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Affinity Photo 2 Review: A Full-bodied Digital Imaging Application – Powerful, Yet Intuitive

4/22/2025

1 Comment

 
​By Jack Neubart
Photographer, photo-technical writer, musician/composer, software developer, birder.
Text and images ©2025 Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.
All photos processed exclusively in Affinity Photo 2.
PictureCzech Glass Egg (souvenir from Prague). Tone Mapping and Liquefy Personas played a key role in creating this image. ©2025 Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.
A key ingredient behind any digital imaging application worthy of your time and money is that it helps you realize your creative vision, letting you recapture in that image, or meaningfully enhance, what you saw in your mind’s eye at the moment of exposure. On that score, Serif’s Affinity Photo 2 delivers admirably, with many of the tools we need and an intuitive, user-friendly workflow that works.

Picture
Original. A remotely triggered Nikon shoe-mount flash was positioned off-camera, beneath a milk-white glass tabletop, with a decorative red paper backdrop added for contrast. When I purchased this souvenir, I envisioned this lighting treatment. What I did not envision was taking the image to the next level. ©Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.
​What essentially makes Affinity Photo 2 eminently practical is that it combines a Raw processing engine, where you add the critical ingredients required to properly cook the image, with a digital image editor, which adds the garnish to give it just the right flavor and bakes in the finishing touches – and does all that in one package. On top of that, Affinity Photo has a few tricks up its sleeve to season the image just the way we like it – or even surprise ourselves by achieving what we could only imagine.

​It gets even better. Serif has managed to keep the price within easy reach and did so without bogging us down in tiresome subscription models. It’s simply a one-off purchase. Buy it once, it’s yours forever – through every succeeding iteration! That alone is saying a lot these days. (If you’re of a mind that a freebie imaging application is a better deal, think again. You’ll be missing out on quite a bit.)
Picture
Step This Way. Into a wonderland that will fascinate and amaze. At least, that's the feeling I wanted to convey by imbuing this image (which stood outside a vintage clothing shop in Berlin) with shapes and colors to match the memorable milieu, with the aid of the Tone Mapping and Liquefy Personas. ©2025 Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.
In addition to Mac and Windows versions (each sold separately at $69.99), there’s also an Apple iPad version (also sold separately, at $18.49 – sorry, Android). You can also purchase the entire suite under a Universal License, which includes Affinity Photo 2 (photo editor) together with Affinity Designer 2 (vector graphics) and Affinity Publisher 2 (page layout in all iterations for each application. (Check out this link: : https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/#buy.)
 
Serif kindly provided me with a Universal License, which meant I could install Affinity Photo 2 on both my iMac desktop (which requires a minimum of macOS Catalina or later) and 15” i5 Dell laptop (Windows 10 or later required). We'll focus on my Mac desktop experience, heading to my Windows laptop to sample one feature: Machine Learning selection tools (hint: it works great). Mac version reviewed: 2.6.2. (I did not review the iPad version or the sister applications.)
 
For starters, I should point out that my iMac sports an Intel i5 processing engine, with a Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB video card and 16 MB RAM, running under Mac OS Sequoia 15.4. You guessed it: it’s not souped up. Still, that did not slow me down noticeably, but it did prevent me from taking advantage of the new Machine Learning selection tools. To take advantage of this functionality, I would need a Mac with M-series processor. So, as noted, I did the next best thing: I turned to my Windows laptop, with roughly equivalent build, running under Windows 11 Professional. Machine Learning? Gotcha!
​Let’s Get Started
If you’re new to image editing, you can dive right in. The application opens with a plateful of tutorials to get you cooking with the right ingredients fairly quickly. If you’ve transitioned out of another imaging app, there may be a bit of a learning curve, since numerous settings and parameters may be different from what you’re used to. But it shouldn’t prove a stumbling block. In fact, no two editing apps think alike or do alike.
 
With my extensive editing experience covering a wide range of imaging applications (not to toot my own horn – much), I was easily able to get around those inconsistencies and found the workflow fairly familiar, with very few rough edges. Much of the time I found I could readily achieve the image I’d envisioned when I first saw the scene and pressed the shutter button.
 
