Improve any pic with Affinity Photo

Crop, rotate, and enhance colors and contrast in your favorite images

With Affinity photo being the only pro-grade photo editing app on the App Store – at least until Adobe inevitably gets into gear with its touchbased Photoshop – we’re going beyond the realms of the one-click filters and automatic fixes of most iOS image editing apps, pushing into territory previously held by expensive Mac apps.

Of course, a touchscreen interface needs to be tailored to the needs of the user rather than just to the product – an app populated by tiny pop-up windows, floating palettes, and histograms that can be adjusted by what feels like one pixel at a time wouldn’t work on a 10-inch screen being poked at with a blunt finger. And even if you’re lucky enough to have a larger iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil, there’s still a degree of looseness to this kind of input that doesn’t fit well with making the kind of tiny adjustments that would be second nature with a mouse.

Happily, Affinity Photo’s interface on iPad has been reworked from the Mac version, with panels that slide out from the right before retracting so you can see what you’re doing, and thumb-sized percentage indicators where you might have seen small sliders on the Mac.

All the tools you’d expect from an image editor are present, including Levels to lighten or darken your photos, selection tools to make sure you only alter the bits you want to, and layers.

Here, we’re looking at a straightforward image improvement workflow, importing a photo into the app and making common edits – the sort of things you might want to do to any image before sharing it with family, friends and online. Ian Evenden

Affinity photo’s interface has been rew orked from the mac version