The name Serif has been synonymous with budget-priced, Windows-based desktop publishing, image-editing and vector drawing programs for the last couple of decades.
Of these, PhotoPlus X8 is the latest version of Serif's competent photo-editing package, which includes helpful learning guides for beginners and some advanced tools, including layer-based editing, for more seasoned users. However, it doesn't cross the bridge from amateur to pro-grade solution – and again, it's only available for Windows PCs.
Affinity Photo is something altogether new and entirely different. It's been developed over the last six years purely for Macs – indeed, there's still no Windows development waiting in the wings. It's also vastly more 'professional' than any other Serif program to date, going head-to-head with the industry-standard, full-blown edition of Adobe Photoshop.
- Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision. Born to work hand-in-hand with the latest powerful computer technology, it’s the only fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS.
- Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Serif, says: “The Affinity Photo Workbook really is an essential companion to the app on Mac and Windows, and puts the ability and knowledge of professionals at the fingertips of every reader.
As a result, what Affinity Photo lacks in beginner-friendliness, it makes up for in top-end features and a power-packed, fully customisable interface.
Adding to the attraction, Serif has also developed a companion graphic design package for the Mac, which goes by the name of Affinity Designer. Images for both programs share the same file format, and are therefore fully interchangeable.
Overview of the New Affinity Photo Editing Software A Post By: Suzi Pratt In early February, software company Serif announced the free beta version of Affinity Photo, a Mac-only photo editing program said to rival the likes of other editing tools, including the standards for creative professionals, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Affinity Photo is its price. Whereas mid-range programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 and Corel Paintshop Pro Ultimate X8 cost around £80/$100/AU$130, Affinity Photo 1.4 is just half the price, at £39.99/$49.99/AU$79.99.
Considering that two major upgrades have already been delivered for free since Affinity Photo went on sale, the price stacks up very well compared to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which combines Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC in a monthly subscription and works out to about £100/$120/AU$120 per year.
So what exactly does Affinity Photo give you for your money?
Meet the cast
The main players in Affinity are a set of modules called 'personas'. These include the Photo, Liquify, Develop and Export personas, each of which has its own dedicated workspace. However, they go above and beyond mere workspaces, with each bringing to the stage its own set of tools and modes of operation.
For processing raw files, your first stop will be the Develop persona. Support for new cameras and lenses is being continuously added, with updates to the program so far being free for users. The control panel has a wealth of tools arranged in tabs for Basic, Lens, Details, Tones and Overlays.
In the Basic tab, for example, you'll get access to exposure, black point and brightness adjustments, enhancements for contrast, clarity, saturation and vibrance, white balance and tint tools, shadows and highlight adjustments and options to add your own presets to the default settings.
Moving along the tabs, the Lens corrections include chromatic aberration and defringing tools, as well as distortion, rotation, horizontal/vertical perspective and vignetting corrections. The Details section adds sharpening refinements and noise control, while Tones contains curves, black & white conversion and split toning adjustments.
The main raw processing tools are many, varied and powerful, and there are additional tools arranged in a vertical button strip down the left-hand side, for things like removal of red-eye and blemishes.
Once you've finished in the Develop persona you may feel that your image is ready to go and needs no further work. In this case you can go directly to the Export persona, where you'll find a wealth of options for outputting images in 8-bit or 16-bit colour depth, in a variety of file formats.
A compatibility bonus when sharing files with other people is that Affinity Photo can directly import and export Photoshop PSD files, complete with full layer support.
Picture this
The real power of the program resides in the Photo persona. Non-destructive alterations are readily available via layer adjustments, which include just about everything you could think of, from brightness and contrast to white balance, colour balance, vibrance and beyond.
Fully automatic corrections include auto levels, auto contrast, auto colours and auto white balance (even for JPEG files).
The Photo persona also has a vertical strip of tools arranged down the left-hand side, most of which have further pop-out options. For example, the Healing Brush tool set includes the regular healing brush and additional tools for patching, blemish removal and red-eye removal, plus a context-aware Inpainting tool that does an excellent job of removing objects from a scene and intelligently filling the space to blend in with the surroundings.
