Today, Serif launches Affinity Photo, the extremely anticipated companion app to 2014’s AffinityDesigner. Whilst Affinity Designer was aimed toward vector art work, Affinity Photo is an expert bitmap editor.
The entire ethos across the Affinity vary is producing extremely quick, subtle instruments which might be targeted to supply a productive workflow for artistic and images professionals — Ashley Hewson, Managing director of Serif
We first reported on Affinity Photo again in February, when it was launched as a public beta. Since then, 230,000 designers have downloaded the app and Serif have been engaged on including characteristic requests from the beta interval, as we speak we’re getting our first take a look at the outcomes.
WORKFLOW
Affinity Photo is an extremely quick different to an app like Photoshop. The energy behind it implies that nearly all the pieces occurs dwell on the artboard, not in preview panels.
AFFINITY PHOTO CAN BOTH IMPORT, AND EXPORT, THE PSD FILE FORMAT.
Affinity Photo doesn’t got down to characteristic-match Photoshop, however it does assist nearly all the pieces Adobe’s behemoth sports activities: there’s assist for RGB, CMYK, Greyscale, and LAB; ABR brush recordsdata will be imported; export choices embody PNG, TIFF, JPG, GIF, SVG, EPS, and PDF; there are limitless layers, adjustment layers (together with readability, vibrance, white stability, and extra), filters, and masks; export @1x, @2x, and @3x from layers, slices, or complete paperwork; break up (or mirrored) screens can be found to show earlier than and after views.
Most importantly for anybody working professionally, Affinity Photo can each import, and export, the PSD file format.
In addition, Affinity Photo delivers quite a few options that Photoshop is crying out for: personally I was notably impressed with the choice to save lots of the historical past panel for a doc for entry afterward.
PERFORMANCE
The very first thing you’ll discover opening up Affinity Photo is its pace relative to Adobe Photoshop. Utilizing core Apple tech like OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch, and Core Graphics produces an especially pleasant different to the spinning beachball of demise.
Affinity Photo started life as a collection of experiments, one in all which was to edit reminiscence-intensive photographs on iOS. Thanks to the shared structure of iOS and MacOS, the progressive options devised to unravel that conundrum will be scaled as much as run on desktop machines:
…all of the lean, imply effectivity required to fulfill my iOS efficiency targets, unleashed on OS X units with gigabytes of RAM – Andy Somerfield, lead Affinity Photo developer
After just a few hours of working with Affinity Photo, it’s clear that is the brand new benchmark for graphics app efficiency.
NO SUBSCRIPTION
One of the chief complaints levelled at Adobe within the final couple of years has been their subscription mannequin.
Serif have rejected the subscription mannequin: the complete worth of Affinity Photo is $forty nine.ninety nine with free updates for 2 years.
Coincidently, one month’s subscription of the whole Adobe CC 2015 suite can be $forty nine.ninety nine. Which means in the event you swap from Photoshop to Affinity Photo, you’ll have $1149.seventy seven to spend on a shiny new iMac on which to run it. Of course the Creative Cloud subscription covers greater than a single app, but it surely’s a tempting proposition nonetheless.
To additional whet your urge for food, for the following two weeks Affinity Pro, and its companion Affinity Designer, will each be bought completely by means of the App Store for $39.ninety nine (reverting to $forty nine.ninety nine on the twenty third July).
FUTURE PLANS
Two of Serif’s trinity of apps (Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo) at the moment are stay, and Affinity Publisher — anticipated to rival Adobe’s InDesign — is scheduled for launch in late 2015/early 2016.
Like Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo is at the moment Mac solely. This permits Serif to combine Mac-particular options just like the power contact trackpad. Serif are nonetheless engaged on El Capitan integration, and Metal is predicted push Affinity Photo’s efficiency even additional.
However, as soon as El Capitan updates roll out, and Affinity Publisher is launched, Serif plan to convey the apps to new platforms, together with iOS and Windows.
PHOTOSHOP KILLER?
Affinity Photo has been in growth for 5 years, and though it’s usually stated that Photoshop has a 20 yr head-begin, it’s beginning to really feel extra like 20 years of luggage.
Affinity Photo doesn’t attempt to characteristic-match Photoshop, it goals to be higher; it’s exactly as a result of Serif haven’t replicated each Photoshop operate that they’ve delivered a quicker, extra environment friendly bitmap software.
It’s most likely time to cease speaking about Affinity Photo as a Photoshop rival, and as an alternative begin speaking about Photoshop as an alternative choice to Affinity Photo.
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