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Affinity Photo Released For Windows

There are many reasons to be excited about Affinity Photo’s release for Windows this morning (it’s been available on Mac for about a year). The software is fast, sophisticated, attractive and full featured, offering a legitimate replacement to Adobe’s Photoshop. This morning’s update to both versions brought more than a dozen great new features (including direct read and write to PSD format files).

But my favorite thing about Affinity Photo for Windows is that the software costs only $39.99 during it’s introductory period.There’s no monthly subscription. Once you’ve purchased it, it’s yours to use for as long as you’d like.

Affinity Photo’s masking capability is very sophisticated.

I’ve been testing the Beta of Affinity Photo for Windows for a couple of weeks, and I love it. I’m still getting used to the interface and all of the features, but it is very fast (much faster than Photoshop) on my Surface Pro 4, which is my main computer while I’m on the road.

Is it as good as Photoshop? In some ways it’s probably better (automatic lossless handling of scaling without need for Smart Objects, for example), but in other ways, it’s still developing. For example, Affinity Photo still doesn’t include profiles for all 3rd party lenses yet, though I expect that to change in the future. It also doesn’t have all of the 3D imaging and video editing/animation features that Photoshop does. For photographers, though, it has all the features you’ll need.

If you only need Photoshop’s photo editing features, though, I’d recommend checking out Affinity’s website. They also have a great user support forum, and dozens of free video tutorials about every feature of the program.

Use Affinity Photo to add lighting effects or dozens of other filters or more complicated macros.
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claude

For hobbyist stuff, Affinity is perfectly fine. But if you’re looking toward a career in design, you need to know Adobe.

I have a XP-Pen Star G640 drawing tablet and Affinity Photo . Works for me . AF may not have all the features of Photoshop, but it’s close. The UI is more intuitive and the workflow is far more seamless. Also not a huge fan of Adobe’s subscription model.

G

VERY interesting. Great report and review.

Alfred Lopez

I didn’t know the “Curves” window looked that cool! I haven’t been on my machine for a week so I still need to update my version to 1.5. It was annoying to convert to TIFF from Lightroom so that I can edit in Affinity. I much prefer working with PSDs.