Serif Affinity Photo

British firm Serif has tried for decades to make inroads on Adobe's firm grip on the media and design software industry with its Affinity line of software, of which Affinity Photo is the Photoshop competitor. One factor in Serif’s favor is the low, one-time price for its photo editing software. Version 2 of Affinity Photo adds nondestructive raw editing, more masking options, mesh warp, layer-state saves, and JPEG XL support. The program is powerful and packed with features, but some operations are slow, and the interface lacks the friendliness and state-of-the-art tools found in Adobe Photoshop, our Editors' Choice winner for image editing applications.

How Much Does Affinity Photo Cost and Where Can You Get It?

Affinity Photo is available on the Mac App Store, from the Microsoft Store in Windows, and as a website download, for a one-time price of $69.99 (discounted to $52.99 at the time of writing). There’s no discount pricing for upgrades, but you can install the software on as many computers as you have, whereas Adobe limits Creative Cloud (such as Lightroom and Photoshop) applications to two computers. Serif Photo offers a 30-day free trial for the price of an email address you must confirm. It used to be 90 days, but that was before Adobe reduced its free Creative Cloud trial to seven days.

How to Get Started With Affinity Photo

Making desktop software available via app stores, as Serif has done with Affinity, simplifies the installation and update process across multiple computers. Affinity Photo takes up 1.3GB of disk space after installation on my test PC. By comparison, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop (both PCMag Editors' Choice winners) each take up 2GB.

When you first run the program, you see a Welcome panel that offers sample images, tutorials, and links to Twitter and Facebook content. From there you can also get overlay packs such as Fog, Snow, and Rainbow effects by registering your product.

A New Document link opens a dialog box where you set image properties like size and type. Serif doesn't include an automated tour of the interface like those offered by competing photo apps, including Corel PaintShop Pro, Lightroom, and Skylum Luminar. You do get a generous selection of sizes, though not fleshed-out content templates like those Photoshop and CyberLink PhotoDirector offer to get you started creating your image.

The Affinity Interface

The interface uses the industry standard dark gray theme, but its many colorful icons are less understated than most of the photo editing apps of today. As with Photoshop, the interface shows a toolbar across the left and an info panel to the right for things like Layers, Histogram, Swatches, Adjustment, Transform—25 modules in all, any of which you can undock.

Above the main image view are buttons for five Personas, or what other programs call modes or workspaces. The default Personas are Photo, Liquefy, Develop (for working with raw camera files), Tone Mapping, and Export. Panorama is another Persona, but it's only visible when you're stitching multiple images.

I had a hard time resetting the interface to the default appearance after removing some panels. I finally discovered a reset option in the Window > Studio menu, but all the original tools didn't reappear. A simple reset option under the main View or Window menu would be preferable. You can customize the interface, including by detaching panels, and Serif has now added the ability to save custom layouts, as you can in Adobe Photoshop.

Ctrl-mouse wheel lets you zoom, and double-clicking switches you back to Fit view. One Affinity Photo interface feature I approve of is that double-clicking a control slider sets it back to its original state. Another is the side-by-side and split views to show your image before and after edits, accessible from clear buttons atop the program window. Unlike most photo apps, there is no full-screen view, though hitting Tab gets you almost there, hiding most interface elements. Affinity Photo supports a decent selection of keyboard shortcuts, but not much in the way of right-click context menus.

You can undo and redo actions up to the limit you set in Preferences, and a History panel with a slider lets you take your work back to earlier states. The main interface adapted well to my highish-DPI (QHD) monitor, which is more than can be said for some Adobe products.

Affinity Photo Workflow

Affinity is not a workflow solution like ACDSee Ultimate, Lightroom, CyberLink PhotoDirector, or Zoner Photo Studio. That means there are no importing or organizing tools. So, you can't just load all the photos from a card after a shoot. It's more along the lines of Photoshop and Corel PaintShop Pro, intended for lighting and color fixing, retouching, image merging for panoramas, HDR, focus stacking, and drawing. There's no panel showing drive locations such as DxO PhotoLab, Exposure, and PaintShop Pro have. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements offer complementary apps, Bridge and Organizer, to handle these functions.

When you open a raw camera file, you don't have to open a separate window like in Photoshop, with its Adobe Camera Raw utility. Instead, you're just switched to Develop Persona. You can adjust exposure, white balance, contrast, clarity, noise, and more, but there are no auto settings such as you get in Photoshop and most other applications. You can come back to the Develop Persona later; you have to tap the Develop button again when you're done with edits in this mode. By contrast, Photoshop offers a Raw Camera filter for similar adjustments without redeveloping. Alternatively, you can use layer effects to apply many of its adjustments for lighting, color, and detail.

