Affinity Photo 1.10

£47.99/$54.99 The substitute for subscription haters

Affinity Photo is the closest thing to a Photoshop alternative in this group. Like Photoshop, it’s designed as a powerful, in-depth, technical image enhancement tool. It’s also available subscription-free and, amazingly, is the cheapest option here.

Where Photoshop is designed to dovetail with Adobe Illustrator and Indesign, Affinity Photo works with and alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. The combined price for all three is little more than the cost of one year’s Photography Plan.

Affinity Photo works in ‘personas.’ There’s a Develop persona for Raw processing, a Photo persona where most of the editing work is done, a Tone Mapping persona with ace HDR tools, and an Export persona for generating processed images to share.

Affinity Photo does not offer any image cataloguing tools or creative one-click presets, however, it does have focus stacking, HDR merge, panorama stitching, retouching tools, live image filters and more.

Its interface is busy and technical at first, but its tools are a match for Photoshop’s and often better.