Affinity Photo

I bought Affinity Photo after hearing a loop of how the program’s background removing tools were much more precise and refined than Photoshop’s….and after tryng to make the program work on that for over 6 years (I’m stubborn like that), I guarantee you things are the opposite — every time I tried to remove a background using Affinity, I then had to always go to Photoshop to refine the details and finish the work. The UI doesn’t help as it’s overfilled with features that the average user not only will not use but will be overwhelmed by.

I get it. You can do as many comparisons of Adobe Photoshop as you want. But, if you want Photoshop because of the copious amount of video tutorials and AI functionality, then get Photoshop.

That being said, if you want to level up you can't go wrong with Affinity Photo. Some functionality here is done better than Photoshop. Check out PiXimperfect's YouTube video as an example.

For my purposes I don't need to use AI and I don't need an inbuilt video editor to animate images.

Affinity Photo has a very polished interface, and, being similar to Photoshop, is easy to pick up. You can watch many Photoshop videos to get inspiration and apply it here.

What's also handy is the Personas feature where you can easily switch from one design environment to another. To be fair, I haven't used them aside from the Export Persona.

It's no slouch either, where Photo can take advantage of hardware acceleration from your graphics card without taxing the system.

Definitely worth a look at.

I want this to succeed, but it's screwed up color data before when I went to save to a file. Also puts functions behind keyboard shortcuts without listing them in the navigation menus. Super hard to work with.

I've worked a lot with Photoshop and find AP to be an improvement in several ways, eg. in brush editing, and just the overall design / feel.

Nice interface, more features than you might expect, and only major updates are paid. There's been one so far, and the first one is still supported. So no subscription and really low price compared to Adobe's.

Both desktop and iPad versions work very well. The iPad app is probably the most advanced touch app I've tried, in having pretty much (exactly?) the same feature set as for desktop (and it's a lot cheaper).

It utilizes the toch screen really well too, balancing desktop adjustment precision standards (unlike eg. Procreate) with intuitive gestures. One of my favorite toch specific features is the radial menu for function keys (cmd, shift, ctrl and option/alt) that work very much like in Adobe applications. That's an update in version 2, in the first one you accessed them with holding 1, 2,3 or 4(??) fingers of your secondary hand on the screen, which worked well, but could be awkward.

Works well with Apple Pencil too, and if your iPad supports hover, you get tooltips and amazing snapping suggestions for relevant tools!

Okay, so buy Affinity Photo if you can, and try Affinity Designer too (like Illustrator), which is also great. Affinity Publisher (like InDesign) seems to be of equal quality.

Just reviewed Affinity Designer so not re-writing that, but this is just as amazing. I think that you cannot go wrong with these products and it is a shame the Affinity range consists only of the three Designer, Photo and Publisher items....however, so far as I am concerned if you do not need the wider suite that Adobe offers or the really specialist features of stuff like GIMP and Inkspace, you should go with Affinity. Check out the YouTube videos from Serif if you want to be convinced!