I succeeded in replacing Photoshop with this App!

When CS6 stopped working in El Capitan, I was suddenly in emergency mode. Apps like Pixelmator were good, but always missed some critical piece of my workflow, or critical element of compatibility with my huge pile of legacy psd files. So I tried the free trial of Affinity Photo. In most ways, honestly, the UI is VASTLY BETTER than Photoshop ever was! Photoshop’s UI still seems modeled after the 1980s when nothing could be done in real time. In Affiniy photo, any layer can be transformed at full speed , in place, by simply touching it. And IMO, doing the basic everyday things better is much more important that how many esoteric features you offer.

WARNINGS: There are some differences in the way Affinity Photo works that REQUIRE help from the Forums to do very basic things and can be initially frustrating - however, I received Forum help in about 24 hours along with great videos, and once you know how something works, it’s seldom more than a couple clicks away. Affinity Photo curently can’t do EVERYTHING in my work flow - but the 10 day trial was JUST ENOUGH to figure out to do the CRITICAL things I needed (including backwards compatiblity psd features) to determine that I could switch to it. Other missing features (like 3-D text extrusion) are more luxury items for me. Bearing in mind that I had no choice whatsoever - CS6 just hangs in the splash screen - I believe that Affinity Photo is THE PHOTOSHOP OF THE FUTURE. It does the minimal things I need now, it has a solid base of support, and I think it’s worth investing an education in it for the future. This is what Photoshop might have been had Adobe started over from scratch. I can easily see Affinity Photo claiming 80% of the market in the next year. And I might never have really tried it had Adobe not cleverly kicked me out of their system, leaving me hanigng with psds I couldn’t edit.

MY ADVICE TO AFFINITY: You really should make the free trial last 30 days, owing to the steeper learning curve for Photoshop users. Like me, there are many users that need to test features for backwards compatiblitiy, and It is very hard to tell if a key feature doesn’t exist at all, or if I just don’t know how to do it.

conflagrator about Affinity Photo