Affinity Photo for Mac1.8.6

As I and many others have said, the interface icons are far too small to be usable on a 5K screen. It is sooooo frustrating as it is the same for all Affinity products on the Mac.

I love Affinity Photo. As a professional photographer I was able to replace Photoshop with it. Although, sometimes it crashes (not too often though). I would love the developers to improve its macro (Actions in PS) capabilities. Highly recommend AP.

Awesome photo editing software, but not that Photoshop alternative too many people say. FOR WHOM AFFINITY PHOTO IS: amateurs and freelancers can benefit a lot from Affinity Photo. For 50 bucks no photo editing software give more for the money. Since 2015, when it was released, it receives regular updates and is getting better at every year. Together with Affinity Designer (vector graphic) and Affinity Publisher (desktop publisher), it is part of a promising ecosystem. Serif did an impressive job. Those who cannot invest anymore in the Adobe CC suite can step down easily and embrace Affinity Photo, as workflows are very similar and learning curve is very smooth. According to my experience, compatibility with PSD format is good, and layers structure is generally well respected. It has all space colours (RVG, CMYK, LAB, etc.) and all photo-editing tool (pen, selection tools, liquify tool, etc.) FOR WHOM AFFINITY PHOTO IS NOT: big AD agencies, those who heavily rely on the Adobe ecosystem, and those freelancers who make real money on their job are at risk by moving to Affinity Photo. Even if tools are all present, their performance is somewhat less impressive (ex. the inpainting tool in Affinity photo is good, but in Photoshop is better; same for clone stamp tool, etc.), and the "raw persona" is much inferior to "camera raw" of Photoshop. No photo catalogue features are included. Affinity Photo claims to be fully compatible with plugins and brushes from Photoshop but, according to my experience, this compatibility doesn't work properly (or I was just unlucky). Import operations are either impossible to be completed or imported items work differently from expected. Those who have heavily invested in that must think twice before making the jump.

Affinity now sells Designer and Photo directly from their website. Try before you buy. They have a 20% sale going on right now too. I have all three applications for macOS 10.14/10.15 and Windows 10. For the Windows versions just replace "macos" in the links with "windows" Affinity Publisher https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/macos/publisher/1/ Affinity Designer https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/macos/designer/1/ Affinity Photo https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/macos/photo/1/

Affinity Publisher is out today, June 19th!
20% off. Looking great. Check the website for details::
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/

Amazing software, by a fantastic company that deserves support.

Jumping ship from Lightroom, I have been experementing with a few possible replacements and opened the same Sony Raw file without any adjustment (I know this is tricky, and that every app does a little ajustement of its own, but I did my best ; and this is how they work in real life). Of all the softwares I tried, the best (cleanest, sharpest file) were Capture One and, not far from it but not as clean, On1. Affinity, Pixelmator, Luminar, Acorn did not match the exported files from those two.
I'll next have a look at Iridient, but I would still need a DAM app that could import my LR catalog (And I think Iridient has a LR plugin, but I don'k know if it can "communicate" with other apps)

It a good app until you need to start selecting areas or mask. Then, it seems pretty primitive compared to Photoshop.

Have been looking for a best App for a large number of product shots which need full color correction, perspective straightening, and deep etching. After looking through all the other Apps, including Photoshop, I thought I'd check Affinity Photo to see what it could do. Boy I am glad I did. This is amazing! I can even correct subtle lens distortion and as I get the hang of AP's interface (it's different - in a good way) I am growing more and more impressed. I really like how you apply all the Layers and Filters live and get to see it all previewed before committing, and there are lots of hints in the Inspector sidebar as to what the options do. This could be the end of Photoshop for me. It's been a long innings.

As good as Photoshop.

One of the best photo editors available. Powerful and easy to use. Must have app.

Wonderful image editor that equals the now overpriced PS. Thanks to the devs for keeping this low-budget AND making it worth using for pro summers. VERY highly recommended.

An incredible Photoshop clone that even surpasses PS in some areas (Layers and Tones for example). It even supports PS plugins too. Incredible!

It is a bit difficult to learn though, but the online video tutorials are great and makes the steep learning curve bearable. Ones you now your way, all other comparable tools are obsolete :).


imo this is the best tool for macOS and Windows. And take a peek at the price ?!? ... $50 is a steal. Actually, let me rephrase that. It is a MUST HAVE BUY for everyone who needs to edit photo's/images.

5stars +1
Very highly recommended !!

such a good app, Ive been using this now for around a year, and never had any issues with it. Theres a couple small things i wish it had like export presets, but only a very minor issue with a super great (priced) app.

