RAW Phone Snaps In Affinity Photo 2

I'm happy to share newfound facts. First, my 2024 Moto Razr can shoot RAW pictures natively; I didn't know that before! It makes .dng files. Second, those pictures automatically open in the RAW developer part of Affinity Photo 2, where edits are made easily. And the icing on the cake: I was wide-eyed when I first saw how good Affinity's noise reduction and detail enhancement are. Sure, these are tiny-sensor, tiny-lens phone snaps. Yet being able to shoot RAW provides a little more leverage to make the most of pictures.

I am trialing Affinity Photo 2. So far, it's great. If nothing else, it feels much more welcoming and accessible than GIMP. I love the "personas" that divide image processing tasks: the Photo Persona for Photoshop-like editing, and the Develop Persona for RAW developing. There are many tutorials on YouTube for beginners like me. Much to learn, I still have.

Masking, layers, filters, brushes, modes, keyboard shortcuts...and of course, sliders!

The RAW developer reminds me of the panel inside of Lightroom Classic: histogram on top, sliders below, grouped by category. Simple and easy. There are also tabs for broader grouping of sliders.

While it might mean pixel peeping, I'd say my first experience with developing a .dng photo from my Moto Razr yielded obvious results with improved detail sharpness and overall clarity. To me, the results speak for themselves.

Here's my first shot, using only the RAW developer, no additional photo editing:

Left: After — Right: Before

Click the image of the purple flower to enlarge it. That's taken with my 2024 Moto Razr in "Pro" mode, using the RAW file format. This was my first time to shoot and edit in Affinity in such a way. There's more I can do to edit this shot, both in the RAW developer and the Photo editor personas of Affinity. But I'm still learning how to best edit photos with layers, masks, and non-destructive editing.

The take-away here is that, based on initial editing in the Develop Persona and after watching several tutorials on YouTube, I think Affinity Photo 2 is proving to be an excellent program to rely on for image processing.

Bonus: Affinity Photo's purple aperture icon looks cool.