The develop persona is effectively Adobe camera raw, in Affinity's own style. Of these, the develop persona is particularly interesting. There are 4 personas currently in Affinity Photo, the standard interface, a develop persona, a liquify persona, and an export persona. These are basically like modules, which change the whole interface to a dedicated workspace for the task at hand. It even has panorama merging built in, and it also includes six extensions for Apple Photos.Īffinity Photo also features what Serif call "Personas".
It features a healing brush and patch tool, as well as a dedicated blemish removal tool (spot removal) and a red eye removal brush, as well as the full compliment of standard tools, such as clone stamp, marque, crop etc.
It has a nice brush engine too, and works well with a tablet for fine retouching. For example, if you parent one to a layer, it just affects that layer, but put it at the top of a stack and it affects the whole stack. But you can do some neat tricks with them, by changing the stacking order. It has lots of live filters, which are non destructive filters, much like the smart filters in Photoshop. It has some really nice touches of its own on some of these features. It has support for 8 or 16bit colour in both RGB, CMYK and Lab (and greyscale).
It has a full compliment of layers, channels and effects, all in an interface that should be familiar to Photoshop users, so it's easy to pick up. While it doesn't do everything Photoshop does, it does a lot, and what it does it does very well. It has a lovely modern and clean design, and in my opinion looks much nicer than the current version of Photoshop.
I had actually been using the software during the beta, but then it went off my radar for various reasons and I'm only getting back to it now.įirst of all, Affinity Photo is a beautiful application. I realise that I'm a little late with this post, as Affinity Photo's been out for a while now, but I wanted to share some first impressions anyway. With this quick first look, I'm going to talk about my general impressions of using it, and I'm not going to go too in-depth, butI'll follow this up in a little while with a full review. The software got a lot of attention when it was launched, and Apple named it the best Mac App of 2015. If you haven't come across it before, Affinity Photo is a Photoshop competitor from Serif labs, the same people who brought us the excellent Affinity Designer (an illustrator competitor).