Brilliant programme as is Affinity Designer but it would be really great if both apps would have a "Check for Updates" in the menu bar. It takes a great deal of time to hunt around the web site and even then its not easy

Splendid! Really the first Adobe PhotoShop counterpart (PixelMator and Acorn are beautiful (have delightful UI!) and are very useful and thus good to have, but not quite PhotoShop replacements).

I want this to be under comment and not a review as it does seem to be a nice product which unfortunately, many will not have access too.

The Affinity Team has a web store to sell their Windows version of Affinity Photo yet they refuse to sell Affinity Photo other than through the Apple App store. I wont use the app store so I am unwilling to try Affinity Photo. That is too bad as it seems promising. I am getting back into photography and I will likely have to reevaluate Lightroom as they are still selling a stand alone version.

The neanderthal thinking on the Affinity team about not allowing direct purchase of their products gives me pause, leaning towards caution about software companies that find that doing things their way is more important than listening to their customer base. I have seen it too many times where an otherwise good product is held too tightly by those too busy congratulating themselves to pay attention to their customer base.

If Affinity photo still has bugs but is basically a good product as many others have said, why should I trust them that they are going to continue to improve the product if they are already refusing customer input? And yes, if they allowed purchase though their web store I would probably still get a license.

I would still be using Pixelmator if they had not cut off existing customers by going app store only. I loved version one of Pixelmator. But then, Pixelmator did the same thing and only sold out of the App store. Now I use Acorn. C’est la vie.

Awesome application with HUGE potential !!!

Superb image editor.

This does almost everything. But other reviewers aren’t kidding when they say it has a steep learning curve. This is one you have to throw yourself into manuals and tutorials. It’s so close to being a Photoshop replacement it’s frustrating—You find yourself stumbling over the stuff it can’t do. But it’s a lot of bang for your buck, that’s for sure.

Steep learning curve but I urge everyone that gives this a try to hold on !! Ones you master this tool, you never look back at any other image editor. It is incredible powerful and matches a lot of PhotoShop features. And all at a very fair price tag. Very highly recommended !!

Good alternative for Photoshop. Very powerful, though a steep learning curve. Nevertheless very highly recommended when you are use Photoshop and need a cheaper alternative.

This and Affinity Photo are the two apps you need for editing image files. If you need simplicity and relatively good editing tools for most needs, you definitely need Pixelmator. If you need full power and all the editing tools you ever need, Affinity Photo is the one to get.

I bought this app about 8 months ago and in most respects is pretty good but I wouldn't ditch Photoshop for it just yet. For all the unpopularity of Adobe and the ridiculous prices they charge I do still find their products to be, on the whole, pretty solid with features that really do make a difference. Affinity Photo is getting there and I do hope they keep on adding features. For the price, if you're a professional, it's a no brainer.

Affinity Photo is indeed a professional photo editing software, offered for an affordable price. It opens/saves PSD files (with they layers) and clearly it's aimed to replace Photoshop on Mac (and soon on Windows). However, app lacks some features available in Photoshop and PSD support is not always perfect. Personally, I faced some clipping issues with certain psd files. No Anti-aliasing options for text. No support for ASL files (Photoshop layer style). Plugins are still work in progress. But, developers are very responsive (even in weekends) and they constantly fix and add new features.

I've been using Affinity Photo since the Beta series. As it is now it will replace my Adobe Photoshop. The tutorials are VERY helpful and the video series will make you a seasoned user in no time. Goodbye Adobe-rent-an-app. . .and good riddance.

Very powerful, like PhotoShop, but cheaper.

I can only applaud the Affinity Team and have put my money where my mouth is and purchased Designer and Photo. I don't use Designer much because I never got into Illustrator but I have already switched from Photoshop. These guys are doing a tremendous job and a ß version of the 3rd member of the family called Publisher will be available later in the year. For those who really want to get off the adobe bandwagon, I would suggest that putting some money in affinity's coffers would be a good way of accelerating things.

I can only applaud the Affinity Team and have put my money where my mouth is and purchased Designer and Photo. I don't use Designer much because I never got into Illustrator but I have already switched from Photoshop. These guys are doing a tremendous job and a ß version of the 3rd member of the family called Publisher will be available later in the year. For those who really want to get off the adobe bandwagon, I would suggest that putting some money in affinity's coffers would be a good way of accelerating things.

