Move Over, Photoshop—Here's Affinity Photo [Tech Tuesday]

There’s a new photo-editing software in town, and from what we’ve seen so far, Affinity Photo may give Adobe Photoshop a run for its money.

When it launches, the Mac-only, pro-level Affinity Photo is slated to cost a cool $50 from the Mac App store. Flat out. No subscriptions. You own it.

Serif, the company that developed Affinity Photo, has been around for a while and is best known for its Windows consumer-oriented photo-editing, web design and desktop-publishing software. The company’s first foray into pro-level apps, Affinity Designer, is a pro graphic design program. Now the company has released a free Beta for Affinity Photo, and the software looks very promising.


The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop and, from what we’ve seen so far (we just downloaded the Beta but haven’t installed it yet), the toolsets and features are extensive. In addition to universal and selective adjustments, you’ll find the standard masks and layers, as well as options for tweaking perspective, lighting, depth-of-field, adding motion blur, refining selections and much more. What Affinity dubs “Inpainting” appears to work in the same way as Content Aware Fill for removing objects from a scene; from the demo, it looks like a seamless and accurate process.

In addition to working in 16 bits, Affinity Photo also supports RAW, CMYK and LAB, 64-bit plugins, as well as the import and export of PSD files. Affinity promises “instant redraw from live tools and effects” such as blending modes, and it’s optimized for Core 2 Duo and faster Macs running OS X 10.7.5 and newer.

Keep in mind, though, that this is a Beta—although reports indicate that it’s pretty stable. On that same note, because it’s a Beta, you have time to voice your opinions, ask questions and post feature requests at the Affinity Photo forum.

The launch date hasn’t been announced nor has pricing been finalized.

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