The Develop Assistant applies auto exposure, tone curve, and noise reduction on loading raw images, but you can't see the difference they make as you can with other apps that have a clear Auto edit button. You then hit the blue Develop button to output a pixel layer or embedded or linked raw layer. The latter two let you work nondestructively, keeping the raw image in a layer of its own.

Supported File Formats in Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo supports a fair number of raw camera file formats, even somewhat recent ones such as .CR3 used by the Canon EOS R and R6; and Nikon Z 7 and fc. It also now supports the JPEG XL format, which supports ultrahigh resolutions with reduced file sizes.

Not the Fastest Photo Editor

Serif Affinity's performance isn't impressive. It took about 40 seconds just to load a dozen raw images, and then each had to be developed separately. Opening multiple raw files in Photoshop places them all in a filmstrip view along the bottom of the Camera Raw utility's windows. You still have to open them all separately in the main program interface, but with Photoshop it isn't a system-taxing operation as it is in Affinity. On a positive note, zooming in and out on large, raw images is snappy.

I am impressed with the initial rendering of the raw image file, though, which to my eyes looked even better than that produced by Adobe Lightroom Classic, with more detail and lifelike colors. But Lightroom lets you choose among different rendering profiles. For this test I use the default Adobe Color profile; switching to the Camera Standard profile yields a sharper result than Affinity's. This leads me to believe that Affinity is simply using the camera's render settings, which is fine, though Adobe gives you more options.

Below you can see a raw camera file rendered by Affinity Photo (left) and Adobe Lightroom Classic (right).

A circular back arrow button lets you reset each adjustment group, and you can uncheck each adjustment group's checkbox to turn off the edits. You can't double-click on a slider to reset its default position, which is something I like to see and something you get from software by Adobe and others.

After editing or even just rendering, you have to either export your edited image to a standard file format like JPG or PNG to use it in the real world. Just as Photoshop's own work files have a .psd extension, Affinity uses the .afphoto extension. You can also export Affinity files to Photoshop's PSD file type and open documents of that type, as well. Lightroom and other true workflow solutions save your edits without requiring you to specifically save to a new format—your edits are saved regardless of whether you export or explicitly save.

Lens corrections (for chromatic aberration and geometry distortion) are available only in Develop Persona. You can revisit this Persona if you want to go back and use its tools again.

Lens Profile-Based Corrections in Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo now includes lens profile-based corrections like those found in many apps, including ACDSee, DxO Optics Pro, and PhotoDirector. The tool did readjust the geometry on photos.

With Chromatic Aberration checked and the correct lens auto-selected, the photo in Affinity (left in the image above) had more aberration than with Lightroom's correction (center), but less than that left by Windows’ included Microsoft Photos app (right). Checking Affinity’s Defringe option didn’t improve matters. You don’t get the choice of develop profiles as you do with Lightroom and Skylum Luminar or even an auto-tone option in this mode.

Noise reduction is only available in the Develop Persona. It works well, especially with color noise, though as with many programs' similar tools, it tends to blur details. You get far better noise reduction in DxO PhotoLab or Topaz DeNoise, and Affinity users also miss out on Lightroom/Photoshop wizardry like Enhance Details and the Texture slider options, as well as its new AI-powered Denoise (though that's still not as good as DxO or Topaz's).

As with Corel PaintShop Pro, Affinity lets you open vector images in .SVG and .AI format, and save to the former, but not the latter. You can combine vector and raster image layers in the same file, and work on both, though as you'd expect, vector editing is limited compared with what you get in Adobe Illustrator. Serif’s Affinity Designer offers more Illustrator-like capabilities.

The program supports batch operations and macros, useful for converting multiple files, stripping their metadata, or rotating them.

Editing in Affinity Photo

In Photo Persona, you see a stacked group of tabbed panels on the right side of the program window. The top one shows a histogram (with warnings for clipping), color picker, swatches, and brushes. In the middle is the Layers panel, switchable to Channels, Brushes, and Stock. The lower panel offers a photo navigator and sections named Transform, History, and Channels.

The Layers tab shows you which edits are associated with which layers, and the Effects tab offers glow, blur, outlines, and overlays. The Stock tab lets you find images from Pexels, which offers a lot of free image content. The Layer Effects panel gives you plentiful options. The Layer menu offers scores of choices, including the new Live Mesh layer, accessed from three menu levels deep. It lets you warp an image to match another surface.

In this mode, you do get colorful buttons at the top for Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colors, and Auto White Balance. On some photos, they work fairly well, especially for levels and white balance. On one dark image, they did nothing.

The crop tool offers presets and a straighten tool that puts a line on the screen to line up with a horizontal line in the image. But there's no auto-level or content-aware crop fill like that in Photoshop. I like that it lets you start cropping either by drawing in the image or from the edges.

