and send the CR2, you will get the CR2 without edits. That’s because there isn’t a way to send edit information between apps (Affinity doesn’t understand Nitro edits and vice versa).

If you send a TIFF (or JPEG, etc.) you will get a rendered image with the edits in Nitro applied.

If you are going to edit in Affinity, then send a TIFF from Nitro and have Affinity replace the TIFF with its own edits.

Image Stacking is not on the roadmap that I put on the website.

[Author]

Posts