Photoshop has been the undisputed leader when it comes to photo editing software for well over 20 years. It has come a long way in that time and cemented its self as an essential program for any photographer. Much to every amateur photographers disappointment, nothing has really presented itself as much of a competitor to Photoshop. Until now, in 2015 Serif began to change the scene with their new Affinity range of creative software including Affinity Photo.
Affinity Photo was built for the Mac from the ground up, unlike Photoshop that has legacy code in new versions. Affinity Photo is very much targeted at photographers. Whereas Photoshop has become a tool for creatives in many different fields, not just photography. So I will be looking at how I replaced Photoshop with Affinity in my photography workflow.
There are a few different reasons why I decided to switch over to Affinity Photo and ditch Photoshop for photography, here are a few of the main reasons.
- Much quicker processing
- Better RAW development
- Intuitive interface for Photography editing
- Quick and powerful removal of objects with the inpainting tool
- Cost. Affinity Photo cost just £30ish (one off), compared to the current Adobe CC subscription you can pay around £16 per month for Photoshop. Technically you are renting Photoshop with the Adobe CC subscription model
Break up your workflow with Persona Workspaces
Opening a raw image into Affinity you will start off in Development persona, there are 4 personas in Affinity. Personas in Affinity Photo are different work areas for performing different processes. I like how Affinity give you a work area for each process so you aren’t stumbling around menus trying to find what should be right at your disposal.
In Development mode, you can make powerful adjustments to your RAW image before moving onto the Photo Persona. Development is what I love the most about Affinity Photo, you can perform almost all edits here such as basic edits, lens corrections, tone adjustments, detail refinement and my favourite is the use of overlays for controlled adjustment of the part of the image. The overlays are particularly useful for landscape where you want to adjust the exposure or contrast in the sky without effective the foreground or landscape of the picture.
After you have finished developing your RAW image you can move along to the Photo persona to make further adjustments and access more powerful tools for manipulation of your image. With this image, I just used the inpainting brush and the burn brush. The Inpainting brush was used to remove the power lines in the image, inpainting allows for much quicker removal of unwanted elements and works extremely well in most cases as you can see in the example below. Removing elements is a much quicker process in Affinity than in Photoshop.
You can see in the examples below the difference between the original and the effects of just 10 minutes of editing. How far you go with your edits is entirely up to you but with Affinity, you can achieve just about anything you want with your editing.
Conclusion
Give Affinity Photo a try, it won’t replace Photoshop for everything but it can certainly replace Photoshop for editing photography. Affinity is due to release Affinity Photo 1.5 which will bring a load of new features such as a dedicated HDR persona and 360 image editing capabilities.
When comparing the £39.99 price for Affinity Photo to even Adobe’s Photographers subscription it still works our much cheaper and you can use it on as many machines as you want.
I bought it recently and it seems to be a real winner. The first genuine alternative to Photoshop. I’m using it on my Mac mini along with Lightroom 4, DxO Optics Pro 9 and Nik Collection.
Hi Richie,
Thanks for commenting, Affinity keeps getting better with the latest addition of HDR merge making it even more powerful. I have just added an update to the article as I no longer use ACDSee, I switched over to Capture 1 Pro for library management.
In your article update, you mention that you “recently ditched Affinity for Capture 1 Pro as Capture 1 allows me to use a reference library which was important for my workflow.” And yet, in your reply to Richie’s comment on March 5th and 6th, you said you “no longer use ACDSee, I switched over to Capture 1 Pro for library management.” I must assume the update in your article is mistaken, and that your are still using Affinity. Is that correct?
Hi Gary,
Thanks for pointing that out, indeed that was a typo it was supposed to say “ACDSee”. I moved my picture management over to Capture One Pro for a variety of reasons, I still use Affinity for heavy editing, manipulation and object removal but most of the RAW file management and editing is now done in C1.
I’ll write an article about the workflow from Capture One to Affinity soon.
Much as I like Affinity it is still missing key features available only in Photoshop, so far. Like Content Aware Move and Fill. And one click Perspective Transform as with Lightroom Classic. And I am not if one can replace people or heads in Affinity. Bummer, as I can use On1 Raw 2018 as a Lightroom replacement but still need Photoshop CC 2018 rather than just Affinity Photo.
I have just got Affinity Photo and am learning to use its tools . I shoot in raw and download the photos into Photos on my I my iMac . I am struggling with saving the photo back into Photos where all my photos are organised. I seem to be saving them into Affinity documents which it’d rather not do. Can you help? Thanks
Thanks for your article, it’s useful ! If you have some experience with Adobe Photoshop but can’t afford the extremely high price tag of owning your own copy then Serif has built the perfect alternative for you.
From what I’ve seen of Affinity, I believe it would be adequate for most if not all your post-processing/editing needs.
What I like best is the price. It’s all the more attractive an option due to a one-time payment versus subscription-based payments imposed by Adobe for Photoshop.
I have been editing photos with my XP-Pen Deco Pro https://www.xp-pen.com/product/432.html graphics tablet for several times on Affinity Photo . Affinity almost can do everything PS can do if you are a half good photographer. But Some features still aren’t there to make it a full replacement.