Serif’s powerful editing app gets a serious update
£17.99 (for iPad; universal licence £144.99) FROM affinity.serif.com NEEDS iPadOS 15 or later
You get a layerbased image editor that’s split into ‘personas’
Serif’s Affinity suite rivals Adobe in bringing pro-grade image editing without a subscription to Macs and iPads. The latest releases of the three Affinity apps, released as version 2 rather than a free update, may mean you have to pay once more, but a universal licence – which gets you all apps on all platforms with no extra costs – is about the same as one year of equivalent Adobe apps. There’s a 30-day free trial too.
The iPad version of Affinity Photo 2 is probably the most interesting of the updates, as it has the broadest appeal and is cheaper than the Mac app (which costs £69.99 if you buy it separately). And while the both Mac and iPad versions takes on Adobe Photoshop, the Mac version lacks the organisational tools of Adobe Lightroom or the browsing capabilities of Adobe Bridge, and there is no equivalent on iPad either, which is a shame.
With Affinity Photo 2, you get a layer-based image editor that’s split into ‘personas’. The Photo persona is a straightforward imageediting app, though a powerful and complex one that will require time spent in the online manual and tutorials to master. The Develop persona is for processing your Raw files. Liquify is for heavy retouching that’s more like sculpture in the way it moves pixels about, and Tone Mapping is for HDR. Finally, Export is for creating the perfect output file for your needs. Personas take over the interface of the app, changing the available tools and options, rather than appearing in a floating window.
Users of the first version of Affinity Photo on Mac will find a great deal of refinement but little that’s actually new, though the iPad version now features quick menus and a command controller to speed up workflows, a compact mode to make the best use of limited screen size, and a resource manager for linked content. The Layers palette has had an overhaul, making masking, clipping and reordering clearer; plus, there are a great many more non-destructive options when masking (the entire Develop persona is non-destructive too, appearing as a layer with adjustable settings). Additionally, you have the option to export straight to the WebP format or open the HIF files from Canon cameras.
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