grichie5

I noticed that Affinity Photo is on sale for $24.95. I downloaded and played with a trial version of the program for about an hour, just long enough to get a feel for it. It seems to offer many of the same features as I find in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Does anyone with more experience using Affinity have any comments?

Schoee Loc: Europe

Just a beginner myself but Affinity Photo seems to be able to do a huge amount of editing tasks. Have a look at the free Affinity Revolution tutorials on YouTube

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

It's an excellent raster image processor and the best Photoshop alternative out there. At $24.95 it's a great bargain. It is fundamentally a raster editor appropriate for RGB raster images.

If you have raw files to process Affinity's built-in raw develop module is weak at best and it's appropriate to consider some other alternative to get raw files converted before moving the images on to Affinity.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

I agree with Ysarex completely. At $24.95 Affinity Photo is a great bargain for a fully functional pixel editor. Also as he points out, the Develop persona, which is Affinity Photo's raw editor, is one of the programs weakest links.

One can compare Affinity Photo fairly favorably to Photoshop although Photoshop is still the far superior standard.

Additionally, raw development in Photoshop is handled by the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR,) module or by Adobe Lightroom. Both are so very functionally superior to Affinity's Develop persona that any comparison would immediately highlight Develop's significant limitations. However, the Develop persona is still far better than nothing at all and may meet the needs of those who have little or no experience with top quality raw processors.

My personal workflow includes DXO Photolab 4 Elite as my raw processor/converter with Affinity Photo on the backend when my images need further processing in a pixel editor.

grichie5

Thanks for your advice. I do subscribe to Photoshop/Lightroom and at my age, am only spending my kid's money. From the two responses, There seems to be no advantage to using Affinity over Photoshop/Lightroom, except for the cost factor.

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

I would agree. It offers no advantage over LR/PS if you already have them and intend to keep them. It's a substantially lower cost alternative for folks who don't want to invest in LR/PS and frankly for most of what people need to process RGB raster images it's more than adequate -- so no real functional loss.

tcthome Loc: NJ

I use it a little for removing things like power lines, etc. Have done a pano, focus stacking , some layers work, & a sky replacement just to see how it worked. It is not as refined as PS but I feel it is the best bang for the cost if your not into subscription software. There are quit a few video tutorials out there & more training if you go up to the help tab at the top of the screen.

tcthome Loc: NJ

Only price.

RGreenway Loc: Morristown, New Jersey

I am using it since the Adobe pricing model is not appealing to me. For the past few years I have been using Apple Fotos which serves most of my needs for organization, but does not offer all the raw processing I sometimes need. What is nice for me with Affinity is that it works with Fotos as an extension whereby in Photos you can click "edit in Affinity Photo" and it links to Affinity where you can do raw development and edits and save the final image back to Photos directly so you can use Photos for most images that dont need extensive correction and Affinity for the rest and also use Affinity for the editing things that Photos does not offer.

Woodworm65 Loc: Lombard, IL

I use Affinity Photo, it has very good features it is a great add on it does not handle raw photos all that well but plays great with software that does I use ON1 in combination with Affinity which by the way there are great tutorials on both on YouTube.

dr.juice

Just a thought here. I've been using the Corel Draw! Graphics Suite since v.0.81 (they are at around v. 20 or so.now) and have never had any issues with graphic software to do anything I wanted. I do "ordinary graphics" in it, all my photo processing and management, make baseball hats, t-shirts, and aprons, manage my font library (currently at 1500+ fonts when I last counted), etc. And lately I've been doing more and more just plain ordinary drawing. I don't normally recommend Corel but recently I was able to correct some text that didn't get properly processed in the camera and I reversed it in Draw in less than 4 minutes! I never would have thought of even trying to do that in Adobe! I'm looking forward to learning the newest stuff they've added over the next 9 weeks while I'm recuperating from a R hip replacement. I generally upgrade everytime they send me an announcement. BTW - I used to look at Adobe's stuff once in a while. Any more I don't bother. Hope this helps.
drjuice in sunny SoCal.

camerapapi Loc: Miami, Fl.

I have been using Affinity Photo after I edit my RAW data with proprietary software. I am happy with the results.
Affinity has plenty of parameters to make adjustments in post. I recently email them to suggest a sky replacement similar to what Luminar offers. Affinity has a sky replacement feature but it is difficult to do and time consuming.
For $24 it is a bargain.

elliott937 Loc: St. Louis

Since Photoshop 'kicked my printer to the curb', I've been using Affinity Photo and extremely pleased.

Wanderer2 Loc: Colorado Rocky Mountains

<<If you have raw files to process Affinity's built-in raw develop module is weak at best and it's appropriate to consider some other alternative to get raw files converted before moving the images on to Affinity.>>

Whenever a query about Affinity Photo is posted on this forum there are usually 1 - 3 individuals that make this claim that it's a deficient, poor Raw convertor/editor so beware if that's what you want to do with it. I've used AP for 2-3 years and I regularly process 100 or so Raw files a week with AP (I process Raw files only) and I simply cannot identify this "weak at best" etc. feature. All of my Raw files (landscapes) are developed perfectly well except for the one exception detailed below. In the AP Workbook it is stated that the purpose of the Develop Module, or Persona in the terminology they use, is to prepare Raw files for editing in other parts of the program and I can find no fault in it doing that, except for that one exception, and the processing ends with excellent results.

I would encourage anyone interested in purchasing AP, and now is an excellent time to do so with the 1/2 price, 90 day free trial, and all future upgrades being free, to do the trial and base their decision on their own experience, especially with what they find regarding Raw development. When I was attempting to make a decision regarding a photo processing program I tried about 6 and found AP to be the easiest to learn and to be very capable. And at that time it had features that many of the other programs did not, including LR and PSE which I still have in my computer but almost never use. The only problem I have found is that I shoot with a camera that has a Pixel Shift Resolution feature that I sometimes use and AP can't handle those merged Pixel Shift Resolution files, selecting just one of the four. But, AFAIK there are only two programs that can process all four of such merged files, RawTherapy and Digital Camera Utility, so one of those has to be done for the initial Raw development and then the file transferred to AP. But other types of Raw files can be imported directly from the card into AP with no problems.

I hope this of some help to anyone contemplating purchasing AP. With a 90 day free trial there is little to lose.

elliott937 Loc: St. Louis

Wanderer2, I totally agree with you. I, also, shoot only Raw, and they are converted nicely into Affinity Photo for me. Been using Photoshop since 2002, now in Affinity Photo, and not looking back.

Bill