To my mild surprise, got a message from Affinity support today: use a very roundabout way to find a
file C:\Users\grog\.affinity\Affinity\3.0\lessons.json and remove it. Then
disconnect from the Internet and restart.
OK, disconnecting from the Internet is a problem. What happens if I just restart? It
works! Well, at least it got past the crash phase, and I was able to select automatic crash
reporting—I think: the next time I looked, the settings page looked completely different.
And did it create a new lessons.json? Of course. I had saved the old version to
compare. And there was no difference! So what went wrong there?
I've spent a couple of days now trying to install and understand Affinity. How do I use it? Once again I couldn't
find out. Give up with Serif, ask Google
Gemini. And it came up with three videos: the first was a “beginner-friendly” tutorial, 18
minutes long. After 8 minutes I still hadn't heard anything that related to photo
processing. OK, the second, an absolute beginner's guide, 27 minutes long. And once again it was bizarre
structure, and after several minutes I didn't even know if it could do what I wanted. On to
the third, “Editing RAW Photos in
the New Affinity | First Look”. The shouting irritates me, and I already have a
program that does a good job on raw images, but at least it talks about processing photos.
Watched it for a while, but it didn't give me the kind of overview I was looking
for: how can I change the images? I should continue watching, but I've spent several
days so far looking at the product, and I can't even process a photo! And looking back, my
first attempt failed because it doesn't like rdesktop. Does it now? How do I
know? But it seems that free is too expensive for this kind of product.
So what do I want? A recipe book? That's not bad for a start; afterwards it is good
to understand the structure, but first I need to know if it can even do anything that my
current software can't. And that's so obvious that it should be in all the advertising.
OK, since I was looking at it, what can PhotoGlory do for me? Apart from the few photos that I experimented with four months ago, I haven't used it. Try my photos from the Asia Trip in May 1967, specifically this one, which before
conversion looked like this:
No useful improvement. Probably it's not bad enough: clearly it doesn't need colouring, but
I had hoped that it would tidy up the sky, but there was little to see there. Still, the
colour and overall gradation was improved (run the cursor over an
image to compare it with its neighbour):
It's interesting to see what it did to the branches of the tree to the right of the road,
and the man in the red turban holding the sign on the left (something that I had never
noticed before) has suddenly got a grey turban. And one thing it did do was to
greatly reduce the size of the image, from 3850 x 2591 to 1024 x 689, a 14 fold reduction.
It did have various suggestions of how to recolour the image, but that wasn't the main
thing. Clearly a lot more experience is needed to do things the way I want. But at least I
was able to get some result, a big difference from Affinity.
So I put a snipe on the cheaper of the two Nikon D1s that I had been looking at on
eBay, and got it for $82, about 3.6% of the
price of the camera I was ranting about on Sunday, or 12% of the postage for that camera. What do I get? An old
camera with a 70-210 mm zoom (better than the lens on the expensive camera) that fits on no
less than 9 of my existing cameras, 3 (discharged) batteries and no charger.
So how do I charge it? I don't really need to, since I don't intend to use it (much), but
it would be nice to find out whether I can or not. And of course there's more to research
about the camera itself. Why only 2.7 MP when other sources (which I can't find, of course)
claim that the sensor has nearly double that? More to research. And does the camera have a
storage card in it?
I've more or less come to the conclusion that Affinity isn't for me, like I have done a couple of times in the past. But
PhotoGlory still seems useful. I just
need to understand how to fine-tune it. They show many ways of removing remaining blemishes
on images, but not how to remove incorrect changes such as the branches on this cow
picture (run the cursor over the image to compare it with the
original):
Yvonne found Larissa playing with something in the driveway this afternoon. A relatively large
turtle, now on its back (thanks, Lara). She put it in the succulent bed in the garden,
where Lara couldn't get at it, and she didn't take a photo. When I heard of it, out
to take a look. The good news: the turtle was alive, and had wandered off. The bad news,
of course: no photo.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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