Are you looking for one of the best photo editors, but you are on a budget and still need advanced features? Then Affinity Photo might be what you've been looking for, with a recently released version 2, which adds more essential image editing tools for artists, designers, and photographers.
Serif Affinity Photo Pricing and Plans
- Unbeatable price for what is offered
Affinity Photo was first released in 2015 as a Mac-only product. Since then, it's gained new features and functionality, and even expanded to the Windows computing side, but kept its low $70/$60 price tag. there are Creative Cloud-style subscriptions here - this is a one-time charge for a perpetual license. You buy it, you own it, that's it.
If you just want to test the waters, Serif offers a 10-day free trial. You'll also find an iPad version for €20/€18, but you don't get a free trial with that.
When you consider that Adobe effectively rents Photoshop for $21/$20 per month, or its entire library of software for $55/$50 per month, Affinity Photo's appeal as one of the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives becomes clear.
Affinity Photo will run on a Mac with an Intel processor, or one with Apple's own silicon, running 10.9 Mavericks through 10.12 Monterey. PC owners need a 64-bit processor running Windows 7 through 11. So it won't have a problem running on graphic design laptops and photographer laptops.
For broader creative work, Serif has also introduced its Affinity V2 Universal License, which unlocks Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher, and Affinity Photo for your Windows, Mac, and iPad devices at a discounted price.
Serif Affinity Photo: Interfaz
- Nice and clean, packed with features, but with some design annoyances.
Affinity Photo's interface is designed to be fairly minimalistic, while still presenting you with all the features you might need. Take the toolbar, for example. You'll find it on the left as a series of small icons. Like many other apps of its kind, hover over one to see a tooltip with its title, and any tool with a little triangle in the bottom right indicates additional but similar tools are just a click away. . .
More tools and information about your current image file are at the top, with a detailed inspector on the right, known as Studio, leaving most of the interface on your canvas. It's all reminiscent of Adobe Photoshop, really, and if you're comfortable with this behemoth, it won't take long to feel right at home with Affinity Photo.
But not everything is perfect (what software is?). One small complaint is that the toolbar is too colorful. Many competitors have long since migrated to a monochrome style, to limit any distractions to the image you're working on and your own color spectrum. Going back to software that still has quite colorful icons seemed strange to us. But that didn't stop us from working.
However, more boring was the study itself. The last time we explored Affinity Photo, they were all presented in a long drop-down list on the right. Your tools are still there, but instead of seeing sliders or editable settings, you're presented with various thumbnails of your current photo.
To apply the change, you need to click on a thumbnail, which reveals the values you can change in a floating window and, depending on which thumbnail you clicked, also applies some changes automatically. However, you can't open multiple floating windows: click another tool, and the parameters you previously selected are replaced with the new ones.
While this saves you a proliferation of endless popups, it would be nice to have access to multiple tools at once, rather than constantly having to click thumbnails to get them to appear. It feels like a step backwards for us, and unfortunately we couldn't find a way to go back to how the design was.
Serif Affinity Photo: Tools
- So many powerful tools are available
You'll find that Affinity Photo is packed with the features you need to manipulate and enhance a photo or project. The list of tools is incredibly long and rivals bigger and more expensive competitors, yes, even Photoshop, and for the price it's no small feat.
There are too many to list in this short review, such as PSD file support, RAW support, masking, layers, retouching, blemish removal, curvature, full set of 16-bit filters to name a few. Instead of turning this article into a bulleted list, we decided to focus on how it feels to use them to work on a photograph. To be fair, we've had good experience working with these kinds of apps, and as a result, Affinity Photo felt very familiar to us, so it's a good thing, if you have experience with its competitors.
However, if you are a newbie, you may well feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of options available to you. Where to start? Fortunately, the home panel has a link to many video tutorials and a support forum as well.
We found some of the tools to be quite fun and easy to use. For example, Liquify was very intuitive and the new Panorama Stitching tool created superior results to the recent software we reviewed, ACDSee Photo Studio.
We fed Affinity Photo a complex image to put together, mainly because the foreground railing could, and does, cause problems for the algorithm. But it turned out much better in this case. Yes, the results weren't perfect, but at least Affinity Photo managed to merge all the photos as best it could, which the other app couldn't.
Serif Affinity Photo: Updates
Affinity Photo V2 is the latest version of the photo editor and the update brings many new and useful tools.
A lot of time has passed. The software had not received an update for six months prior to release. And most of the previous changes were stability and performance improvements. We got an optimization for Apple's M1 chip, for example, and the most recent big flagstaff announcement was the aforementioned panoramic stitching, but as good as that feature is, that was a year ago.
Despite some interface quirks, Affinity Photo is excellent, packed with powerful features, at an unbeatable price, but we were a little concerned that this software might start to fall behind its ever-evolving rivals. The release of V2 at least keeps Serif in the competition.
The new edition includes features such as non-destructive processing of RAW files, ideal for Adobe Lightroom users looking for alternatives to Lightroom. It also offers many improved masking tools and JPEG XL support.
The biggest problem here is that existing Affinity Photo users don't get a discounted upgrade path; they will need to repurchase the latest version of the software.
Serif Affinity Photo: Board
Swipe to scroll horizontally Row 0 - Cell 0 Row 0 - Cell 1 Row 0 - Cell 2 Pricing & PlansGreat value without a subscription5InterfaceClean but with some UI frustrations3ToolsPacked with useful photo editing tools4UpdatesNew V2 update adds even more features but not an upgrade path for existing 3.5 usersI should buy?
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Serif Affinity Photo: Alternative Photo Editors
Some of the best alternatives to Serif Affinity Photo include ACDSee Photo Studio 2023, Adobe Photoshop, and Pixelmator for Mac.
If you're working on a budget, we've tested the best free photo editors.
Serif Affinity Photo: Price Comparison
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