Affinity Photo 1.5
Pro image editing at a reasonable price
THE NAME SERIF has long been associated with budget design apps, usually ending with “Plus.” There was DrawPlus, PhotoPlus, and even PagePlus, and while they were cheap, they were outclassed by other software packages, often costing a great deal more, and which ran on Macs.
While the products improved over time, Serif decided to break with the Plus range when it launched Affinity Designer, a vector graphics app that was initially released only on Apple computers, followed by Affinity Photo, a raster-editing app. Both then made their way to Windows after beta periods (in the case of Affinity Photo, a very short one, as anyone trying to follow last issue’s tutorial may already have found out).
The Affinity products are pro-grade, Adobe-troubling apps sold at a reasonable price, with no monthly subscriptions. If you can do it in Photoshop, the chances are you’ll be able to do it in Affinity Photo, although sometimes without the same levels of user-friendliness we’ve come to expect from Adobe’s more mature product, and sometimes with remarkable levels of thought put in by Serif’s engineers. The benefit of the year it spent as a Mac exclusive, though, is that the thick-blackframed-glasses brigade has done the beta testing for us.
Affinity is split into parts known as “personas,” each of which has its own workspace that has a slightly different layout and function. Things are in the same general places, but tools you need in one persona aren’t present in another. Opening a raw image file takes you to the Develop persona, and when you’ve finished with your adjustments there, you move it into the Photo persona for more edits. There’s an Export persona for creating files matched to specific requirements, Liquify for distortion and warping effects, and Tone Mapping for HDR image creation. The chances are you’ll spend most of your time in Photo, and Develop if you shoot in raw. Switching between personas is a simple case of clicking an icon at the top of the interface—the change is instant, and your image moves over with edits intact. RAW POWER Develop only operates on one image at a time, like Adobe Camera Raw, rather than Lightroom. It’s a full-featured raw image converter, with a Clarity slider that’s capable of extracting more detail from your images, and a useful split view showing your image before and after your edits, divided by a bar that can be dragged across the image with the mouse, to show the full scope of your changes.
The Photo persona is where the bulk of the editing is done, and while anyone who has used Photoshop or Photoshop Elements will feel at home, there are some differences that can take a while to get used to. The tools live on the left, with a selection of floating palettes docked on the right, where you’ll find common actions such as Levels adjustments and Hue/Saturation. Affinity also has a top toolbar, populated by automatic adjustments, such as Auto Levels, plus selection and pasting tools. Filters live in their own menu, and as the app supports layers, there’s a palette of that name with a familiar layer stack, and buttons at the bottom for creating new layers, masks, and so on. Liquify acts like Photoshop’s Liquify filter, enabling you to drag areas of your image around as though it were made of soft clay, making invisible changes or more caricaturish edits.
If you’re looking for a photo-editing app to get started with, Affinity makes a lot of sense. It’s cheaper than Photoshop Elements or a year of Photoshop CC’s photographers’ bundle, and while it lacks those packages’ organizational abilities— it’s not going to help you make sense of a vast photo library—its editing skills stand alongside Adobe’s finest.