Finally, the Liquify persona hosts an array of pinch, push, twirl and turbulence tools, complete with mesh view and the ability to freeze or thaw selected areas of the image. The speed and fluidity with which edits are updated on screen is particularly impressive.
Alive and kicking
That speed is on show throughout Affinity Photo. Not only are the editing tools very good, with excellent fine-tuning and customisation options, they're also super-fast in action.
Most adjustments can be previewed live, in real time and without any lag, even if you're working on images with huge numbers of layers. This makes the editing process wonderfully fluid, and enhances the creative experience.
The 'live' aspect of watching images update as you work on them extends to customisable effects that include lighting, blurring, tilt & shift, and many more. It's great to be able to get instant feedback on adjustments, which can also be applied as 'live layers'.
The same immediate, constantly updating previews also apply to live layer blends, for which 30 options are available. Similarly, live filters offer instant previews and non-destructive application.
Similar speed and dexterity is available when retouching images, using tools like dodge and burn, clone, blemish removal and red-eye fix. The latest 2015 edition of Photoshop CC offers a noticeable speed increase over previous versions when using its healing, spot healing and patch tools but, even so, Affinity Photo has the edge.
For ultimate control, you can create custom brushes and nozzles with advanced flow dynamics, and there's built-in support for Wacom and other graphics tablets.
New tricks
For more extreme adjustments, single-plane and dual-plane perspective corrections are easy to apply, and there's also a customisable mesh system for applying warps, again in real time. The latest V1.4 brings yet more fun to the party, with new additions like panoramic photo stitching, live stacks, a haze removal filter and split toning, plus a whole lot more.
Working outside the box, so to speak, V1.4 also adds six extensions for the Apple Photos app. These enable you to use powerful tools from Affinity Photo within the Photos app, including develop, haze removal, liquefy, miniature, monochrome and retouch.
If there's a flaw in Affinity Photo, it's that the seamless support of Photoshop image files (including complex layered files), doesn't yet quite extend to plug-ins. Some work fine, others don't, but it's an area in which Serif have been making strides to ensure greater compatibility with existing third-party plug-ins, and a growing range of new ones.
Also, much like Photoshop itself, image organisation and cataloguing tools are basic in the extreme. In this respect, the Serif program could do with a companion app along the lines of Lightroom.
Verdict
Overall, Affinity Photo is a fabulous program that really does rival the best professional and enthusiast-level image-editing packages on the market. It easily takes the lead over previous Serif programs that we've seen for PC, and is a worthy winner of Apple's 'Mac App of the Year' award, 2015.
As with most photo-editing programs, a 30-day free trial version is available. Try it – you'll love it. And when you can't give it up after a month, you'll also be pleased that it's so 'affordable'.
In early February, software company Serif announced the free beta version of Affinity Photo, a Mac-only photo editing program said to rival the likes of other editing tools, including the standards for creative professionals, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. In this article, I’ll walk through the public beta version of Affinity Photo and describe some pros and cons to using this new software.
Affinity Photo Basics
At the moment, Affinity Photo beta is available as a free online download and is compatible with Apple OSX Lion 10.7.5, and up. Some key features that move Affinity up in the ranks include support for CMYK color, RAW file processing, 16-bit editing, 64-bit Photoshop plug-in compatibility, ICC color management, and LAB color. A few other noteworthy tools include Affinity Photo’s Inpainting feature, which is essentially the equivalent of Adobe content-aware fill, and real-time editing that will apply edits instantly without the need to render a preview.
It’s uncertain when Affinity Photo’s full version will launch, but when it does it will be available for purchase in the Mac App Store for about $49.99. A Windows/PC version of the app is said to be in works, but again no solid timeline is available.
Pro: Speed and reliability
The first feature of the tool that really stood out was its speed and reliability. Affinity Photo is extremely fast and it never once crashed during the seven times I used it, which is impressive for a beta version. The tool’s speed is accredited to it being built on an entirely new and modern codebase, unlike Adobe Photoshop, which recently celebrated its 25 year anniversary and thus has been built on architecture that is also a couple decades old.
Con: Default RAW file conversion
One of the most striking differences that I immediately noticed was the default adjustment that Affinity Photo made to my RAW image when I first imported it. While these defaults could likely be adjusted to taste, I was surprised at how drastically Affinity altered my image when all I did was import it.
