Poor Substitute for Lightroom

Lightroom’s problem is it now requires a 120 dollar per year subscription to keep an Adobe program up to date; thus, an opportunity has arisen for other programs to take its place. Affinity Photo wants us to think they are the one to replace Lightroom. They are not. I am not a dedicated Lightroom user and I am using Lightroom 5 because I can’t afford to update the thing. Plus, I am not impressed with several Lightroom concepts or its inate complexity. I was hoping Affinity Photo would be less complex and avoid concepts built into Lightroom that make it hard to use, but Affinity failed.

Cropping should be the easist process of all. This is so basic, yet Affinity failed in its execution. When I crop photos and press “apply” the result is NOT what I choose. The program moves the crop to another location. If I go into Edit and remove the crop then the correct crop shows up. Also, after a crop the user should be able to adjust the position of the crop right away. In this program the user must delete the crop just made and redo the entire thing. Very poor.

The choices of tools and whatnot on the left side of the photo should not include a fill tool or pen tools or items not immediately associated with photo editing. This makes the tool icons extremely small as a large number of icon are there that will not be used often in photo editing. This is true of the entire editing area. It is extremely cluttered and the icons are terribly small. Affinity needs to clean this up. While Lightroom has too many layers of editing tools all separated from one another, Affinity needs to add at least one layer to clean out the drawing and painting tools and keep them away from the photo editing tools.

For some odd reason, on my iMac machine (about 5 years old) the interface moves around. The reviewing and editing area, plus the picture, all kind of ripple now and again.

A built in problem for Lightroom and Affinity Photo is they both try and do too much outside of photo editing. Yet, in the photo editing area, they come up short. I can’t really edit batches of photos without examining each of them closely, and to do this I have to zoom in on various parts of each picture. After that I can move on; however, the both programs make it hard to change to the next picture if the zoom is in play. Not a big deal until you are trying to go through 200 photos and all of the sudden each additional move becomes a major pain. Why can’t I just hit the arrow key?

So… to keep this review short enough to read, I don’t like it.

AD2

Alandaledaniel about Affinity Photo