Affinity Photo vs. Photoshop: Which Is Better?

Affinity Photo vs. Photoshop: Features

Affinity Photo

When you first open it, Affinity Photo looks almost identical to Photoshop. There are layers, history, tools on the left, and a context bar on the top. Its feature set is more tightly focused on photo editing, but it’s no slouch. If photo editing and painting are what you need, then Affinity Photo has you covered. Some of its powerful features include:

• Develop & Tone Mapping Personas: Affinity Photo’s focus on photography means that you get the kind of tools you’d find in Adobe Lightroom right within the Affinity Photo workspace via a dedicated persona.
• Batch jobs: Photo editing often involves applying the same adjustments to a whole bunch of photos, particularly when preparing them for other apps or websites that have strict size restrictions. Affinity Photo makes this easy with the batch jobs on the file menu.
• Astrophotography, HDR, panoramas, and other stacks: Photo provides the kind of powerful tools that involve large sets of photos right at the top of the file menu.
• Excellent pen input support: both the desktop and iPadOS versions of Affinity Photo include great brushes out of the box and put drawing and painting tools like pressure sensitivity and stabilization right at the top of the app. 
• Integration with the rest of the Affinity suite: Affinity is unique in that it allows you to access the full version of Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer from within Affinity Publisher. There’s no need to switch apps or worry about file linking when working on larger projects in Publisher.
• Support for a wide variety of file types: Affinity Photo can open just about everything, including Photoshop PSD files and Adobe PDF as well as TIFF, EXR, and other uncompressed and raw formats. 
• A fully featured iPadOS app: Affinity Photo, like Designer and Publisher, also comes in the form of an iPad app that offers almost all the same features as the desktop versions.
• Cycle future: the history panel on Affinity Photo has an extremely useful feature when it comes to experimentation: you can not only undo and redo but also revisit entire branches of edits and try out multiple edits without losing the changes you did after going back to a previous history state and making a new edit.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool, and Adobe has tended to treat it as the Swiss Army knife of the creative industry for most of its 3.5 decades on the market. That’s given it a particularly expansive set of tools that sometimes feels a bit random.

• Integration with Adobe Lightroom: Lightroom has become the first and often only tool for professional photographers using Adobe Creative Cloud, and although it doesn’t always work as intended, Photoshop is the only app that can receive photos from Lightroom for more complex edits and then send those edits back to Lightroom without exporting and importing again.
• Powerful filters: a hallmark of Photoshop for decades has been the Filter menu. Everything from liquify to tilt-shift blur effects and painterly effects can all be applied from the Filter menu. The ability to apply filters non-destructively to any smart object is also a particularly flexible addition to the Photoshop toolset.
• Content-aware: first introduced as a way to quickly resize photos without having to cut out the subject or crop information, content-aware has gone on to add content-aware fill, which greatly speeds up retouching and has received AI assistance in newer versions.
• AI tools: Adobe has shifted its focus to AI support in many apps, and Photoshop has gotten a slew of tools like AI-assisted selections, cloning, and content generation. These all have the potential to greatly improve workflow but come with some distinct AI-related caveats.
• Video and animation: one of the more bizarre features in Photoshop but one that is nonetheless useful is the timeline, which allows for limited video editing and animation directly within Photoshop. This can be particularly useful when trying to achieve specific effects or use Photoshop filters on image sequences that you will later edit in After Effects.

Verdict: Tie

Adobe Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo is kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison given Photoshop’s Swiss Army knife approach. For photographers and digital painters interested primarily in still images, Affinity Photo is an excellent choice. Having access to the kinds of tone mapping and development tools that you’d have to outsource to Lightroom from Photoshop is particularly helpful, especially considering Photoshop’s clunky and unreliable integration with its sister application. You can also use Affinity Photo in conjunction with Lightroom with only a few more steps than Photoshop for those who have a lot of work in Lightroom already.

However, for graphic designers and other creatives who might find the ability to quickly replace content wholesale with AI, as well as motion designers working with After Effects, Photoshop is a powerful tool. Even though Affinity Photo does have a powerful set of filters and treats layers more like Photoshop’s smart objects by default, not all filters are available as non-destructive filter stacks. Photoshop therefore offers the ability to create unique painterly and print effects that you may struggle to replicate in Affinity Photo.

Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo: Performance

Comparing Affinity Photo vs. Adobe Photoshop in terms of performance largely comes down to the age of the respective apps. While it isn’t a make-or-break for most designers, waiting for filters and watching the loading circle adds up over time. App crashes and lost data add hours to a project much more quickly. Let’s have a look at Adobe Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo when it comes to performance and stability. 