After using PS CS6 for three years I was about to surrender to Adobe's mandatory "pay for life" CC subscription when I came across this jewel. I tried the Beta, liked it, and continued to watch the development over the past year. I am impressed how responsive they are to user input, and the latest version attests to this app continuing to quickly get better w. time. I like the layout and workflow, being familiar yet faster when compared to PS. Although the default GUI is a bit better than PS, I still experienced some eye strain after a few hours due to the small light gray type on gray background. But then I discovered the "User Interface" adjustments in preferences and now all is good. Another plus is this app isn't bloated w. a lot of graphic arts features -- just solid photo editing. But if you need graphic arts editing, they did the sensible thing by putting all that into another app called Affinity Design. The big question now is will AP do all the things I use PS for? After seeing all the features they have added in just a few months, I am optimistic. So much so, that I just bought v. 1.4 of Affinity Photo.

Pixelmator and Affinity Photo are both awesome image editors. Pixelmator is cheaper but lacks some features like plugin support. Still it fits for a lot of users that only need a simple, fast and stable image editor. Affinity Photo is more expensive and offers more advanced features. The best way to know which you need is to try both for free first. :)

Tried Photoshop but found it too complicated. This program has wonderful support and is not too complicated. What's more the extensions work with Photo. Love everything about it. Thank you Serif

Coming from Photoshop, this is one of the worst competitor apps that I've encountered, many tools don't work in a usable way and it also cannot load that many photoshop plugins (none for me). Its absolutely awful now, would have been nice to get rid of some of adobe's offerings

una delle migliori applicazioni del suo genere. quasi a livello di photoshop.
consente un miglioramento automatico delle foto ad un livello veramente ottimo.
prezzo eccezionalmente basso per quello che offre

This is just great image editing app, especially for the price 49€. I really hope that Serif company would continue developing this program, since I believe it is not far from Adobe's Photosop. Only a couple of things I would like to be there: for instance macros (or 'actions' as Adobe names them. But anyway, this is certainly worth every penny they ask for it.

I used to use Photoshop, but when Adobe went to a very expensive subscription only model (meaning you can only RENT it by the month now) I switched to GIMP, the free open-source Ps rival. It's steep learning curve is similar to Photoshop's & it does things Photoshop doesn't. And the fact that it's completely free makes GIMP an extremely attractive alternative to Ps. For a while I experimented with Acorn & Pixelmator, but they're both amateur imaging apps with limited capabilities. Now, however, there's Affinity Photo, which is not only a powerful professional tool, it's WAY simpler to use than either Ps or GIMP. It does most of what Ps does & does it faster, easier & at a small fraction of the cost. And there's no subscription. You buy it; you own it. Plus, it works in tandem with Affinity Designer, the new Mac vector drawing app that fills the huge hole left after Adobe bought & killed off Macromedia FreeHand. Affinity Designer blows away every other Mac drawing app on the market (except for Illustrator, Adobe's spendy subscription-only vector drawing bloatware). It isn't quite an Illustrator-killer yet, but it's getting there. Both apps (from British software company Serif) work seamlessly together to produce truly professional images. At the $49 price for each, they're a steal.

I used to use Photoshop, but when Adobe went to a very expensive subscription only model (meaning you can only RENT it by the month now) I switched to GIMP, the free open-source Ps rival. It's steep learning curve is similar to Photoshop's & it does things Photoshop doesn't. And the fact that it's completely free makes GIMP an extremely attractive alternative to Ps. For a while I experimented with Acorn & Pixelmator, but they're both amateur imaging apps with limited capabilities. Now, however, there's Affinity Photo, which is not only a powerful professional tool, it's WAY simpler to use than either Ps or GIMP. It does most of what Ps does & does it faster, easier & at a small fraction of the cost. And there's no subscription. You buy it; you own it. Plus, it works in tandem with Affinity Designer, the new Mac vector drawing app that fills the huge hole left after Adobe bought & killed off Macromedia FreeHand. Affinity Designer blows away every other Mac drawing app on the market (except for Illustrator, Adobe's spendy subscription-only vector drawing bloatware). It isn't quite an Illustrator-killer yet, but it's getting there. Both apps (from British software company Serif) work seamlessly together to produce truly professional images. At the $49 price for each, they're a steal.

Using Pixelmator for a very long time now. Someone pushed me to try out Affinity Photo as an alternative so I did.

The GUI looks amazing cool, as Pixelmator but with a lot more options, features, buttons, windows, ... I immediately got the feeling this is a really powerful app for editing images/photos.
And that is where it failed for me. It was just too complex compared to Pixelmator. I struggled with a lot of things like the Repair tool. You first need to set a reference point using a key combination and after this it still didn't produced good results. I probably am using it the wrong way but it shows the difficulty and steep learning curve needed to get into Affinity Photo.
It does more resemble to PhotoShop and that cannot be a bad thing if you know how to use such tools.

In short:
If you need quick and easy ways to edit images, Pixelmator is for you. If you need very powerful editing, you need Affinity Photo.

