360 Camera Software and Platforms 360 Camera Techniques

Affinity Photo adds 360 Roll Correction to spherical 360 photo editing tools

Affinity Photo has several features for editing spherical 360 photos
Affinity Photo has several features for editing spherical 360 photos

Serif’s Affinity Photo is a powerful and user-friendly photo editing software for Windows, Mac and iPad that offers a more affordable alternative to Photoshop.  Besides the usual array of photo editing tools, Affinity also has extra features to facilitate 360 photo editing.

It’s easy to assume that Adobe’s products are the only software worth considering for 360 photo and video editing.  However, for photo editing, Affinity Photo is an alternative to Photoshop that offers useful tools for editing spherical 360 photos.

360 Live Editing with 360 Roll Correction

Affinity enables you to switch to a 360 view when editing 360 photos.  The 360 view is interactive and you can rotate it as well as zoom in or out.   This feature makes it easy to make changes such as removing the tripod, or adding text or graphics anywhere in the frame without distortion — even in the zenith or nadir.

Another feature added to version 1.6 of Affinity Photo is 360 Roll Correction, which can level a tilted horizon in a spherical 360 photo.

Here is a tutorial using the 360 Live editing to add a watermark / logo to the nadir of the 360 photo.

360 Pan: Present multiple non-360 views of a 360 photo

Another feature of Affinity is 360 Pan, which enables you to paste a 360 photo within another file, and then change the view of the 360 photo, thus allowing you to show different non-360 views of the 360 photo, like a magic window.   This feature could be useful for creating promotional materials for real estate, for example. Here is a demo of 360 Pan:

Affinity Photo is available direct from Serif’s website for $49. (In case you’re wondering, I don’t have an affiliate relationship with them.)

Thank you very much to my friends tech bloggers Bill Meier (basicbill.com) and Svend Nielsen for letting me know about this app!

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Mic Ty

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  • When purchasing Affinity, no matter where you live, make sure you choose USA as your country. The company is from the UK, but they charge you in local currency and always more if you choose any country other than USA.

  • Is the stitching compatible with a Pano5+1 Mk II and GoPro setup as this would make it a go to piece of software with all it’s other features.

    • Hi Mark. Affinity does not do stitching itself. But if you have a stitched equirectangular photo, you can edit with Affinity.

      Best regards,
      Mic

  • Love that soft.
    Very useful for 360.

    With the new update it’s work very well on windows. Finally finally after waiting a long time.

    I highly recommend

  • Thanks for the tutorial, i’ve try it and working fine but when i uploaded into facebook, it can’t be seen in 360. something wrong with exporting this images?

  • I’m also using Affinity Photo on a daily basis. if you compare Affinity Photo with Photoshop, you will find that it can do approx. 95% of the same things. Affinity Photo is really stable, except when handling very large files, then it gets a bit slow compared to PS. However, I really love the live brush feature in Affinity Photo. It is such a relief to see the result before you do the actual brush strokes.

    the interactions with XP-Pen graphic tablets such as Artist Series https://www.xp-pen.com/series/Artist-display.html could be improved. In particular, there’s no way to properly use the brushes properties of pressure and tilt. The brushes customization self, is very complicated and inadequate, so it works bettere with mouse and keyboard instead than a graphic tablet.