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo, along with its sister apps Designer and Publisher, is renowned for its speed, efficiency, and reliability. Given that it was designed to work on both Intel desktops and iPad’s ARM chips from the beginning, it works particularly well on the latest generation of Apple’s ARM-powered desktops and laptops. Time will tell if that performance translates to the new generations of ARM-powered Windows machines, but Affinity Photo certainly has an advantage on contemporary hardware.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop has been around for a long time, and even though Adobe has done a remarkable job keeping it up to date, its age still shows in some cases. Some filters like halftone still don’t provide live updates. The filter gallery can feel quite slow to respond in general, and designers will frequently find themselves guessing at the outcome as filters and adjustments sometimes have to be turned off while editing one or the other.

Verdict: Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo vs. Adobe Photoshop in terms of performance has a clear winner: Affinity Photo. You can expect smooth performance on everything from powerful workstations to iPads.

Affinity Photo is also well positioned to take advantage of the general industry-wide shift away from aging x86 and x64 processor architecture towards power-efficient and customizable ARM chips.

Affinity Photo vs. Photoshop: User Interface

Affinity Photo vs. Adobe Photoshop’s interface is a close comparison. Photoshop defined the interface for a lot of creative applications. The layer-based workflow, customizable panels that can be docked and grouped with tabs, and the overall menu layout have made their way into just about every 2D creative application. Affinity Photo is no exception, and it has also learned important lessons from Adobe’s user interface design.

Affinity Photo

If you’ve worked with Photoshop before, you’ll have little trouble getting started with Affinity Photo. The layers, dockable panels, menu items, tools, and more are exactly where you’d expect to find them. Instead of listing notable features, let’s explore how Photo has diverged from Photoshop.

1. Personas: The most notable difference is, of course, Affinity Photo’s personas. The develop, tone mapping, and export personas are entirely different workspaces that allow Affinity Photo to incorporate features from Adobe Lightroom and speed up your workflow.
2. Studios: In Affinity apps, studios refer to the main workspace. You can customize the workspace as you see fit and save it as a studio preset, but by default, there is one main studio for each persona, rather than having workspace presets as in Adobe Photoshop.
3. Single pathways to operations: Affinity Photo has opted to avoid having multiple pathways to a given operation. This cleans up the interface and makes it easier to remember where to find things, but it also means that you might want to put together a macro for operations that require multiple menu clicks if you’re going to be doing them repetitively. That said, Affinity has also done an excellent job of keeping operations a maximum of two levels deep.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop’s user interface is time-tested and has been the industry standard for photo manipulation and painting for decades. It owes no small part of its success to its interface. It can be tough to compare any other interface to it objectively because Photoshop’s interface is already familiar to so many and has informed so many other applications.

Let’s explore some of the ways it differs from Affinity Photo and more recent additions to the Photoshop interface that have departed from the traditional photo manipulation interface that it established. 

1. Properties panel: Photoshop has been somewhat more conservative in its adoption of the Properties panel than apps like Illustrator, but the relatively new context-sensitive Properties panel does make an appearance in Photoshop. It provides quick access to commonly used tools depending on what type of layer you have selected and what tool is active. It is essentially an extension of the kind of functionality you see on the options bar at the top of the application.
2. Contextual taskbar:  In addition to the Properties panel and options bar, Adobe has also added a context-sensitive taskbar that floats beneath whatever layer you have selected.
3. Lightroom: Having photo development tools broken off into a separate app can be beneficial depending on your workflow. It takes a few extra steps from the kind of Photo development tools you get in Lightroom to the layer-based editing in Photoshop, but with as much as Photoshop has going on, it is at least cleaner to have Lightroom broken off into a separate app, even if that adds steps to the workflow.
4. Multiple paths to an action: In addition to the multiple context-sensitive bars, Photoshop has a variety of ways to perform the same action. For instance, you can use adjustment layers to add curve adjustments to multiple layers at once non-destructively. You can also add the curve adjustment from the image menu and apply it non-destructively. In addition, if you set the layer to a smart object, you can add the curve adjustment from the image menu non-destructively. These multiple paths can be confusing but also add a degree of flexibility to the UI.

Verdict: Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo vs. Adobe Photoshop is a tough comparison in terms of user interface because they are quite similar. Beginners will find Affinity Photo more straightforward and will likely prefer having the development and tone mapping in one application. Photoshop veterans will also find Affinity Photo very easy to get started with.

