MONTHLY CHALLENGES
Current and past Challenge images can be seen at Amersham Beyond Group on Flickr.
For APS Members only, the images are also available for viewing and commenting on Facebook here.
The current Challenges are;
#52 ONE to THREE
#53 PRINT WORKS
… and the latest Challenge;
#54 PICTURE IN PICTURE
Again we had many physical print-based creations on display from our summer Challenge Print Works. Who will be the first to dare to enter something unconventional in a society print competion? The images of them online sadly do not do them justice. Several members are psyching themselves up for it.
My experiences of print transfer to stone were shared. I had initially purchased waterslide decal paper for a laser printer. This is the same idea as those decals for Airfix and Revel plastic kits from my youth. Print, soak, slide and dry. This worked perfectly until I touched them after drying and they just fell off! Even on paper they did not stick. Maybe I missed something but it seems to me that they would have to be slid onto a water-based glue to stay in place. A shame because they produce very clean photographic transfers.
Another revelation was that printers do not have white ink (doh!) as they rely on the white paper, of course. You have to bear this in mind when imagining the project if the receiving surface is not a light tone. My second attempt was more successful, sticking laser prints face-down with PVA glue and when dry, soaking the paper and rubbing it carefully off the toner. A final spray with lacquer protects the images and hides any remaining paper traces.
For another image I found that I could not produce a clean edge to gilding so I gilded the mount board and cut a clean hole through the print to reveal it.
Janette had popular success with weaving strips of two different prints together in a chequer pattern, after initially attempting to weave them through the mount board which was too thick. She also produced strips of two prints in a concertina style producing images of autumn and winter from different angles.
Once again the feeling of creativity in the room was tremendous. Many thanks to the members who spent the summer months on it . One more month to come.
My definition of the Picture in Picture Challenge was rather open-ended and so the interpretations of it were varied. I guess I had imagined the included picture to be an existing image such as a poster, artwork, photograph, screen image etc. Some interpretations were more like composites or double-images but it’s all art and it’s all good. The important element was intended to be that the included image and the new image have a connection and create a single entity.
Ken’s creative spiral originated from Percolator (iOS) and iColorama (iOS) filters. The former produced the bubbles and the latter the Escher effect. He says that iColorama is a bit of a struggle to learn as there are so many options, but it’s worth playing with.
The next Challenge will be;
#55 CUTLERY
The aim of this Challenge is a creative image involving one or more items of cutlery. Cutlery can include any kitchen utensils, not just knives, forks and spoons. This might seem a bit random but I was inspired by the many high impact, bold and colourful images online. Many of them in close-up.
Tips: shiny items look best when they are clean and new. Lighting and composition will be key.
BACK OF BEYOND DIARIES
Affinity Studio. You may have seen the big news this month. Canva have launched Affinity Studio which integrates the entire Affinity software suite into one program, combining Photo, Publisher and Designer. Most dramatically, this will be entirely free.
Affinity Photo has been the first real competitor to Photoshop since launch in 2015. Many of our members use it and rate it highly. It does pretty much everything Photoshop does and they have made the interface as close to that of Photoshop as legally possible whilst modernising it as well. There are many official tutorial videos online to help with the learning curve. Affinity has benefitted from Adobe’s highly unpopular move to an increasingly expensive subscription pricing model and they have always pledged to maintain a one-off single payment for an enduring licence – somewhere in the region of £50 per product, often on sale for less.
Interestingly, the reaction to this news has not been entirely positive. Whilst everyone likes something for nothing, many Affinity users are passionate about the product and are worried about the funding model being unsustainable with Canva pledging themselves into a financial black hole. The business model relies on selling business and AI feature subscriptions to create an income stream. If this does not generate the necessary cash it threatens the whole enterprise. Having said that, Canva (who bought Affinity in 2024) have had financial success with this model for 10 years. They are an Australian company with a philanthropic policy.
Adobe have been complacent for far too long, adding unwanted functionality and failing to fix bugs or modernise the core products which are looking very out of date after 30 years. They certainly need a competent competitor to give them a good shaking.
I am in two minds. I like the idea of Affinity and it is clearly a great product. However I learnt Photoshop over 30 years ago whilst living in American and went to user group meetings in their San Jose offices when it was all shiny and new. Muscle memory is a powerful incentive to just carry on doing what I know & love. And I want it to be better. Affinity is very similar but everything is frustratingly slightly different. I would certainly recommend newcomers to image editing start with Affinity Studio. It’s now a no-brainer.
The fly in the ointment is image management which is non existent. I currently do this by a simple folder-based structure and an image browser (Faststone). There are many mature bowsing, image cataloguing and digital asset management systems but few support the existing .afphoto format let alone the new .af format. That is a problem.
I believe that XNView may be working on this and I have had good results from this image browser in the past. Hopefully the file format will be widely adopted quickly, if not by Adobe! The alternative is to convert files to PSD, TIFF or JPG which will introduce other limitations.
NEXT MEETING
The next meeting is on Thursday 4th December 2025 in the Drake Hall at the Community Centre.
Cheers, Steve.