Affinity Photo

Sometimes, a photo is not a recorded frame of memory. It can be an art project where the snapshot is the canvas. It could be the starting point of something great. But, an artist needs a few tools to create magic. In digital art, you must have a feature-packed photo editor.

Affinity Photo is an amazing photo editing software by Serif and it’s a serious and powerful rival to Adobe. Why? For starters, the app does not require you to be a subscriber and pay monthly to keep using their product. You pay for Affinity Photo once and it’s yours forever.

That’s not Affinity Photo’s best selling point, though. The photo editor has a clean, clear, and minimalist interface. Another great thing about its interface is that you can adjust elements according to your needs, so it won’t take you much time to get used to the app.

Overall, Affinity Photo is built around five modules known as “Personas,” namely Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping, and Export. The majority of the time you will be on the Develop persona for preprocessing RAW images or on the Photo persona for editing, masking, layering, and drawing etc.

The Liquify persona is made for retouching images and it works like the Liquify/Mesh Warp tool. Tone Mapping is mainly designed for playing with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. It works with both solo and merged shots.

The final persona, Export, enables you to save your finished masterpiece in different digital imaging formats, like JPEG or PNG. You can use different file types and compression levels.

Affinity Photo has a wide range of drawing tools and brushes and you can customize their settings as needed.

If you work with RAW images, your file will first open in the Develop persona. Here you can make basic adjustments, like lens corrections and noise reduction, along with powerful alterations, like cropping and healing.

It might take a bit longer to load RAW files. The loading time depends on your camera brand, though; for example, a RAW file from Nikon takes 25 seconds to load whereas one from a Fiji takes six. 

Overall, Affinity Photo is great at editing RAW files. The development team knows automation is the path to follow. For example, the app will automatically apply a tone curve upon opening a RAW file into the Develop persona just like Adobe Lightroom’s Auto Develop option.

Despite the fact that the Affinity Photo is good at RAW editing and Serif includes RAW editing at the top of their features list, it really carries itself much better as an editor for image retouching. Luckily, Photo persona is safe from optimization issues from the RAW development phase. It is almost non-destructive in this sense.

All the tools are very responsive on images and do not show any delay in applying their effects. However, although Serif has devoted an entire module to the Liquify tool, it might show some lag in response while working with large brushes.

If you are an artist, Affinity Photo for iPad is a delight for you. It provides you with a startlingly broad array of brushes that can be used for digital painting.

Serif has included a fantastic set of vector drawing tools in the Photo persona. So if you want create vector based illustrations, Affinity Photo will surely not disappoint you.

Every graphic designer wants a image manipulator that can selectively edit different parts of an image. It takes precise selection of that part. If your selection is spikey, viewers will be able to spot the jarring selection edges, no matter how well your adjustments and filters are.

Affinity Photo’s selection tools are really amazing and responsive. This set includes Rectangular, Elliptical, Freehand, Flood Select, and Selection Brush.

1. iPad Air 2
2. iPad 2017
3. iPad 2018
4. iPad Pro 9.7
5. iPad Pro 12.9
6. iPad Pro 10.5

Not everyone can afford a photo editing suite that asks you to pay a monthly fee. Honestly speaking, it makes little sense. This is why Affinity Photofor iPad and iPad Pro is the perfect replacement to any photo editor that asks you to subscribe. For a one-time charge, the app is yours for use with future updates available for free.