Effects and Art in Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is more targeted to Photoshop-style editing rather than Lightroom-style photo workflow, with lots of layer support, a good selection of effect filters, and masking tools. You can link layers and add Pattern layers. The Pattern layer type can be helpful, and it’s fun to see the pattern reproduced across the entire image as you draw.

Another new layer feature lets you save visibility states so you can easily switch between views of a many-layered project.

The selection tool works acceptably, with options to snap to edges and adjustments for feathering, smoothing, and anti-aliasing. But it's nowhere near Adobe Photoshop's state-of-the-art automatic selection tools that automatically detect and select multiple objects and can handle complex things like hair (Capture One is also good at it). The healing tool requires you to select a source area to replace a blemish or unwanted object. It's not as sophisticated as Photoshop's content-aware Patch and Move tools.

Affinity Photo does have some masking options, including live masks based on hue, luminosity, or frequency band range, and they update if you change the image they're based on. You can also now combine masks into compound masks and edit them nondestructively.

Liquefy gets its own Persona. In this mode, you get 10 tools that let you push and swirl the image's pixels. One of the uses, as highlighted on Affinity's help page, is for remodeling faces. But Adobe's Face-Aware Liquify tools are far better targeted since they identify parts of the face and offer sensible editing options. With the Affinity tools, you're on your own.

Affinity Photo includes a good variety of brushes, including sub-brushes (combined brushes), symmetry drawing, and even wet-brush-edge paint accumulation. Brush styles include Acrylic, Engraving, Gouaches, inks, markers, pens, and pencils—a full toolbox with a high degree of customization options.

Merge Tools in Affinity Photo

The Panorama tool was able to stitch a pair of test raw-camera images shot with a wide-angle lens. There is an option to Inpaint Missing Areas, which takes effect only after you exit the tool. You don’t get Lightroom's cylindrical, spherical, and perspective merging options. It also successfully merged three adjacent iPhone X photos shot in portrait orientation.

The HDR Merge tool in Tone Mapping Persona is impressive, though it takes a long time to process images—much longer than Lightroom's HDR merge tool. The process includes denoising as well as tone mapping and alignment. When it's done, you get a choice of Natural, Detailed, Cool, High-Contrast Black and White, Dramatic, and Crazy. The program can also combine images for focus stacking—of particular interest to those who shoot microphotographs.

A special case tool Affinity Photo provides is the Astrophotography Stack Persona. It requires special shot types such as long exposures and calibration shots, but it does offer functionality not found in Photoshop to get those night skies looking clear and well-defined.

Text and Typography in Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo let me open a PSD file from Photoshop, and I found it easy to select, resize, and move a text box, but not edit the text. The program has its own text tools, Artistic Text and Frame Text. The former is for display type and the latter for longer text entries. Very detailed formatting is possible, with thousands of OpenType fonts at your disposal. You can align letters along a path and choose ligature styles, but you don't get the level of glyph editing that Illustrator offers. Kerning and tracking are as detailed as you could wish, however.

Photo Output in Affinity Photo

The Export Persona lets you create custom image slices, but it doesn't actually have an Export button. You have to choose File > Export from the menu, just as you could in any other Persona. You can export your creation as PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PSD, PDF, SVG, WMF, or EPS. You can't export your file in Illustrator AI format, however. The program offers soft proofing and color management (including ICC profile importing). Another interesting option is the Lanczos 3 resampling option, which takes longer but is supposed to result in superior resizing results. I saw more detail enlarging a photo with Photoshop’s automatic bilinear option, but some users in Affinity’s forums claim to have better results with Lanczos enlargement.

In the image above, the left side was enlarged from 6,024 pixels wide to 10,000 pixels wide using Photoshop’s Automatic bilinear algorithm, and the right side used Affinity Photo’s Lanczos 3. Both use the program’s default raw import settings.

Affinity Photo Performance and Help

Affinity Photo uses graphics processor acceleration. I did notice that zooming was snappier, and the program was mostly responsive during testing on my reasonably powerful PC, a 3.6GHz Core i7 with 16GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics processor. But some adjustments, and even loading photos, took a lot longer than in other software.

I appreciate that Affinity includes a help window that details all the program's features, while many other photo-editing apps, including those by Adobe, make you go online for help. Adobe also has an annoying habit of sending you to user forums rather than official and relevant help resources.

Lots of Tools at a Low Price, But You Pay in Other Ways

Affinity Photo is a powerful, low-cost image editing program, but it trails Adobe's products in terms of both usability and advanced capabilities. It does much of what most users need—layers, raw support, color manipulation, filters—and is more economical than Adobe's apps. It's not well suited as a raw photo workflow tool, since it includes nothing to organize your digital assets, and you don't get a companion organizing tool like Adobe Bridge. The ability to edit vector and raster images in the same program is another plus, but again, the tools are limited. For unparalleled imaging tools, turn to PCMag Editors' Choice winners among photo software: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom Classic.