Affinity Photo vs Photoshop, which one is better? Which one should you use for editing your photo? To answer the question, today we will present you a head to head comparison.

Though both are professional photo editing software, there are pros and cons to them. Before going to the discussion, let’s know some history about Photo editing.

Affinity Photo is a powerful and very professional photo editing software under macOS and Windows operating systems. From the service point of view, the software can satisfy users whether it is quick correction, exquisite modification, or immersion in complex art works.

1. Affinity Photo has long been a strong competitor to Adobe Photoshop. With its new version 1.9 update, Affinity Photo is an even stronger photo editing application. Available for macOS, Windows and iPad, Affinity Photo 1.9 adds many new features and promises improved performance.
2. Search for Stock images within Affinity Photo; Add previews to your layer stack as guidelines; Search Commercial and Model Released images; Royalty free providers (Unsplash, Pexels and more) Adjust Tool and UI Settings Light or dark user interface; Adjust background and UI gray levels; Set tool behavior and appearance in Preferences.

Before the invention of technologies, photo editing was the work of hands. People edited photos by cutting photos and adding inks. Abraham Lincoln’s photo was the first hand edited photo in 1860.

After the great invention of computer technology, photo editing became more easy. Since 1980, the software Adobe Photoshop has been leading the photo editing world. But with the advancement of technology, there are more new software coming. And Affinity Photo is the most similar software nowadays. But in the race of photo editing, how much ability it gains compare to Photoshop? We will see that in the head to head comparison.

There are also other alternatives for photo editing software. We sorted out 15 best free drawing software here for you. You can check one of them and use to create your amazing arts.

What is Affinity Photo?

Affinity Photo is a raster-based photo editor. It is qualitative image editor software and deserves the designer’s attention. To create a professional graphics tool, Serif designed this great software. With the Affinity Photo, they have entered in the photo editing industry. Affinity Photo also offers a publication tool.

The modular interface of Affinity Photo consists of five sections. To access basic image editing tools, it has the Photo Persona section. You can apply wrap effects with the Liquify Persona to correct distorted photos. And the rest is Tone Mapping Persona, Develop Persona, and Export Persona. You can export images in Raw, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, etc. formats with the Export persona.

What is Photoshop?

Photoshop is a popular and leading photo editing software. It is for both beginners and professionals. Photoshop has a complex interface but a huge number of tools for advanced image editing. Adobe system first launched Photoshop in 1980 at the beginning of technological advancement.

With lots of upgrades, Photoshop reached to a great position. Now we all think photo editing means Photoshop. It offers many handy plugins, textures, fonts, brushes, etc.

Professionals can take the benefits of custom layers and masks in Photoshop. It is the giant place for image editing. There is no limitation when you edit in Photoshop. The only limitation may be your imagination.

Download Adobe Photoshop CC from here and start designing.

The Key Differences Between Affinity Photo vs Photoshop

Affinity Photo and Photoshop are both for professional graphic design. But which one is the most powerful software? We will decide after comparing their features and other affordability. So, we will see some major differences in this Affinity Photo vs Photoshop comparison.

Affinity Photo vs Photoshop: Features

Let’s compare all the important features of Affinity Photo and Photoshop to see who wins.

Affinity Photo Features

• Affinity Photo offers an attractively designed user-interface, which is easier than Photoshop.

• It has no subscription charge and provides a free trial version. But you have to buy the original software with an expensive and single payment.

• The toolset in Affinity Photo is more fast and efficient. But not for all the advance editing.

• It also offers powerful live tools and real-time editing.

• It has a full set of 16-bit filters and can undo or redo 8000 history steps while editing.

• You will have access to advance layer control and it has limitless layers.

Photoshop Features

• Photoshop has a limitless ability for photo editing. You can extend its functionality with add-on programs or plugins.

• The pen tool in Photoshop provides precise paths for selecting objects.

• You can fix any defects and curves with the Photoshop stamp tool. It also allows you to duplicate or remove objects from the photo.

• The cropping and slicing tools are more advance in Photoshop.

• With five different spot healing brush tool, you can fix any spot from the photo.

• There are also enough selection tools in Photoshop. Marquee tool, lasso tool, magnetic lasso tool, etc. are the most effective for selection.

• Other great features of Photoshop are that you can edit video with it. Though Adobe has a more advanced video editing tool, you can edit a video with Photoshop.

• You can design 3D illustrations and paintings in Photoshop.

• Photoshop also provides 360 panorama workflow and Adobe Camera Raw enhancements.

In this Affinity Photo vs Photoshop head to head comparison, Photoshop is the best.

Affinity Photo vs Photoshop: Platform

Affinity Photo works on Windows, macOS, and IOS platforms. But Photoshop works only Windows and macOS.

Affinity Photo vs Photoshop: User Community

Beginners, business, professionals, and freelancers all can perform their work with both software. But in Photoshop, designers have more editing access than Affinity Photo. In Photoshop, you can design anything you imagine. There are no limits to editing in Photoshop.

But, Affinity Photo has various limitations while editing. But it is more user-friendly than Photoshop.

Affinity Photo vs Photoshop: Cost

Photoshop Cost

Adobe Photoshop has three different pricing plans. You can choose one from them. Photoshop offers a monthly plan at $31.49, an annual plan but monthly paid at $20.99, and an annual prepaid plan at $239.88. So, Photoshop requires subscription monthly or yearly.

But Photoshop also includes some extra advantages to these plans. Each one of them offers you access to the latest features and updates. It will also provide 100GB of cloud storage and other features. So now it’s up to you which plan would be the best fit for you.

