All photos used in the screenshots are mine! User InterfaceĪffinity Photo is broken down into five modules that Serif calls ‘personas,’ which are accessed in the top left and focused on particular tasks: Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping, and Export. Note: The screenshots in the following review were taken with the Windows version of the software, but the Mac version should be almost the same, with only a few slight interface variations. To get a complete rundown of the features offered in Affinity Photo, you can view the full feature list here. We’ll look at the overall interface design, as well as how Affinity handles RAW adjustments, general pixel-based editing, drawing and painting, and HDR imagery. The Detailed Review of Affinity PhotoĪffinity Photo is a large and complex program with a wide range of features, and we don’t have room to look at them all in this review. I’m always on the lookout for an up-and-coming program that can help improve my workflow, so I treat all my image editor reviews as though I might consider using the program myself.ĭisclaimer: Serif has given me no compensation or consideration for the writing of this review, and they have had no editorial input or control over the final results. My experience ranges from small open-source editors to industry-standard software suites, and that has given me a unique perspective on what a good editor can accomplish – as well as how frustrating a poorly-designed one can be.ĭuring my training as a graphic designer, we spent a fair amount of time both using these software packages and understanding the logic that went into the design of their user interfaces, and that also helps me to separate out the good programs from the bad. Hi, my name is Thomas Boldt, and I’ve worked with many different image editors in my career as a graphic designer and a professional photographer. What I Don’t Like: Lacking photo library management. Best of all, Affinity is available as a one-time purchase, no subscription required. The upgrade from version 1.0 to version 2.0 fixed most of the issues that I experienced in my earlier testing and added a bunch of great new tools. Drawing and painting tools are responsive and quite excellent, as are the vector drawing tools, which are also compatible with Affinity Designer.Īffinity Photo is still fairly new in terms of development, but the team behind it is constantly working on new features and bug fixes. ![]() It has a well-designed, customizable interface and performs most editing tasks rapidly, although it may take some time to adapt to the ‘personas’ concept that divides the app into sections. ![]() Bringing the image into DXO PhotoLab made all the difference in the world.Affinity Photo is a powerful and affordable image editor that is directly competing with Photoshop for enthusiasts and professional users. I tried lots of tricks to knock down the glare and reflections that were coming from so many angles that a polarizer was no help at all. A few years ago I was photographing over the Grand Canyon from inside a Eurocopter and regulations did not allow for the doors to be open. One of my favourite features is Clearview, a function that I have not found elsewhere. It therefore does have a learning curve to some extent and there are tutorials available to help you with learning the tool. You actually are doing the editing yourself, not just whacking the image with someone else’s generic idea. You can edit with these tools, but it is absolutely not the primary UI.ĭXO PhotoLab is best suited to the more serious editor. This is very Instagram user friendly, and ideal for those who really don’t want to actually edit and just want to slap a look on a picture and be done with it. ![]() Their user focus is built around the use of presets. There are a number of Lightroom develop alternatives out in the market such as Skylum’s Luminar and ON1 Photo RAW. ![]() In fact, that may be a minor downfall for DXO PhotoLab, although not in my case. Lightroom CC is rather brain dead for serious editors. Note that I am talking about Lightroom Classic CC here, not the web oriented Lightroom CC designed and built predominantly for those using their phones to take pictures. Lightroom is rather boggy at 8GB and you need 16GB of memory to get decent performance out of the current V8 of Lightroom Classic CC. The product runs on any processor from an Atom 2 on up and is usable with only 4GB of memory. What it gives up in feature breadth, it makes up in speed and performance.
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