Unbelievable Deal

I pulled the trigger on Affinity Photo when it went on sale at $39. As far as software is concerned, what you get for the money here is an amazing deal. This is $200 software being sold for $45. Even if you don’t like it, at the price it’s worth buying and spending some time to see how good it is.

I bought it hoping to replace Adobe Lightroom as my primary photo editor. I was disappointed to discover that it’s more in league with Photoshop than with Lightroom. I’m not a heavy-caliber Photoshop editor, and found that Affinity Photo was offering a far deeper editing set than I had wanted to simply spruce up photos without making them look… well… too spruced up.

After a week of playing with Affinity Photo, I absolutely fell in love with it, though. I still use Lightroom as my RAW editor since Affinity’s RAW processing seems to lag behind Lightroom here. But, after doing the RAW work in Lightroom, I export my photo over to Affinity to finish the editing.

What I love:
Beautiful interface which is easy on the eyes. Adobe products just give me a headache to stare at. They seem disorganized and gaudy. Affinity is just relaxing to work with and hosts a solid interface that doesn’t keep making me angry for unknown reasons like Lightroom does.

One Price, One Product. I have a photo editor that will continue to improve and I paid a single price for it. I have no idea what Adobe is thinking with their mocked-up rental schemes, but Affinity ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS ADOBE where product ability for price is concerened. Adobe could never make software this great for this price.

Non-Destructive Edits. Sure, the layers concept isn’t new, and Lightroom has non-destructive editing too… but Affinity does it smoother and better.

Improving. Affinity will get better and better. Adobe will wallow and confuse while charging a price for updates.

On-line Resources: Affinity does a great series of how-to videos on their site which are designed to really get you running quickly.

Zoom tool: Lightroom lets you zoom once. Affinity lets you zoom to your own desires.

In-Painting: Adobe should pay attention to this.

What I don’t love:
RAW Editing. So close… but not quite there.

Lens corrections. It could be that I haven’t figured it out entirely, but lens corrections aren’t inherent. You have to build them, it seems.

Slow. I’m using a 2012 Mac Mini with 8G RAM and Affinity really drags compared to Lightroom. And honestly, Lightroom is a pig too. Affinity is worse.

Underdog. Since Affinity is new and not the industry standard, there aren’t many publications or pros giving instructionals and hints. (Then again, there’s a certain pride in learning by playing around.)

Plug-Ins are sparse. I really love direct to site plug-ins for Flicker, SmugMug, et al… but none exist yet for Affinity.

In the end, I can sum it up with this: WHY DID APPLE KILL APERTURE? ;)

Shemp about Affinity Photo