INSTANT EXPERT AFFINITY PHOTO
Bring your pictures to life with this powerful image editor – no subscription needed. Nik Rawlinson introduces the best features
Whether you’re shooting with a smartphone or a powerful DSLR, your photos can often benefit from a little light editing. You can tweak them with Windows’ integrated Photos app, but for more advanced, professional-grade edits you’ll need a more capable tool, such as Affinity Photo.
Developed in the UK by Serif (now part of Canva), Affinity Photo is part of the three-app Affinity suite, along with Designer and Publisher. It’s a dedicated image-editing program, much like Adobe Photoshop, with support for a wide range of image formats, including raw files straight off the camera. It’s available for Windows and macOS, and there’s also an iPad edition for editing on the move.
One thing that makes Affinity Photo particularly appealing is its price. By contrast with Adobe’s subscription-only licensing for Photoshop, Affinity Photo is offered as a perpetual licence costing only £68 inc VAT for Windows and macOS, or £18 inc VAT for the iPad edition. If you buy the whole Affinity suite, you get all three apps on all three platforms, plus every point-release of the version 2 builds, for £160 inc VAT. Discounts are offered for bulk business purchases and for education institutions, with Serif promising “incredibly affordable licensing options for educational purposes”.
You can download Affinity Photo from the Microsoft Store, or directly from
affinity.serif. com. The iPad version is available through the Apple App Store. You’ll need an Affinity account to activate the software, but you can try out Affinity Photo – as well as Designer and Publisher – for free before handing over your cash.
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djustable adjustment layers
Affinity Photo offers multiple levels of undo to roll back your edits, but it also makes extensive use of adjustment layers for fine, non-linear tweaking. Rather than containing pixels or other image elements, an adjustment layer defines adjustments that apply to every image layer beneath it. To better understand how this works, open an image and make sure the Layers panel is visible (if it isn’t, click it in the View menu). Now click the Adjustments button at the bottom of the panel and select the kind of adjustment you want to make.