Buying Options of Affinity Photo 2Īffinity Photo 2 usually costs $69.99 for macOS and Windows and $19.99 for the iPad. Live Mesh Warp allows you to wrap text or images around 3D objects in a photo. There are luminosity range masks too, and combining layer masks has become available too. Band-pass allows the creation of a mask focused around edges within an image, which is particularly useful for those who work on different frequency layers. Masks can also be easily created to follow the hue of the object in the picture. The new Live Masks feature updates masks automatically based on the underlying image's properties. There are also Liquify and Tone Mapping Personas.įor those considering upgrading from V1, the new version allows you to develop raw files non-destructively and choose to embed them into a document file or link them externally. The software has other tricks up its sleeve, too, including panorama stitching, Plus HDR, Focus, and Astrophotography Stacking. I won’t go through all the tools individually because most editors have similar functions, and like others, Affinity Photo has layers and the ability to apply blending modes and layer masks. The layers-based adjustments are on the right. Affinity is no different, with various tools on the left of the screen with their settings in the top bar. Many photo editors are similar and based upon the layout of Photoshop. Nevertheless, users of the first version or Photoshop will not feel lost at this point. I say mostly because there are some new tools added. Here, the user interface has changed from V1, but the changes are mostly cosmetic. When you have finished developing your image, you click the Develop button on the top left of the window, and then your image opens in the Photo Persona. This means a lot of scrolling up and down that panel when moving between adjustments. Another slightly bizarre feature is that you cannot minimize those sections without turning those adjustments off, as you can with Solo mode in LR. Alas, you must scroll down that panel and find them in a separate section further down. One would expect the Shadows and Highlights adjustments to sit alongside the other tonal adjustments, i.e. The layout of the basic adjustment sliders doesn’t seem that intuitive to me. The contrast slider in Affinity is very sensitive and needs a lighter touch than in Lightroom. With Lightroom, I would usually barely touch that. For example, I could push the clarity slider up to 50% on some images, and they didn’t look over-processed. With Affinity Photo, it means you don’t have to be so scared of over-adjusting the settings, as is so easy to do in ACR or LR. That might take a little getting used to if you are an Adobe user and must pussyfoot with the presence sliders. The adjustment sliders are gentle in their response compared to LR. Increasing noise reduction in both resulted in a muddier-looking image using Lightroom. If you look at the back of the lapwing in the middle, Affinity, on the left, handles the noise far better than Lightroom does. Each is a 100% crop, and the sharpening and all noise sliders are reduced to zero, as opposed to the default values. The photo was underexposed and brightened in development to accentuate the noise. The above image was shot at a high ISO with noise control turned off in the camera. Furthermore, increasing the noise reduction didn’t leave the image looking as muddy as it does with some competition. Even at higher ISOs, opening photos into external noise reduction programs was unnecessary. The noise reduction from the Serif Raw Engine is pretty good, far better than Lightroom’s. Regarding sharpening, most raw developers find it hard to compete with AI-based noise reduction software, such as Topaz Denoise AI and ON1 No Noise AI. Furthermore, images shot at higher ISOs were much cleaner with Affinity than LR, even if I reduced Lightroom’s sharpening down to zero. This is good news, as it means less image development and editing time. I opened the same raw file in both Affinity Photo and Lightroom (LR), and the initial results in Affinity were far closer to the image on the rear screen of my camera, which I have set to closely match what my eyes see. The most important thing to me about any software is the results, and the Develop Persona does deliver. The different functions of the software are split between what Affinity calls “Personas.” The one I spent the most time in was Develop. It's not without a couple of shortcomings, but what software isn't? I am pleased that this has been addressed with Affinity Photo 2, and after hours of fun trying out the features, I found it stable and running smoothly on the computers I tried it on. That was mainly because an annoying glitch ruined my raw developments. I’ll have to start by admitting that I was not a fan of the first version of Affinity Photo. I’m hyper-critical of raw development tools, as that’s where most of my work is carried out.
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