Edit images in Affinity Photo

Serif’s desktop app for pro-quality photo retouching jumps to iPad

Affinity Photo IS Serif’s professional-grade image editing app for macOS and Windows, and its move to iPad is a bit of a big deal. Before now, apps such as Apple’s Photos and Handy Photo from Adva Soft have been powerful, but lacked the kind of precision and many of the features we expect from software such as Adobe Photoshop. The iPad version of Affinity Photo, however, shares the same core tech and tools as the Mac version.

Having this sort of app on the iPad is important for a number of reasons. It moves the tablet from being just a convenient way to view photos into the category of device on which photographers can actually do serious work. And that means we could see many more apps unleashing capabilities that had been stuck on desktop only.

Affinity Photo offers photo retouching, including blemish and red-eye removal, as well as darkroom tools such as dodging and burning. If you use Photoshop, you’ll recognise the Levels and Curves windows, which alter the brightness of your images, and there’s a full layers and masks system to build up complicated effects.

There are all the filters you could need, and the app is split into sections known as “personas” for working with raw image files, using Liquify to transform your image, and the creation of high dynamic range (HDR) images. The app also has tools for painting, cropping, handling typography, and undoing previous work that you’d expect to find in any professional image-editing app.

You’ll need an iPad Air 2, any iPad Pro, or the iPad 5th-generation (released earlier in 2017) to use Affinity Photo, because its processing requirements are quite high. A stylus might also be a good idea, but we’ll be working mainly using the humble finger.