ediTing PhoTos
Whether you edit photos on your Mac or iPad, Affinity Photo has some great features to match blazing performance
> AFFinity photo macos $49.99; ipad $19.99 From Serif Labs, affinity.serif.com
Features Hardware acceleration + RAW edits + Apple Photos extensions
tAKing on An app as popular and as embedded in the Mac world as Adobe Photoshop is ambitious, to say the least. But Serif’s Affinity Photo has done that and built itself a loyal following in the process thanks to a combination of features and performance. The latest version, 1.7, added support for Apple’s Metal API and hardware acceleration on discrete GPUs. This version also brought support for HDR displays.
Version 1.7 also brought a beefed up RAW processing engine, rewritten brush engine, and better batch processing with a new assets panel allowing you to
quickly drag and drop commonly used elements. It also overhauled the Layers panel.
Affinity Photo uses the metaphor of “personas” in its user interface. So, for example, in one persona, Develop, you process RAW photos. Tools in Develop are arranged in tabs for things like Lens, Details, and Tones. The Photo persona is the heart of the application with non-destructive layer adjustments for just about every kind of tweak that you can think of, as well as customizable tools such as healing and red–eye removal. The Photo persona also has the context–aware Inpainting tool, which enables you to remove objects from a scene. And in the Liquify persona you can have fun pinching, twirling and otherwise distorting images, all with real–time previews. Real– time previews are present, in fact, throughout Affinity Photo, helping to give the app a real feeling of speed.
If you want to take things even further, you can use a clever, customizable mesh to create warps, stitch photos to create panoramas, remove haze, and apply split toning.
Affinity Photo also offers extensions for Apple Photos, so you can edit photos in Apple’s app using Affinity tools. The best news of all is Affinity Photo’s price, and with free updates it costs a just fraction of the cheapest way to get your hands on Photoshop.