Affinity Photo: A low Cost Alternative to Photoshop
Don't want to Pay Adobe $54 per month? Here's an alternative:
Posted by Creative Beacon on Monday, August 31, 2015
Affinity Photo
Whenever a new tool becomes available, I like to be one of the first ones to test it out. When I heard that someone was making a new piece of software that is supposed to compete with Photoshop, I had to check it out. Right now, Affinity Photo is in its beta testing phases. I decided to download it and check it out for myself. I signed up for the beta, and quickly received an email. Let’s take a look at Affinity Photo, and I’ll tell you what I think of it.
It’s relatively light weight
I expected Affinity Photo to be a monster in size. Surprisingly, it came in and only 400 MB, which isn’t nearly as large as I expected. It only took a minute to download, and another minute to install. Quickly, I was up and running in little to no time at all.
It’s lightning fast
For being the beta version, Affinity Photo runs super fast. It opened almost instantly, making it much faster than Photoshop. I opened up a couple images and tried out some of the features. Things like filters, blur effects, and painting tasks ran instantly. There was no lag or lack of performance. Personally and professionally, I was impressed.
It is built well
All the menus are organized into compact panels. Different adjustments can be accessed via accordion menus. When you’re ready to make an adjustment, just click the photo under that particular adjustment, and a popout menu comes out with more options. When you’re done, it goes away. Just like in Photoshop, you have different tabs in the way that you like to work. If you’re familiar with how Photoshop works, you’ll build the zip around Affinity Photo quickly and easily.
It has all the professional features you would expect
Affinity Photo has all of the professional adjustments, filters, and tools that I need to professionally edit photos. It has all of the color modes you would expect, such as RGB, CMYK, and even LAB mode. You can create effects such as drop shadows, and are shadows, glow effects and even 3-D.
There are modules at the top left of the menu system that allow you to access different tools and parts of Affinity Photo that have a separate interface. One example is the liquefy settings. You can liquefy image and push around the pixels just like you would in Photoshop. There’s also a development mode, which is still in beta. You can import camera raw files directly into this module for quick processing. Class module allows you to export your images at different formats and sizes, making things easy for you to get all the necessary files in formats that you need. You can eat then slice your images, if you’re using them for the web.
Affinity Photo is well on its way to competing with Photoshop
Affinity Photo is packed with most of the tools that you find in Photoshop, but at a fraction of the price. Affinity Photo runs fast, works great, and doesn’t bog down your computer. Right now, it’s only available for Mac users, but they do plan on creating a PC version at a later time. You can download the beta version for free and tried out yourself. When it’s released, it will only be 30 or 40 bucks in the iTunes store. This is much more affordable than Photoshop itself, coming in at roughly what the fee is for one month of Adobe’s subscription. You don’t have a huge budget, I would highly recommend trying out Affinity Photo as a great alternative. To download the beta, click here to sign up. They will email you with the download link.
