Affinity Designer Exit Text Tool

British firm Serif has been in the media-creation-software space for over a decade. Its Affinity line, which started with Mac-only apps in 2015, even garnered an Apple Mac App of the Year award that year. The Affinity apps are also available for Windows, and the company is attempting to make inroads on Adobe's firm grip on the media and design software industry. Serif's low, non-subscription pricing is no doubt a factor for some users. The latest version of this photo editing software adds hardware acceleration for improved performance on Windows, linked layers, astrophotography stacking, and custom interface presets. It's feature-packed and powerful, but some operations are still slow and the user interface still lacks some friendliness found in competitors. Several of the program's tools, too, fall short of Adobe's state-of-the-art software.

How Much Does Affinity Photo Cost?

Affinity Photo is available on the Mac App Store, from the Microsoft Store in Windows 10, and as a website download, for a one-time price of $49.99 (discounted to $24.99 at time of writing). There's no upgrade pricing, but you can install the software on as many computers as you have; Adobe limits Creative Cloud (such as Lightroom and Photoshop) applications to two machines. Serif Photo's generous free trial gives you 90 days for the price of an email address that you confirm.

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We like desktop software to be available via the app stores, as it simplifies the installation and update process across multiple computers. The download on my Windows test PC was 530MB, and the program took up 711MB of disk space after installation. By comparison, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop (both PCMag Editors' Choice winners) each take up 2GB.

When you first run the program, you see a Welcome panel that offers sample images, tutorials, and links to Twitter and Facebook content. You can also obtain overlay packs such as Fog, Snow, and Rainbow effects by registering your product. A New Document link opens a dialog box where you set image properties like size and type. Serif doesn't include an automated tour of the interface like those offered by several competing photo apps, including Corel PaintShop Pro, Lightroom, and Skylum Luminar.

The Affinity Interface

The interface is industry-standard very dark gray, but its many colorful icons are less understated than most of the photo editing apps of today. As with Photoshop, the interface shows a toolbar row across the left side of the program window and an info panel to the right for things like Layers, Histogram, Swatches, Adjustment, Transform—25 modules in all, any of which you can undock.

Above the main image view, there are buttons for five Personas—what most programs call modes. The default personas are Photo, Liquefy, Develop, Tone Mapping, and Export. Panorama is another persona, but it's only visible when you're stitching multiple images.

Personas equate to workspaces, but I had a hard time resetting the workspace to the default after removing some panels. I finally discovered the option way down at the bottom of a long flyout list from the View > Studio menu. A simple workspace reset option under the main View or Window menu would be preferable. You can customize the workspace, and Serif has now added the ability to save custom workspaces, as you can in Adobe Photoshop.

You can zoom with the mouse wheel plus Ctrl, and double-clicking switches you back to Fit view. One Affinity Photo interface feature I approve of is that double-clicking a control slider sets it back to its original state. Another is the side-by-side and split views to show your image before and after edits. Unlike most photo apps, there is no full-screen view, though hitting Tab gets you almost there, hiding most interface elements. Affinity Photo supports a decent selection of keyboard shortcuts, but not much in the way of right-click context menus.

You can undo and redo actions up to the limit you set in Preferences, and a History panel with a slider lets you take your work back to earlier states. The main interface adapted well to my highish-DPI (QHD) monitor (which is more than can be said for some Adobe products).

Photo Workflow

Affinity is not a workflow solution like ACDSee Ultimate, Skylum Luminar, Lightroom, CyberLink PhotoDirector, or Zoner Photo Studio. That means there are no importing or organizing tools. It's more along the lines of Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro, and Topaz Studio—that is, it's intended for photo retouching; image merging for panoramas, HDR, and focus stacking; and drawing. Topaz Studio does not offer any photo organizing tools either. There isn't even a panel showing drive locations such as DxO PhotoLab, Exposure, and PaintShop Pro have. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements offer complementary apps, Bridge and Organizer, to handle these functions.

Affinity Photo, like Topaz Studio and Photoshop, is only nondestructive in the sense that you don't save over the original image; you have to export to a different file format to save your work. In Affinity's case, files have an .afphoto extension. You can also export to Photoshop's .PSD file type and open documents of that type, as well. Lightroom and other true workflow solutions save your edits without requiring you to specifically save to a new format—your edits are saved regardless of whether you export.

The program supports a fair number of raw camera file formats, even somewhat recent ones like .CR3 used by the Canon EOS R and R6; though Nikon D6 and D7 photos showed as black. The import performance didn't impress in testing: It took about 40 seconds just to load a dozen raw images. On a positive note, zooming in and out of large raw images was snappy.

