Affinity Photo


Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif for macOS, iOS and Windows. It is part of the "Affinity trinity" alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Affinity Photo is available for purchase in the macOS App Store, iOS App Store, and the Microsoft Store.

Functionality

Affinity Photo serves as a successor to PhotoPlus, which Serif discontinued in 2017 in order to focus on the Affinity product range. It has been described as an Adobe Photoshop alternative, and is compatible with common file formats such as Adobe's PSD.
Functionality include RAW processing, colour space options, live previews as effects are applied, as well as Image stitching, alpha compositing, black point compensation, and optical aberration corrections. Working in Affinity Photo is always live, with pan and zoom at 60fps and non-destructive editing. It supports unlimited layers and a dedicated workspace for developing RAW photos; as well as RGB, CMYK, LAB, Greyscale colour spaces with ICC colour management and 16-bit per channel editing.
Affinity Photo is not an image organiser like Apple Aperture or Adobe Lightroom, however Serif have confirmed they are developing one.

Development

Affinity Photo began as a raster graphics editor solely for macOS. It was Serif's second macOS app, and was built from the ground up to leverage core native technologies, including Grand Central Dispatch, Core Graphics, OpenGL and Metal 2 hardware acceleration.
Serif established an R&D team for Affinity Photo in 2009, headed by lead designer Andy Somerfield. A free beta test version of the Affinity Photo app was released to the public on 9 February 2015.
The initial stable release of Affinity Photo, version 1.3.1, launched on the Mac App Store 9 July 2015 for macOS 10.7 and later. At that time, Serif's raster graphics application for Windows was PhotoPlus; however, following the release of Affinity Photo for Windows, this product has now been discontinued. Version 1.3.5 of Affinity Photo, released in August, provided numerous bug fixes and improvements.
Serif announced its first major update to Affinity Photo in December 2015. Version 1.4 added panorama photo stitching as well as support for macOS 10.11 El Capitan, including six Affinity extensions for Apple Photos. Updates to both Affinity apps provided language support for Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. These augumented the four languages in previous versions: English, German, French and Spanish. Stability and bug fixes were released with Affinity Photo 1.4.1 and 1.4.2, in January and June 2016. Version 1.4.3 in September 2016 optimised Affinity Photo for macOS 10.12 Sierra.
In December, 2016, Serif launched Affinity Photo for Windows, and released an update to the macOS version at the same time, Affinity Photo 1.5.1 added a 32-bit RGB editing mode with support for 32-bit file formats and more than 70 new camera RAW file formats, as well as the ability to develop RAW files directly into a 32-bit document. Version 1.5.1 also added support for the new MacBook Pro with Touchbar.
Serif launched Affinity Photo for iPad during the keynote at Apple's WWDC in San Jose on 5 June 2017. In September 2017, the iPad version was updated for compatibility with Apple's new iOS 11.
Serif released major updates to Affinity Photo, as well as Affinity Designer, in November 2017. Affinity Photo 1.6.6 was optimized for macOS 10.13 High Sierra, better integration with Apple Photos, improved Photoshop Plugins support and added an option to switch between a dark or light user interface.
In February 2020, version 1.8 of Photo added support for Photoshop smart objects in PSD files, and expanded plug-in compatibility, with focus on DxO's Nik Collection of plug-ins.

Reception

The macOS version of Affinity Photo was received favourably by professional photographers, and Apple named it as the best Mac app of 2015.
In 2016, Affinity Photo was awarded the prize for Best Imaging Software by the Technical Image Press Association at Photokina.
In November 2017, the iOS app was named by Apple as its best iPad app of the year, and Tom's Guide selected Affinity Photo for their first list of Best Tech Values.
In February 2019, Affinity Photo received Amateur Photographer's Software of the Year award, followed by Photography News' Best Software award in March 2019.