If you’re a photographer, graphic designer or creative professional tired of subscription-models, the recent upgrade of the Affinity suite is not just big news; it’s potentially game-changing. How to get off the Adobe subscription train and onto a more affordable editing platform and workflow is one of the most common questions I get on photographic workshops.

As a result I have long been on the lookout for tools that don’t burden you with monthly fees but still give you serious editing ability. Now, Affinity has taken a bold step — combining its photo editing, vector design and layout-publishing tools into one unified app - just called Affinity - and making it free for everyone.

I regularly meet photographers, both enthusiast and professional who don’t rename their photographs on a regular basis. By this I mean more accurately they that don’t rename the image files on the computer. This is a terrible idea if you create images and intend to work on them in any meaningful way through post-production, or if you want to do more than shoot pure for social media (and even then it’s better to rename the files). The usual excuse is that it is just too much work and hassle to rename the files. It really doesn’t have to be though.

Editing in layers is a principle concept for being able to work in Photoshop. In this post we'll take a look at very basic masking techniques to start down the road of layered editing in Photoshop, or any other bitmap editor for that matter.

When you are in a programme like Lightroom or Capture One, the use of presets becomes a quick and easy - as well as fast - way to make changes to images. Rather than changing every setting individually, a photographer can select a preset that they have created, or even bought, to reset several parameters to one or several images at a time. To say that saves time is an understatement. Taking all the time required to individually adjust images, the use of presets can literally save hours out of a week of editing.