When you open a raw camera file in Affinity Photo, the program switches to the Develop Persona. I appreciate that this raw conversion happens in the main program window, rather than a separate dialog the way Photoshop forces you (though Lightroom doesn't). You do have to tap a Develop button and wait several seconds before you can edit a raw image, however (about 15 seconds on my test system).

You can do lens corrections (for chromatic aberration and geometry distortion) only in Develop Persona. You can revisit this Persona if you want to go back and use its tools again.

Serif Affinity Photo poor chromatic aberration correction

Affinity rendered a raw camera from a Canon 80D with noticeably more chromatic aberration than the free Microsoft Photos app, even with lens corrections enabled.

Affinity Photo now includes lens-profile-based corrections like those found in many apps, including ACDSee, DxO Optics Pro, and PhotoDirector. The tool did readjust the geometry on photos. On one test photo, though, even with Chromatic Aberration checked and the correct lens auto-selected, the photo had more CA than I got with Windows' included Microsoft Photos app (see image above). Checking Affinity's Defringe option didn't improve matters. You don't get a choice of develop profiles as you do with Lightroom and Skylum Luminar or even an auto-tone option in this mode. Noise reduction (NR) is only available in the Develop Persona; it works well, especially with color noise, though as with many programs' similar tools, it tends to blur details. You get far better noise reduction in DxO PhotoLab, and Affinity users also miss out on Lightroom/Photoshop wizardry like their Enhance Details and Texture slider options.

As with Corel PaintShop Pro, Affinity lets you open vector images in .SVG and .AI format, and save to the former, but not the latter. You can combine vector and raster image layers in the same file, and work on both, though as you'd expect, vector editing is limited compared with what you get in Adobe Illustrator. Serif's Affinity Designer offers more Illustrator-like capabilities.

The program supports batch operations and macros, useful for converting multiple files, stripping their metadata, or rotating them.

Adjusting Your Photos

In Photo Persona, you see a stacked group of tabbed panels on the right side of the program window. The top one shows a histogram, color picker, swatches, and brushes. The central panel has tabs for adjustments including lighting, colors, curves, LUTs, and gradients, but no detail options like noise reduction, sharpness, or chromatic aberration—you have to deal with that stuff at the Develop stage when you first open a raw file. The lower panel offers a photo navigator and sections named Transform, History, and Channels.

In this mode, you do get colorful buttons at the top for Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colors, and Auto White Balance. On some photos, these work fairly well, especially for levels and white balance. On one dark image, they did nothing.

The same panel's Layers tab shows you which edits are associated with which layers, and the Effects tab offers glow, blur, outlines, and overlays. There's even a Stock tab that lets you find images from Unsplash to license and use in your image.

Effects and Art

Affinity Photo is more targeted to Photoshop-style editing with layers and filters and the like than to straight photography. New for layers in Affinity Photo since our last review update is the ability to link layers and add Pattern layers. Photoshop itself only recently gained a Pattern Preview tool, which works similarly to the last mentioned. With Affinity, it's an actual Pattern layer type, which is helpful, and it's fun to see the pattern reproduced across the entire image as you draw.

If you're creating artwork, you can specify the target device (web, iPad, and so on), the color format (RGB, CMYK, LAB), and canvas size. Serif now lets you create templates on which you can base projects, but you won't find any included with the software, as you do in Adobe Photoshop and PaintShop Pro. The preset sizes are somewhat out of date. iPhone 8 is the newest option for that kind of phone, and the Nexus 7 is included, but no Pixel phones. Surface Pro 2 is the newest version of that tablet on the list—we're now up to the Surface Pro 7.

The selection tool works acceptably, with options to snap to edges and adjustments for feathering, smoothing, and anti-aliasing. You don't however, get the kind of detailed automatic selection that can handle complex things like hair, which you get in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Capture One. The healing tool requires you to select a source area to replace a blemish or unwanted object. It's not as sophisticated as Photoshop's content-aware Patch and Move tools.

The Tone Mapping mode lets you select regions of your photo using an overlay paint tool or an overlay gradient tool. The paint tool offers an Edge Aware option that worked well in my testing. You can also create a mask layer based on a color or luminosity range—but not in the Tone Mapping Persona. You need to go back to the Photos Persona, add a new layer, choose Selection from Layer from the Select menu, and then Layers panel, click on the layer's thumbnail with the Shift and Ctrl keys pressed. Then, you click Mask Layer in the Layers tab on the right panel. Other programs make it much easier to create and edit luminosity masks.