Pro: Easy access to basic photo editing tools
The interface, and ease of use, is where Affinity Photo really shines. Despite being a longtime Photoshop user, I’ll admit that its layout can be overly complicated, presenting too many tools that are beyond the scope of basic photo edits. While Affinity’s interface definitely borrows some features from Photoshop, its basic layout is relatively straightforward and easy to understand without requiring a ton of customization. The top bar below the menu shows all of the basic details of your photo (file format, ISO, shutter speed, aperture, etc.), which is something that seemed rather hidden and hard to find in Photoshop.
Basic editing tools are presented in the right hand panel under the histogram, the tools are nicely labeled, and easy to adjust with sliders. There is also a History tab that, in the same way that Photoshop does, keeps track of every edit, making it easy to track and reverse any changes. Hardcore photo retouchers might find these editing tools to be lacking, but for beginners or photographers in need of basic edits, these tools will get the job done in a straightforward manner.
As a photographer who shoots almost exclusively in RAW, I’ve grown accustomed to the seamless integration of Camera RAW with Photoshop and Lightroom’s smooth handling of RAW image conversion. The way that Affinity handles RAW editing took a bit of troubleshooting, but was straightforward when all was understood.
Initial RAW Editing Tools
When you first open a RAW file into Affinity, there are distinctly fewer editing options and adjustments to choose from. The Basic tab offers easy access to make basic adjustments to white balance, exposure, contrast, shadows and highlights, clarity, vibrance, and black points. What was curiously missing from this panel were saturation and tint control. The Lens tab offers adjustments for lens correction, chromatic aberration reduction, vignettes, and defringing. The Details tab allows for detail refinement, noise reduction, and noise addition. The Tones tab is where you can adjust curves, split toning, and black and white image conversion. In this mode, the left hand panel also has a vertical tool bar reminiscent of Photoshop’s, but when editing RAW files, it is noticeably much sparser containing just 10 tools versus the 20+ tools in Photoshop.
Unlocking the Full Editing Menu
In order to unleash Affinity Photo’s full set of editing tools, it’s essential to click the small Develop button in the upper left hand corner of the RAW image editing window. This will transform Affinity’s interface dramatically to more closely resemble that of Photoshop. If you work exclusively with JPGs, this step will automatically be done for you upon the uploading of the JPG image, but this is an extra step when working with RAW files that to me was not so intuitive.
Within the full Affinity Photo interface, you no longer get the image EXIF data in the menu bar, but instead a full row of icons that offer shortcuts to quick edit features such as auto white balance, contrast, and color. There are also several icons on the right that describe different personas such as Liquify, Develop and Macro Persona. A couple of these were not yet available in thw beta version, but clicking on the Liquify Persona offered just about the same editing tools and capabilities that Photoshop’s liquify feature does. For the sake of demonstration, the below image shows off the use of Affinity’s Liquify Twirl Tool, which was intuitive and easy to use.
Affinity Photo Youtube
Note that the left hand tool bar is significantly longer offering; paint brushes, clone tools, dodging and burning, text overlays, and much more. The right hand editing tool panel is also laid out differently with tabs including Adjustment, Layers, Effects, and Styles. Want to add a Gaussian blur or 3D effect to your image? Just head over to the Effects tab and check the box next to the desired effect, and it is instantly applied as opposed to hunting around menus or creating an action as you would do in Photoshop.
Closing Thoughts
Affinity Photo Mac Manual 2016
It’s not often that a platform emerges to go head-on with Adobe, but so far Affinity Photo is setting itself up as a professional-grade app. While there are many high level features for advanced photo editing, there are also lots of basic photo editing tools that are intuitively positioned, making Affinity much more approachable for beginning or amateur photographers.
Whatever the fate of Affinity Photo, the fact that companies like Serif are working on platforms to advance the process of photo editing adds healthy competition to an industry that has long been dominated by big players like Adobe and will hopefully give photographers more options in the future.
Affinity Photo For Pc
Have you tested out Affinity beta yet? If so, what are your thoughts about what works well, and what could be improved?