Awesome alternative for Pixelmator and of course PhotoShop. Very powerful but has a steep learning curve, same as PhotoShop. If you have time to learn this, you have a the best image editor for OS X at a very low price.

Great photo editor. A bit complex to use compared to Pixelmator but it is very powerful indeed. Pity you cannot testdrive it first.

Both Affinity Photo & Affinity Designer are on sale at the Apple Mac App Store until July 23rd: $39.99

This guy "nazeema aslam"

does what nobody in 20 years has done here: spamming a whole thread and making it almost unreadable because it gets divided.

Please MacUpdate, could you delete these countless iterations of identic spam posts and make sure such won't happen in the future ?

I am a big fan of Serif’s drawing app Affinity Designer so I was very excited to see a new app in this suite that is very tightly integrated. From the time I have spent playing with it there are a number of things I like more then Photoshop. Raw photography is more logically placed inside the app rather then from a plugin which allows you to easily switch back and forth between raw editing tools and the other tools. There is a separate persona for editing web graphics which is very nice since Adobe now buries all the web tools in difficult to find places. I liked how Adobe used to have separate apps for that kind of work but Affinity now does that except web tools are now split off in a section within the same app. Nice solution. The masking tools work differently then in PS and allow for some interesting possibilities in how to hide certain parts of an image. Affinity programs now share the same file so the days of making complex file structures in the Finder may be over. One file for illustration, photo manipulation, and eventually page layout (next year for the page layout.) This should be very helpful once Affinity moves to iPad that has a simpler file structure. The main short comings of the product to me is that it doesn’t have any way to easily batch edit photos or catalog. The way that I do most of my photography these days is do a photoshoot of similarly shot photos, edit one of the photos and then apply those changes to all the others. This is a huge time saver over editing one photo at a time. Until Affinity Photo has those features I don’t see using it as my main editing program. The developers have talked about looking at adding some of those features. Overall great version one software. Adobe will probably become the Quark XPress of graphics software where they were once dominate but better options came along and eventually overthrew them. Remember InDesign use to have far fewer users then Quark at one point. I personally believe the Affinity suite can go after Adobe even quicker then the time it took InDesign to become dominate. ID 1.0 was very immature but Affinity 1.3 is quite good from the start. I have to also mention this since it is brought up on social media everyday. I am glad Affinity is currently focusing on the Mac. IMO it is better on the Mac then it would be on any other platform. iPad - interesting new tool but still not as good for creating content as it is for viewing content. Windows 7 - Decent OS for it’s time yet old. Windows 8 - Do I even need to explain this? Windows 10 - Might be ok but won’t have major bugs worked out for another year like all the other versions of Windows. After surveying the other options Yosemite is the best OS at the moment. Better to not waste valuable development time on these other platforms.

I´ve been testing the program for a week or so, and I´m very impressed. For my needs it will definitely be a replacement for PS. In my humble opinion it won´t meet any competition at all. Pending of the price, of course.

Still in beta, so this isn't a review. I've been looking for a Photoshop replacement and this seems more promising than Pixelmator. Most of my demanding Photoshop work is done restoring old family photos, so obviously I'm not making any money doing it, which is why I'm not interested in paying a monthly subscription to Adobe. Pixelmator doesn't have enough of the tools I need, but Affinity Photo comes much closer. I'm looking forward to exploring it more and seeing how they improve it as the release version gets closer.

FYI this is a Beta version on offer here and it definitely won't be free when it launches.

I see this sitting somewhere between Photoshop and Pixelmator (and others in that genre). Had a play with the Beta but can't see myself giving up Photoshop (not a big fan of Photo's and Designer's UI). Good luck to them though. There are a ton of people out there wanting to get off the Adobe subscription thing and this might be what they've been waiting for.

AFFINITY PUBLISHER? Wow, our/My cup runneth over! I don't want to be greedy, (not much!), but it would be fantastic if we could get a look at the Publisher App before my 30 days trial runs out with InDesign!

Can't give a review and score just yet, as I've had exactly 20mins with the App so far but have to say it's looking pretty good to me! Came across an option in the prefs that looks like Photoshop Plug-Ins can be used also, if that is possible, then that would be a real deal clincher as I have just a few of those! The way it's looking, I can rid myself of my rental contract with Adobe this year, fingers crossed!

I haven't spent tons of time with this yet but the idea of basing a suite of apps on a single file format is a super cool revolutionary idea. This really cuts down on all the wasted time having to deal with file management and file hierarchies. Normally I would have one main project folder and then folders inside for illustrations, photos, layout files, etc but the single file format does away with that. Once Affinity Photo makes it to the App Store the apps will all use the same folder rather then a separate folder for each app in the way that most sandboxed apps work. Nice!