Affinity Photo Cost

Affinity photo offers only one-time payment for windows and Mac at $49.99. But it will cost you only $19.99 IPad version. You can also use a free trial version for Windows and Mac before purchasing.

Affinity Photo vs Photoshop: The Winner

Now the question which one is the winner in this Affinity Photo vs Photoshop head to head battle? It became difficult to select the ultimate winner. But we should see the top winner is Photoshop.

Affinity Photo also is a close competitor to Photoshop. But Photoshop wins with its unlimited features and editing capabilities. But remember, everything depends on your needs.

Conclusion

In Affinity Photo vs Photoshop, both are professional tool. They perform well. It is good for us that we have such two precious photo editing tools in the digital era. If they compete with each other, we can have a better user experience soon. The future comparison may change if Affinity upgrades its feature. But in terms of price, Affinity already one step ahead in this Affinity Photo vs Photoshop.

A raster-based graphics software is a computer program that allows us to make and edit photos. It also allows us to save them in many raster graphics file formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF.

The graphic design software that is open source and free to the users is the free drawing software. The best free drawing software is Krita, My paint, Gimp, etc.

Adobe Camera Raw lets you import and enhance raw images. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, After Effects, and Bridge supports Adobe Camera Raw.

Affinity Photo 1.9 is here, and as usual, it is free to existing users on the platform(s) a licence has been purchased for.

If you’re an Affinity Photo user who needs some help updating to 1.9, we recommend you check out this handy guide—How to install Affinity updates.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in this latest release.

1. Linked layers

In 1.9, you now have the ability to duplicate linked layers, then unlink particular attributes, which is really beneficial for composite work. If you want to take it further, you can also link specific attributes of completely different layers, then manage everything on the intuitive Links panel.

James shows us some use cases for linked layers in this video.

2. Astrophotography stacking

One for the stargazers out there—in Photo 1.9 you are now able to stack deep sky astrophotography imagery, including FITs documents in addition to RAW files. This makes Affinity Photo one of the very few cross-platform apps that can perform the entire astrophotography post-production workflow, from stacking to powerful editing and retouching—all in 32-bit precision.

For stacking, you can auto-detect hot/cold pixels and manually highlight column defects to produce a cleaner stacked result. There’s also a dedicated background removal filter—fantastic for removing difficult background gradients (light pollution, airglow, moon illumination, sensor defects) after tone stretching.

Check out the tutorial below, plus five other in-depth Astrophotography videos on our website.

3. Hardware acceleration on Windows

Hardware acceleration uses your computer’s GPU devices to dramatically increase rendering performance for raster-based operations, such as compositing pixel layers, adjustment layers, live filters and raster tools. Mac users have enjoyed the benefits of Metal Compute hardware acceleration since version 1.7 and now Windows users can enjoy this same benefit and experience some massive performance gains, especially with more esoteric workflows like complex layer compositing in 16-bit or 32-bit pixel formats.

Here James explains how to enable and disable this feature on both platforms and how it can be beneficial.

4. Pattern layers

Create endlessly-repeating patterns just by simply painting into the bounds of this new layer format, then rotate, shear, scale, clip and mask it for some fantastic design ideas. What’s more, you can also create pattern layers from existing raster layers, giving you another approach to bitmap pattern fills for architecture and other design workflows.

In this video, James shows us how to add seamless raster textures and patterns to diagrams and illustrations using this new feature.

5. Studio presets

In Photo 1.9 you can create, save and recall different interface layouts with ease. You’ll find this incredibly useful if you have multiple users that prefer different layouts, or if you have specific workflow setups that you wish to toggle between—you might have dedicated layouts for colour grading, retouching, brushwork, vector design and compositing, just to name a few disciplines.

James runs through how to customise your workspace, save studio presets and quickly switch between them in this video.

And there’s more…

There are so many cool features packed into Affinity Photo 1.9, we found it hard to pick just five. Here are some other exciting new additions we really want to tell you about.

Live Liquify

A much-requested feature—in Photo 1.9 you have the ability to perform Liquify operations non-destructively using a live filter layer, rather than committing your changes to a pixel layer.

Affinity Photo User Interface

LUT improvements

You can now batch-import LUTs (lookup tables) to the Adjustment panel and quickly audition them on your document.

External file linking

Placed images and documents can now be linked externally. You will also find a dedicated Resource Manager dialog to manage these external files.

In this video, James explains how to enable linked resources, allowing you to place images and documents into your work that can be updated externally.

Custom brushes from layer selections

Image and intensity brushes can quickly and easily be created from pixel and mask layers—a fantastic way of speeding up brush creation workflows.

This feature opens up a variety of creative possibilities, some of which you can see in this video.

Divide blend mode

In an image editing workflow, this new blend mode helps you to correct difficult colour casts and opens up further tonal options when used with live filter layers.

James runs through some corrective and creative uses for the Divide blend mode in this tutorial.

Check out our 1.9 Affinity creative sessions

For even more information about this latest release, check out the 1.9 Affinity creative sessions led by our in-house product experts. They run through all the major updates to each app, and you can stream them at any time on our official YouTube channel.

Watch more tutorials

We have a fantastic range of video tutorials designed to help you get the most out of Affinity Photo 1.9 on our website.

Find out more about our 1.9 updates:

Affinity Photo is currently 50% off

The Affinity Photo Interface

In response to the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have once again cut the price of our apps by 50%—including the newly released 1.9 versions, so if you don’t have Affinity Photo yet, now is a great time to purchase a copy.

The 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite is also back for a limited time. For more details and to download the free trial, go to the Affinity website.

Affinity Photo Trial

Existing users can download v1.9 free from their Affinity account.