Adobe Photoshop CC 2020 vs Affinity Photo 2020

In the battle of the image-editing apps, there’s only one winner: the users

- IAN EVENDEN

THE WORLD OF professional image-editing applications is not a wide one. There’s Adobe Photoshop, and then there’s everything else: Maybe PaintShop Pro or PhotoPaint from Corel, or the opensource GIMP, or Paint.net if your needs aren’t very great. Then Serif, maker of the also-ran app Serif PhotoPlus, decided to play Adobe at its own game with the Affinity suite. First came Affinity Designer, then Affinity Photo, then Affinity Publisher, rivalling Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign in terms of features and usability.

Serif is quick to retweet stories on social media of professionals abandoning Photoshop for Affinity Photo, often underlining the difference in payment schemes adopted by the two software developers. But just how similar are the two programs? And can someone who’s been using Photoshop for 20 years navigate a new app?

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two apps is the way you pay for them. Photoshop is part of Adobe’s notorious Creative Cloud suite of subscription-only apps, but differs slightly in that it can be obtained (along with RAW-processing and image organization app Lightroom) as part of the bargain-priced Photography Plan, which at $9.99 a month is half the price of a subscription to any other single app. Alternatively, you can splash out $52.99 a month for the entire software suite, which numbers more than 20 apps.