If you like Photoshop, you will love Affinity Photo.

After studying with and using Photoshop for most of my life, I got tired of using their software on OS X. Photoshop used to be the gold standard of OSX Photomanipulation software, a must-have if you owned a Mac and did any professional image work. Not anymore, Photoshop hasn’t worked great on OS X in a long time.

Now this is a review about Affinity Photo, not Photoshop.

Affinity Photo is crazy fast. The trackpad gestures for moving/zooming around a document feel buttery smooth. Everything about Affinity Photo feels familiar if you’ve used Photoshop, but you will definitely need to have experience in software similar to this if you want to learn how to edit photos. Thankfully, the Affinity Photo website has some fantastic tutorials to getting started.

There are only a few things that Affinity Photo cannot do, like full 3D support and video editing which Photoshop can. However, both 3D and Video were never “fun” experiences in Photoshop and I generally didn’t use them anyway.

My complaints are very few. My most-used shortcut from my Photoshop days was holding down Spacebar while making a selection with the selection tool so I could reposition it without increasing/decreasing the selection. This is not in Affinity Photo (currently as of March 9, 2016).

If you are a Professional and need Photo Manipulation software similar to Photoshop then go try out their free trial and inevitably come back to buy it.

I don’t think I’ll ever return to Adobe’s products again.

Khyrdantai about Affinity Photo