OUR EARLY VERDICT
Affinity Photo is a far cry from Serif's budget Windows programs. Designed from the ground up for Macs, this is a fast, efficient and genuine Photoshop alternative and looks packed with promise.
FOR
- Speed and real-time effects
- Price and non-subscription licence
- Raw support for brand new cameras
AGAINST
- Plug-ins support yet to be finalized
- Even experts will need to acclimatize
- Basic media browser
Photoshop has been the world's top image editor for so long that it's hard to remember things ever being any different.
But now it has a brand new rival, in the form of Serif Affinity Photo. Launched as a public beta in February 2015, it's now scheduled for release in the summer of 2015 at the same price as the company's vector drawing app Affinity Designer (£39.99/US$49.99 from Mac App Store).
We're testing what the company describes as a 'late beta'. It requires a 64-bit Mac, but it's compatible with any version of the Mac OS from 10.7.5 Lion or onwards.
What makes Affinity Photo different
Serif is better known in the Windows world, for its range of low-cost, amateur-orientated alternatives to professional applications, such as PhotoPlus and DrawPlus. But the Affinity series is very different.
First, it's designed from the ground up solely for Macs. Second, it's designed not for amateur Photoshop wannabees, but as a direct Photoshop rival – Serif wants to be very clear about this. Third, it's the second in a trio of professionally-orientated 'Affinity' applications sharing the same core processing engine and file format and designed, eventually to dovetail together in the same way as Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, but with directly transferrable files.
Affinity Designer has already been making waves as a fast, affordable and powerful Illustrator rival and the third program, Affinity Publisher is due in late 2015.
You can try out the free Affinity Photo public beta right now. You will need a 64-bit Mac, but it's compatible with any version of the Mac OS from 10.7.5 Lion or onwards.
Why do you need it?
Affinity Photo is an important and much-needed rival to Photoshop. Photoshop has some flaws that we've got used to, including a number of 'non-live' effects and processes where you have to try some settings, wait to see the effect, then go back and try again if it's not right. It also has a new subscription payment plan that some users will never get used to.
Affinity Photo's brand new architecture, however, is designed for live previews and redraws of even complex tools and effects, and it's available from the App Store as a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Serif says, 'we don't do subscriptions'.
Personas – workspaces reimagined
At first sight, Affinity Photo looks a lot like Photoshop. Down the left is a vertical toolbar containing a familiar set of tools and on the right is a stacked system of expanding/collapsing palettes.
There is a difference, though. At the top left of the window is a row of 'Personas', which could at first glance be mistaken simply for different workspaces; in fact, they put Affinity Photo into different editing modes.
Liquify persona
The Liquify persona is just like the Liquify window in Photoshop, but feels faster and more fluid. It's also possible to 'freeze' parts of the scene which you want left alone and carry out your pinch, push and twirl adjustments around them.
The maximum brush size is limited to 1024 pixels in this version, however, which is fine for manipulating small objects but not really large enough for large-scale distortions.
RAW Develop persona
This is the equivalent of the Adobe Camera Raw dialog in Photoshop. It lacks a little subtlety compared to Adobe Camera Raw, but then this is only the beta version. It can set black and white points automatically, and you can change these later to extract the full dynamic range of your raw file, but it doesn't have the camera calibration options in ACR for mimicking the camera's own colour reproduction. There are manual chromatic aberration and lens correction tools, and Serif is planning to 'crowdsource' lens profiles which can be applied to raw files automatically.
The Raw Develop persona has a full range of colour and tonal adjustment controls, and it's also possible to apply localised adjustments with gradient and brush tools – just like Adobe Camera Raw.
The current beta was launched with raw support for some of the very latest cameras at the time of writing, including the Canon 5DS, 5DS R, 750D, 760D, EOS M2 and M3, Fuji XQ2 X-A2, Nikon: D7200 and Nikon 1 J5, Pentax K-S2 and Samsung: NX500. If Serif continues to be this fast out of the blocks with support for new cameras, that's going to be a big feather in its cap.
Export persona
The Export persona does exactly as you'd expect, exporting your images in a range of formats using adjustable parameters (JPEG quality, for example) and presets. But it's also useful for web designer – it can split images into slices for export, based on layers and areas.
Photo persona
The Photo persona is where you do all your serious work. This is the principal editing environment while the others are designed for specific tasks.
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