ON1 Photo RAW And Affinity Photo Round Trips & Plug-Ins

If you are an ON1 Photo RAW user and also own Affinity Photo, these two videos are for you. Photo RAW 2021 integrates very nicely with Affinity Photo. Whether you are using Photo RAW as your home base or Affinity Photo as your primary editor, you’ll have ready access to both programs and their features.

A little setup is needed for each workflow. I have the steps summarized for you below, and videos to walk through the setup.

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ON1 Photo RAW To Affinity Photo Round Trip

This workflow is for Photo RAW centric editing. If you’re using Photo RAW as your asset manager and primary editor, you can send selected photos to Affinity Photo for additional post-processing. There is a bit of prep work to do before your first round trip.

In Affinity Photo Setup

Launch Affinity Photo as a standalone application.

1. Open the General area of the Preferences

2. Check the Enable “Save” over imported PSD files option.

3. Click Close to dismiss the Preferences and exit Affinity Photo.

This option tells Affinity Photo to use PSD files as an intermediary file format, and that Affinity Photo can save its changes directly to PSD files it receives.

Photo RAW Setup

Launch Photo RAW.

1. Open the Preferences and go to the Files tab.

2. In the What To Edit section at the top, set the File Format to PSD.

3. Click OK to close the Preferences.

The Round-Trip Process

1. Select a photo in Browse in Photo RAW.

2. Right-click and select Send To Affinity Photo, or use File > Send To Affinity Photo

   • If you do not see an Affinity Photo option…

   • Select Send To Other Application

   • In the popup window, navigate to the Applications area (macOS) or Program Files (Windows) and find the Affinity Photo program.

   • Select it and click Open

   • Photo RAW adds the “Send To Affinity Photo” menu option for future use

3. Select Edit A Copy With Settings Applied to include any edits you have made in Photo RAW.

   • You may also expand the Copy Settings section and confirm the file format is PSD.

4. Click Edit. Photo RAW creates a new PSD file and sends it to Affinity Photo.

5. Edit the photo in Affinity Photo

6. Click Save in Affinity Photo, or exit Affinity Photo and save your work on the way out.

When you’re finished, there is a PSD file in the same folder as your original photo, with the edits from Affinity Photo.

This is a destructive workflow, like most plug-in workflows. Changes made in Affinity Photo are “baked into” the PSD sent back to Photo RAW.

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Affinity Photo With ON1 Photo RAW Plug-ins

This workflow is for Affinity Photo centric editing. If you do your photo development and work in Affinity Photo and want to leverage the tools and effects in ON1, setup the plug-ins and you’ll have ready access to ON1 right from Affinity Photo.

The setup to do:

1. Launch Affinity Photo and open the Photoshop Plugins area of the Preferences.

2. Check the Allow “unknown” plug-ins to be used option in the lower left.

3. For macOS only, click the Authorize Global button and choose the root of your hard drive (usually Macintosh HD).

4. Click the Add button beneath Plugin Search Folders and choose the folder with the ON1 plug-ins. The folders are different for macOS and Windows.

   • macOS: Applications/ON1 Photo RAW 2021/Plug-in Files

   • Windows: \Program Files\ON1\ON1 Photo RAW 2021\Plug-in Files

5. Close the Preferences and when prompted, click Restart Now to restart affinity.

You’ll find the ON1 plug-ins listed in the Detected Plugins list.

Access the plug-ins while editing in Affinity Photo from the Filter > Plug-ins > ON1 menu.

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