serif Affinity Photo 1.6
£48.99/$49.99
the cheap and powerful alternative to photoshop
Affinity Photo is sold at a budget price point, but has the tools, the features and the power to compete with Photoshop. It was launched originally as a Maconly product, but now it’s available on Windows too.
Serif designed Affinity Photo from the ground up for professional users. It might be cheap to buy, but there’s nothing cheap about its execution. It matches Photoshop for selection, masking and layer tools, and Serif has focused heavily on the retouching market, with cloning, healing and retouching tools, an Inpainting tool for automatic object removal and a dedicated Liquify persona (workspace) for localized image distortion effects.
These Personas are part of the whole Affinity Photo workflow. The Photo persona is where the regular image-editing work is done, but there’s also a Develop persona for Raw processing, a Tone Mapping persona for HDR effects and an Export persona for exporting finished images. Performance
Affinity Photo is an extremely powerful photo editor with more tools and features than there’s space to list here, from focus stacking to high-end frequency separation. It does not, however, have any browsing or cataloguing tools, so unless Serif launches a digital asset management application to go with it, you will need other tools for organizing your photos. Its Develop persona lacks the quick and simple Raw conversion tools in rival programs too, so that although the results can be great, you have to work quite hard to get there. But at this price it seems crazy to complain about any of this.