‎Affinity Photo on the App Store

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You can also create abstract shapes or an offset path with the powerful contour tool. Raster Design Tools Apply Raster Techniques to Vector Art Switch to the Pixel persona, select a brush, and start shading or texturing Finesse artwork with Dodge, Burn, Smudge and Sharpen brush tools See a live preview at the brush tip before you apply your stroke for desktop only Pixel Selections Isolate parts of your design to constrain raster retouching Use regular shapes, pixel-width regions, freehand lasso, and selection brush Select regions based on color and tonal ranges Grow, shrink, feather, smooth and outline selections Elliptical Marquee Tool draws from center. Edit one and the rest update instantly.
 
 

How to install Affinity updates

Are you considering trying Affinity Photo? And is it the right photo editor for you in ? Then read this full Affinity Photo review. Learn about the pros and cons of this very capable image editing app.

We rate the app on a set of parameters like user experience, price, features, workflow, and integration and plugin support in this extensive Affinity Photo Review. Furthermore, you can find answers to most of your questions about Affinity Photo, if you have never used it. Affinity Photo is a photo editor software app. Just like Photoshop, it is capable of performing very advanced image editing tasks, but at a fraction of the price of Photoshop.

It is behind in terms of advanced capabilities, but well suited for advanced image editing for even most professional photographers. Layer based editing. Panorama, HDR merge, focus stacking, macro support. Raw image support, but also works with raster and vector images. Very similar to Photoshop , but a bit easier to use. Limited lens-profile based corrections in the develop persona.

You cannot create custom workspaces. Just like Photoshop, it is not an easy program to learn for novices. Affinity Photo is comparable to Photoshop in many ways. We think that most users would be very satisfied with the features included at a low price. With Affinity Photo, the British software firm Serif has made an incredible application for photographers who wants control over the images editing process.

It is feature-packed, powerful, and affordable. Furthermore, some of the algorithms could also be improved, like the one behind the shadow and highlight adjustment layers. It seems like Photoshop can get more details from the shadows and highlights than in Affinity Photo. However, in version 1. Affinity Photo is still young compared to Photoshop, and the shortcomings are not deal-breakers for anyone but the pickiest photographers.

You can also buy and download it directly from Serif. As a private individual you are allowed to download and install the app on all computers that you own. No matter if it is one, two, five or ten. However, if you buy Affinity Photo for Windows, and you own a Mac, you need to also purchase the Mac version of the software.

So the license covers all desktop devices you own running that particular operation system Windows or Mac. If you want Affinity Photo for iPad, you need a separate license for that too. We have a short section further down in this review that discuss the iPad version.

The download size in App Store is MB. By comparison, Photoshop takes up 2GB. The first time you run the program, you will see the startup panel, with tutorials, samples, and links to the Affinity User Forum. The startup panel also includes a New Document link to a dialogue, which helps you set the properties for a new document. As a photographer, a link to open an existing image would be welcomed. However, it is a minor thing, as you probably want to disable the startup panel from opening once you get to know Affinity Photo.

The current trend in user interfaces is dark-gray and very understated icons. Affinity Photo follows this trend to a certain point with icons being the exception. The icons are colorful but easily distinguishable. The industry-standard of dark-gray understated icons may have gone too far to a point where it is actually difficult to distinguish the dark-gray icons from each other, which is a real annoyance in Photoshop. If all icons have the same color and tone, you can only separate the icons by the shape, which is not user-friendly at all.

So Affinity Photo avoided this trap with the user interface, which as great to see. Serif has divided the user interface into separate task-oriented workspaces called personas. This means that you will only see icons related to what you are working with. It makes sense with all the features crammed into a single program.

Like Photoshop, the interface shows a toolbar to the left, a topbar and context bar at the top and all the relevant panels at the right side. There are a total of 25 panels that you can undock or hide as you wish. However, Affinity Photo remembers your latest settings and activated panels.

Double clicking on a slider resets it back to the default value. You can also configure autosave at a given interval and set up the undo and redo limits in under Preferences. There is full support of Wacom tablets , include pressure sensitivity, as an alternative to using your mouse.

For example, you can control whether a new layer is placed on top of the active layer or considered a child layer.

It should be compared to Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro, which are likewise intended for photo retouching, focus stacking, and image blending. Along the same line with Photoshop, Affinity Photo is only non-destructive in the sense that you save the images in another format than the original.

You can also create a non-destructive workflow inside Affinity Photo, by using layers for all your edits, so you can revert to your original image, by just removing or disabling the layers. Here you can make basic corrections which you can also do in the Photo Persona. However, some things like lens corrections, remove chromatic aberration, defringe, and lens vignetting can only be corrected in the Develop Persona.

So if you at a later stage in your editing process want to change i. You cannot save your settings as your own custom profile that fits your different lenses either. Some reviews state that noise reduction is only available in the Develop Persona, but this is not true.

You can always apply noise reduction as a normal filter or a live filter in the Photo Persona. It support batch processing and macros , which is useful for speeding up your workflow.

The main image adjustment is done in the right side studio panel. This is where you find all the adjustment layer panels for enhancing tones and colors, like exposure, contrast, levels, highlight, and shadow adjustments, plus vibrance and HSL adjustments, and many more.

The adjustment panels are placed at the center of the right side. On top them, you can find things like the histogram, brushes, and the color picker panel.

At the bottom of the right side, you will find the layers panel, channels, and the history panel. This is Very similar to Photoshop. To add an adjustment layer just select it from the adjustment layer panel and modify the sliders in the dialog. To add sharpness and handling noise you add a filter. You can do this in two ways. You can add a normal filter, which is stamped onto your pixel layer destructively or you can use the Live Filter tool, which is added as a separate filter, you can modify at any stage of the editing process.

The selection tools work well in general. The Selection Brush Tool is straightforward to use and a clear favorite when you want to create a quick selection. Affinity Photo also supports snap to edges, and you can adjust for feathering, smoothing, and anti-aliasing. You can refine all selections to create a more precise selection. As you can see in the sample below, you can create very precise selections of even strands of hair using the Refine selection tool.

The healing tool is not quite up to Photoshop standard though, even though it does a decent job. The inpaint tool is excellent though and lets you easily remove most unwanted objects from your image. All tools that let you push pixels around are grouped together under the Liquify Persona. Not many photographers will likely use these tools every day. However, it can be useful if you are into remodeling someones face in your images.

You need to be very gentle when using these tools, to avoid ending up with unnatural looking faces. Even though Affinity Photo lacks some merging options, it generally does a great job with most panorama stitching jobs, you throw at it. In many cases better than Photoshop. We have tested using handheld vertical captured shots with a DSLR without any issues or messed up areas in the final result.

It does lack the ability to properly edit the merged result, in case you want control of which overlapping areas are included and which is left out. In Photoshop you can see and edit the layer mask of each image layer. This makes is easier to modify the final output.

In Affinity Photo, you need to correct the sticking before making the final rendering and entering the Photo persona. HDR merge allows you to bring out the best details from multiple exposures into a single photo.

In the HDR merger, you can select an unlimited number of source images. It will align them automatically before merging them into a final result. Be warned though, it is a very resource-demanding task. It will likely take a couple of minutes to perform unless your computer is extremely powerful.

It is simply too slow compared to what competing software can deliver. However, the result is impressive. As with any other automatic HDR merge software, a skilled photographer can tell that it is not manually blended.