In general, Photoshop’s age has resulted in some redundancy and confusing workflows that can be irritating at best and a workflow bottleneck at worst. For example, exporting to newer file formats like WebP does not appear in “Export As”, neither does it appear in “Save for Web Legacy”, nor even in the “Save As” dialogue. To save to WebP, you have to choose “Save As” and then “Save a Copy”, and then you can save as WebP. However, other formats like JXL and HEIF are notably absent from that dialogue.

While redundancy does exist in Affinity Photo, particularly with regard to exporting, there is a generally clear reason for it, and you won’t find that different paths lead to different implementations of the same operation.

Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo: Pricing

Pricing is a significant consideration for any designer, photographer, or digital artist. How does pricing differ for Affinity Photo vs. Adobe Photoshop? The exact prices change frequently, and there is a significant amount of complexity and fine print in Adobe’s pricing. We’ll look at the differences between the Affinity pricing model and the Adobe pricing model, but I encourage you to visit their respective sites and dig into not only the pricing but also the cancellation policies and various packages offered.

Affinity Photo

The Affinity Photo pricing model is straightforward. At the time of writing, Affinity Photo is offered on a perpetual license basis with a one-time payment. You can either purchase it individually for a single operating system or purchase it bundled with the Affinity suite, which includes licenses for all available platforms.

For example, if you wanted Affinity Photo for a Windows machine, you would pay once and have permanent access to the Windows version. If you later wanted to use the iPadOS version, you would need to purchase it separately. Similarly, the macOS version would be another separate purchase if you decide.

Alternatively, if you purchase the bundle that includes all of the Affinity apps, you can install and use all of the apps on all supported platforms without any additional purchases. You can also purchase the apps individually in the Mac App Store, but it is significantly more streamlined to purchase them directly from the Affinity site.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe has offered all of its apps through a subscription-only pricing model since 2013. There are multiple different bundles offered, but the primary and most common is the Creative Cloud bundle, which includes all apps (except for the Substance apps).

There are a lot of different discounts available. Paying for an entire year, for instance, typically provides some small discount, as does accepting an annual contract that prevents you from canceling without paying for the full 12 months, even if you don’t pay for all 12 months upfront.

Verdict: Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo and the Affinity suite are substantially cheaper than Photoshop and the Creative Cloud suite, even if you opt for just Photoshop or a limited bundle that includes Photoshop. The downside, of course, is that Adobe still has deep roots in creative industries, and Affinity Photo simply doesn’t carry the same kind of weight on a resume as Photoshop does.

Depending on the industry you work in, other Adobe apps that don’t have such well-rounded alternatives as Affinity Photo may still be required.

Affinity Photo vs. Photoshop: Ecosystem and Support

In terms of ecosystem and support, Adobe Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo is, in a sense, ecosystem vs. support. Adobe dominates the industry with its ecosystem, but Affinity Photo has instead focused on providing good support and being as compatible as possible with other third-party applications.

Affinity Photo

Since its release, Affinity has had an uphill battle to compete with Adobe’s massive and growing ecosystem. It has made the integration between the three Affinity apps as smooth as possible, while also going to extremes to make sure that as many formats and platforms as possible are supported.

1. The Affinity hierarchy: Affinity has established a system for its apps that follows a typical graphic design workflow, with Publisher at the top and Affinity Designer and Photo both available from within Publisher. This means you can let Publisher manage the organization and linking of files while working in Affinity Photo’s main persona. All of the edits made in Photo are also made directly within Publisher, and all of the layers available in Photo are also available in Publisher.
2. Formats: Affinity Photo makes it exceptionally easy to export to contemporary formats like WebP and JXL, while also supporting as many raw and uncompressed image formats as possible. It even opens Photoshop’s PSD files and PDF files. This means that whether you’re working in UI design and need the smallest, highest efficiency possible or you’re working in VFX and need as much color depth as possible, you can do it all within Affinity Photo. It also means that if you cancel your Adobe subscription, you can still open your Adobe files with Affinity Photo.
3. Platforms: Windows and macOS are supported, of course, but Affinity is unusual in that full versions of all the apps, including Photo, are also available on iPadOS. There is, as yet, no Android version available.
4. Third-party support: You won’t find the kind of integrations for Photo that you do for Photoshop, although being able to export and import such a wide range of formats generally makes up for that.
5. Cloud support: while it doesn’t have the full range of features that Creative Cloud offers, syncing files and sharing through third-party cloud solutions like Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, etc. is as easy as any other application. However, it requires some intentional file management on the iPad version.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe has focused on getting all of its apps to work together through Creative Cloud. The benefit of an ecosystem is that everything within the ecosystem generally works together, and Adobe’s ecosystem covers just about every creative industry. Some of the features that Photoshop has access to are quite powerful.