Liquefy gets its own Persona in Serif Affinity Photo

Liquefy gets its own Persona, but you must select a layer or mask before you can use it. In this mode, you get 10 tools that let you push and swirl the image's pixels. One of the uses for these, as highlighted on Affinity's help page, is for remodeling faces. But Adobe's Face-Aware Liquify tools are far better targeted for this, since they actually identify parts of the face and offer sensible editing options. With the Affinity tools, you're on your own.

Affinity Photo includes a good variety of brushes, including sub-brushes (combined brushes), symmetry drawing, and even wet-brush-edge paint accumulation. Brush styles include Acrylic, Engraving, Gouaches, inks, markers, pens, pencils—a full toolbox with a high degree of customization options.

The Panorama tool was able to stitch a pair of test raw-camera images shot with a wide angle lens. There is an option to Inpaint Missing Areas, which takes effect only after you exit the tool. you don't get Lightroom's cylindrical, spherical, and perspective merging options. It also successfully merge three adjacent iPhone X photos shot in portrait orientation.

The HDR Merge tool is impressive, though it took a long time to process our test images—much longer than Lightroom's HDR merge tool. The process includes denoising as well as tone mapping and alignment. When it's done, you get a choice of Natural, Detailed, Cool, High-Contrast Black and White, and Dramatic. The program can also combine images for focus stacking—of particular interest to those who shoot microphotographs.

A special-case tool Affinity Photo provides is the Astrophotography Stack Persona. This requires special shot types such as long exposures and calibration shots, but it does offer functionality not found in Photoshop to get those night skies looking clear and well-defined.

Text and Typography

Affinity Photo let me open a PSD file from Photoshop, and I found it easy to select, resize, and move a text box, but not actually edit the text. The program has its own text tools, Artistic Text and Frame Text. The former is for display type, and the latter for longer text entries. Very detailed formatting is possible, with thousands of OpenType fonts at your disposal. New for text is the ability to have your letters align along a path. You can choose ligature styles, but you don't get the level of glyph editing that Illustrator offers. Kerning and tracking are as detailed as you could wish, however.

Photo Output

The Export Persona lets you create custom image slices, but it doesn't actually have an Export button—you have to choose File > Export from the menu, just as you could in any other Persona. You can export your creation as PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PSD, PDF, SVG, WMF, or EPS. You can't export your file in the Illustrator .AI format, however. The program offers soft proofing and color management (including ICC profile importing). Another interesting option is the Lanczos 3 resampling option, which takes longer but is supposed to result in superior resizing results. I saw more detail enlarging a photo with Photoshop's automatic bilinear option, but some users in Affinity's forums claim to have better results with Lanczos enlargement.

The left side was enlarged from 6024 pixels wide to 10,000 pixels wide using Photoshop's Automatic bilinear algorithm, and the right side used Affinity Photo's Lanczos 3. Both used the program's default raw import settings.

Performance and Help

Serif claims improved performance in the recent update, with graphics processor acceleration. I did notice that zooming was snappier, and the program was mostly responsive during testing on my reasonably powerful test PC, a 3.4GHz Core i7 with 16GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics processor. But some adjustments, and even loading photos, took a lot longer than in other software. Chromatic Aberration correction and switching to tone-mapping mode was notably slow. To its credit, Serif Affinity Photo never crashed during testing, something that can't be said for a surprising number of media software titles, even those from the big names.

We appreciate that Affinity includes an actual help window that details all the program's features: many vendors have followed Adobe's undesirable practice of making you go online for help. Adobe also has an annoying habit of sending you to user forums, rather than official and relevant help resources.

Affinity Photo is a powerful, low-cost image editing program, but it trails Adobe's products in terms of both usability and advanced capabilities. If it does what you need—layers, color manipulation, it could be a way to save quite a bit if Adobe's apps are beyond your means. We don't recommend it as a raw photo workflow tool, since it includes nothing to organize your digital assets, and there's no companion organizing tool like Adobe Bridge. The ability to edit vector and raster images in the same program is another plus, but, again, the tools are limited. For unparalleled imaging tools, turn instead to PCMag Editors' Choice photo software, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom Classic.

Serif Affinity Photo

The Bottom Line

Affinity Photo includes many of the editing tools we associate with Photoshop, at a more attractive price. But it lacks the polish and advanced capabilities found in Adobe's software.

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