Published at Beyond Photo Tips
My initial experience with Affinity Photo was a mixture of wonder and disappointment. Wonder, because I loved the way that they had reinvented the photo editing experience (for someone who grew up using photoshop), and that the editing experience could be so different and in some ways better than photoshop. But frequent crashes were not part of the deal. Here’s how I sorted it out. For now.
Affinity Photo kept crashing at inopportune moments … like soon after building a focus-stacked image, if I even touched the mouse Affinity Photo would crash – consistently. Apparently, it was not something I did.
Affinity Photo keeps Crashing, but it’s not caused by Affinity Photo?
Yes. That’s most likely the answer. In my case it was Capture One that was causing the trouble.
I went to the Affinity forum to report a bug, but I found out that the likely culprit was not Affinity Photo, but the way some other apps may be interacting with windows. For me, it was the Windows Explorer Integration that Capture One has. As soon as I disabled it according to the process described on the Capture One support forum, Affinity Photo became stable once again.
So, for those of you facing repeated crashes in Affinity Photo, first take a look at this list of well known issues with third-party software. See if there is a fix, and try it out before giving up on Affinity Photo.
Here is the list of 3rd party software that cause issues with Affinity Photo in Windows (fixes at the link below the list):
- Capture One (windows explorer integration)
- Brother Control Centre 4
- Fresco Logic Proxy Display Driver
- My Endpoint Protector
- NVIDIA Optimize for Compute Performance
- NVIDIA Surround
- RivaTuner
- FastPictureViewer Codec Pack
- Duet Display (versions before 1.4.7.6 only)
- D3DGear
- QTranslate
- Actual Tools
You can find out more about how to sort out these known issues at this forum post by Mark Ingram.
Why Am I Looking for a Photoshop alternative?
For those of you who haven’t looked for a photo editing app to replace photoshop, the question may linger…
Why even try to find an app other than Photoshop if it creates issues like this? Isn’t Photoshop the best answer to all your photo edting needs?
Fair question, and one that needs to be addressed.
- Photoshop is great… But not the best.
- For some people, it’s expensive… Their monthly subscription plan doesn’t suit others.
- Some just don’t want to use an app by the dominant producer in any field… ie: they don’t want to support a monoply.
To me, all these answers are valid, and I’m sure there are other reasons out there too.
Like many other photographers looking for Photoshop alternatives, I stumbled across Affinity Photo just because it is one of the best options out there. The features on offer looked amazing, and the price looked just perfect for someone like me – especially in the middle of a global pandemic. Some photographers have less work currently (and can’t afford a subscription), but still need to get work done, and Affinity have been so kind as to give everyone a 50% discount and a long trial period! There’s no reason not to give it a try.
Stable Apps are Very Important
Nobody likes to do a significant amount of work on any project only to have it crash when trying to use a tool, or before the file saves. This is why I was initially very surprised to find Affinity Photo crashing repeatedly when trying to accomplish a task. Thankfully, the fix was rather simple in this instance, and Affinity Photo has not crashed since then.
However, it’s still early days in my exploration of Affinity Photo. I have a history of 26 years of using Photoshop, and that isn’t going away in a flash. Affinity Photo will have to earn its place in my arsenal of photography tools.
I will keep you updated on this front, so stay tuned to my posts in the future, and hopefully you too will find it a tool worthy of your photography toolkit.
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