Discover Affinity Photo 2

In part 1 of a series, Rod Lawton reveals some hidden depths of Serif Affinity Photo 2, the latest version of this amazingly powerful Photoshop rival

- Rod Lawton

Affinity Photo has built a huge reputation as an Adobe Photoshop alternative that offers the same level of professional features as its Adobe rival, but without the subscription. Affinity Photo 2 brings some major new features and upgrades to boost productivity and creative potential, and we’ll go through some of them in this article. It’s a quick tour, but it will give you an idea of what this program can achieve and the depth of its creative tools.

Affinity Photo is a powerful program that inevitably introduces some unfamiliar jargon here and there. Photoshop is the same. And, like Photoshop, Affinity Photo is designed not just for photographers, but designers and illustrators too.

This means that there may be tools here that you simply don’t need right now. In fact, you can do most regular photo editing from the Layers panel, and any settings to tools you need will pop up as and when you need them.

Affinity Photo also has ‘Personas’. These are like workspaces but go rather further to include tools and processes not available in the main ‘Photo’ persona. The Liquify persona is probably going to be most useful to designers and professional retouchers, the Develop persona is where you process raw files and the Tone Mapping persona is for HDR merging and effects. The Export persona (see the box, right) is for outputting processed versions of your images.

One more thing. If you open a JPEG or TIFF image in Affinity Photo, it will open straight into the Photo persona. If you open a raw file, it will open in the Develop persona first, and you must develop it before it can be edited.