Down the left-hand side of the screen is a vertical strip of tools, while on the right is a set of panels for layers, adjustments, filters and more. The Photo Persona is laid out in the same way as almost every regular photo editor. Most of the work in Affinity Photo takes place in the Photo Persona, so let’s take a look at that first. Affinity Photo saves images in its own bespoke file format, so you need these export controls to produce regular JPEG or TIFF images for sharing or publishing. The Export Persona is for choosing file formats, colour and compression settings. You’re unlikely to spend a lot of time in the Liquify Persona, unless you do some heavy retouching and like Dali-esque reality enhancements.

And if you create an HDR Merge, you’ll be taken straight to the Tone Mapping Persona to make your adjustments.

It’s a bit like Adobe Camera Raw, but integrated into the Affinity Photo interface. You can switch between them manually as required and in some instances they will open automatically.įor example, if you open a raw file, you will go straight into the Develop Persona where raw processing is carried out. You don’t go through them one by one in a linear order. In order of appearance on the top toolbar, these Personas are the Photo Persona, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping and Export Personas.

The tools are different, and you use them at different stages of the workflow. These aren’t just different configurations of the same tools. Affinity PersonasĪffinity Photo offers five different workspaces for different tasks. This is an old-school photo editor, Photoshop style, but without the cash outlay or the subscription. And Adobe refugees will be delighted to learn that not only are there no subscription plans, and that until version 2, every single update since launch had been free.Īffinity Photo is not really designed for beginners, it has no cataloguing and browsing features and it doesn’t offer one-click insta-ready ‘looks’ for your social channels.

Affinity Photo might be priced like a budget program, but it’s far from that. The price is a slight increase over the previous version, but still low for software of this calibre. Affinity Photo supports any number of adjustment layers, image layers, Live Filter layers and masks, to allow highly sophisticated editing steps.

Affinity photo editing software reviews