Note: if you’re interested in using Affinity Photo for processing RAW photos (i.e. its “non-destructive workflow”) you’re probably going to be horribly disappointed. See my followup article.
Affinity Photo has just come out of beta and is being sold for a discounted price of $40 (its regular price will be $50). As with Affinity Designer, it’s well-presented, with an attractive icon and a dark interface that is reminiscent of late model Adobe Creative Cloud and Apple Pro software. So, where does it fit in the pantheon of would-be Photoshop alternatives?
In terms of core functionality, it appears to fit in above Acorn and below Photoline. In particular, Photoline supports HDR as well as 16-bit and LAB color, while Affinity Photo lacks support for HDR editing. Unless you work with HDR (and clearly not many people do) then Affinity Designer is both less expensive than Photoline, and far more polished in terms of the features it does support.
Affinity Designer supports non-destructive import of RAW files. When you open a RAW file you enter “Develop” mode where you can perform adjustments to exposure, curves, noise, and so forth on the RAW data before it gets converted to 8- or 16-bit RGB. Once you leave Develop mode, you can return and second-guess your adjustments (on a layer-by-layer basis). This alone is worth the price of admission, and leaves Acorn, Pixelmator, and Photoline in the dust.
In essence you get the non-destructive workflow of Lightroom and the pixel-manipulation capabilities of Photoshop in a single package, with the ability to move from one to the other at any point in your workflow. Let me repeat that — you can “develop” your raw, go mess with pixels in the resulting image, then go back and second-guess your “develop” settings (while retaining your pixel-level manipulations) and so on.
This feature isn’t quite perfect. E.g. you can’t go back and second-guess a crop, and vector layer operations, such as text overlays, get reduced to a “pixel” layer if you go back to develop mode. But it’s a big step in the right direction and for a lot of purposes it’s just dandy.
This is just my first impressions, but there are some things that could be better.
Affinity Photo provides adjustment layers, live filter layers, filters, and layer effects — in many cases providing multiple versions of the same filter in different places. Aside from having functionality scattered and in arbitrary buckets, you get several different user interfaces. This is a mess, and it is a direct result of copying Photoshop’s crazy UI (accumulated over decades of accumulated functionality) rather than having a consolidated, unified approach the way Acorn does.
At first I thought Affinity Photo didn’t support layer styles, but it does. Unfortunately you can’t simply copy and paste layer styles (the way you can in Photoshop and Acorn), so the workflow is a bit more convoluted (you need to create a style from a selection and then apply it elsewhere — often you just want to copy a style from A to B without creating a reusable (or linked) style so this is a bit unfortunate).
I really like the fact that the RGB histogram gives a quick “approximate” view but shows a little warning symbol on it. When you click it, it does a per-pixel histogram (quite quickly, at least on my 24MP images).
I don’t see any support for stitching images, so if that’s important to you (and it’s certainly very important to landscape photographers) then you’ll need to stick with Adobe, or specialized plugins or software.
It also seems to lack smart resize and smart delete or Photoshop’s new motion blur removal functions. (Photoline also does smart delete and smart resize.)
Anyway, it’s a great first release, and definitely fulfills the promise of the public betas. It seems to me that it’s a more solid overall effort than Affinity Designer was when first released, and I’m probably a more demanding user of Photoshop-like programs than I am of Illustrator-like programs. I can understand the desire to provide a user interface familiar to Adobe products even at the cost of making them unnecessarily confusing and poorly organized, but I hope that sanity prevails in the long run.
Bottom line: a more complete and attractive package than either Photoline or Acorn (its most credible competitors) and better in some ways than Photoshop.