1. Creative Cloud: Adobe Capture is particularly powerful as it allows you to capture textures, patterns, color schemes, fonts, materials, and more from the world around you and add them to Photoshop. Having Lightroom available on the phone and tablet as well as the computer is also helpful. There are some legal considerations concerning Adobe’s use of AI and their policies regarding their ability to access your work, but as long as your workflow and licensing allow for it, there are some advantages to sharing documents and working collaboratively through Creative Cloud. 
2. Formats: One disadvantage of an ecosystem is that there is less incentive for the developers to make their app compatible with other third-party apps, and Photoshop has lagged severely when it comes to the newer, high-efficiency formats. At the time of writing, WebP is only supported through a convoluted set of steps and even then has to be used with a Photoshop action to be applied to batches of photos. HEIF and JXL have yet to make an appearance in the export menus. Support for industry image formats like EXR, raw formats, and other uncompressed formats are included, but Adobe continues to add steps in the dialogues that push users to save to cloud documents (not the synced files you see in the Creative Cloud folder) which are stored on Adobe servers and use the PSDC format. Photoshop does, however, support several video formats.
3. Platforms: Photoshop is, of course, available on Windows and macOS. It also has some support on Linux via WINE. On Apple silicon, Photoshop still has several limitations compared to the Intel version. You can, of course, use an older Intel version through Rosetta on macOS for a very minor performance hit, but it is worth considering. The mobile version of Photoshop for iPad and Android tablets has been playing catch-up for a long time and still isn’t there yet. Some different Adobe apps are tailored to specific needs, but Adobe has not yet made a full-featured iPadOS or Android version of Photoshop. 
4. Third-party support: Given its status as an industry standard, Photoshop enjoys broad support across the industry, with a variety of plugins made by third parties. Its PSD format is also broadly supported in other desktop apps and even some web apps.

Verdict: Tie

Affinity Photo vs. Adobe Photoshop’s ecosystem should be an easy win for Photoshop, given that it has a massive ecosystem and long-standing industry support while Affinity Photo doesn’t. However, Adobe has increasingly tended to use its ecosystem as a stick rather than a carrot.

Creative Cloud should be a very beneficial tool for creatives, but that convenience comes with a growing list of caveats. At the time of writing, Adobe’s policies and the controversial status of AI in creative industries make it a potential liability for creatives.

Ultimately, Affinity’s lack of built-in cloud, AI, its smaller ecosystem, and its focus on supporting as many third-party formats as possible may be more appealing than Adobe’s all-in-one approach. 

Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo: Conclusion

So which is better: Affinity Photo 2 vs. Photoshop?

Ultimately, the choice between Photoshop and Photo will likely come down to the company or clients you work with. Even if you prefer Affinity Photo, you might end up having to use Photoshop. There is a lot of momentum behind Photoshop, and having Affinity Photo on your resume won’t mean much yet for most employers.  

• Affinity Photo is best for:
• Freelancers and small businesses that don’t have the budget for an expensive recurring subscription.
• Digital painters and concept artists who use pen input and who want to be able to go from iPad to desktop easily.
• Print designers who will be using Affinity Publisher given its advantages over InDesign.
• UI and UX designers and front-end developers. Photo’s export tools work much better with Figma, Webflow, Framer, WordPress, and every other web platform with image size requirements. Its support for high-efficiency image formats makes it an ideal choice for SEO as well.
• Photographers. Even those with an extensive library in Lightroom will still be able to work with Affinity Photo and find its built-in photo development and tone mapping tools much more convenient than going back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop.
• Adobe Photoshop is best for:
• Large collaborative teams that have a substantial investment in Adobe already.
• Motion designers and video editors who are heavily invested in Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro.
• Freelancers and content creators who will benefit from AI generation tools.
• Students looking to add marketable skills to their resume.

Fortunately, nothing is preventing you from using both. I use Affinity Photo almost exclusively. All of the screenshots in this article were processed through Affinity Photo because its batch tools make it substantially faster for me to prepare large numbers of images. Even if you have a large amount of work in the Adobe ecosystem, as I do, Affinity’s one-time purchase pricing model makes it a great backup if you ever need to pause your Creative Cloud subscription.

On the other hand, I still have a Photoshop subscription so that I can tell clients that I have Photoshop, and so that I can write how-to articles about Photoshop. Photoshop’s ubiquity in the industry is potentially its most compelling feature.

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