Yet, coming from Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw, there was one thing I wished I could manually control directly: the histogram. Affinity Photo 2 is not alone in this. But you may be less bothered by what I see as a shortcoming. Sliders and curves do the trick, but not entirely for me.
​The Histogram: A Key Tool
A histogram is a graphical representation of the tonal range in an image, with tones ranging from shadow (left side) to highlight (right side). In theory, the histogram (graph) should be shaped like a bell curve (picture the hump on a Dromedary camel’s back – peaking in the middle and tapering off at either end). But when we achieve this tonal distribution, we may see that the result is lifeless, bland. Hence, a more uneven tonal distribution makes for a more satisfying, more pleasing, if not more dramatic, result. We should normally be able to see a range of dark tones down to black (shadows), shades of gray (midtones), and a range of light tones culminating in white (highlights).
 
When the graph pushes up against either side, tones may be clipped, or lost. Respectively, shadows may be “blocked up” and highlights “washed out,” each telling us we’ve lost detail and color or that colors and tones are not represented faithfully.
 
We’re especially focused on important, or “key,” tones – if you want to see detail in a person’s face, then adjust the histogram (and/or tonal/contrast slider settings and/or curves) to ensure you see that detail. On the other hand, if the subject is backlit – in silhouette, then, not only is that detail unimportant, it's practically mandatory that it remain in shadow – a mystery to the viewer.
 
Color/tone-specific indicators signal a misstep in either direction (taking the adjustment too far – look for bright, colorful pixels popping out uninvited throughout the frame telling you to pull back or take it in the opposite direction). That can happen not only with the tonal and contrast sliders, but with such settings as clarity as well. With black-and-white, we often take a tempered approach, letting the image, mood and content dictate their needs, meaning, we may leave certain areas in shadow for a heightened dramatic composition.
The Affinity Photo 2: File Management and System Resources
Affinity Photo keeps it simple when it comes to file management. You don’t need to create massive catalogs, as you do with some other applications. Your hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD) will thank you. And you don’t need “scratch disks” to assign a portion of a drive to that application’s edits in progress.
 
That doesn’t mean you’re free to open a ton of images. Any way you look at it, digital editing does exact a price on system resources, if only temporarily while working on images. And you’ll still need space to store processed images – native Affinity Photo (.afphoto) files can be quite large, although you can simply export compressed JPEGs, if you don’t mind losing a little something in translation.
 
TIP. When opening an image file in the Affinity explorer window, you may find working with the tiny thumbnails (icons) a bit of a challenge, especially for older individuals. Fortunately, you have other options. They include Adobe Bridge and Finder on Mac or Explorer in Windows, each of which affords you a larger view of the thumbnails. Mac, for instance, offers a Gallery view, featuring a full-size image, with filmstrip (small thumbnails) at the bottom, much like that found in Adobe Lightroom
​Personas
The Raw image initially opens in the Develop Persona for Raw processing. Other file formats, such as JPEG and TIFF, go straight to the Photo Persona for pixel-level editing. (More on these Personas below.)
 
You can drive this Raw image further by following two divergent roads: Hang a left to the Liquify Persona, or hang a right to the Tone Mapping Persona.

Liquefy lets you play around with warping and distorting the image (including the ability to imbue an image with a swirly van Gogh-esque effect – my fave).

The Tone Mapping Persona processes images as high dynamic range (HDR), whether you’re working off a single exposure or several. Tone-mapping a single frame delivers a simulated HDR, whereas tone-mapping bracketed exposures ideally aims to recapture the true tonal range and color palette originally observed in the scene and present it as a true HDR. Popularly, we tend toward a less realistic and richer color palette with either approach (allegedly, giving the image the “wow” factor – hey, I’m guilty of it myself). Either way you look at it, It’s fun and may give your images that needed boost.

​There’s also an Export Persona. This differs from Export via the File menu option. Per the onboard Help manual: “For a more comprehensive set of export options, use Export Persona.” This Persona has numerous applications I have yet to explore.
Picture
Lake Michigan, Chicago. I wanted to focus on the couple heading to the shore, so I stripped the color out of the backdrop and kept focus on them. Hmm, I wonder if the focus would shift if I'd done the reverse? ©Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.
 The Develop Persona: The Raw Processing Engine
“Persona” is a quaint moniker, which reasonably defines the “personality,” or more precisely, toolset and processing steps unique to each aptly named editing stage.
 
The Develop Persona offers a handful of adjustment tools, enough so as not to overwhelm you. On the right are the adjustment panels, or Studio, as Affinity refers to it. Use the tutorials and built-in Help guide to acquaint yourself with key features.
 
In addition to the Basic tonal adjustments, the Develop module offers Lens corrections. Affinity Photo intuitively selects the lens from the EXIF image data. You can also manually select a lens from the myriad lens profiles included for numerous brands. And you can manually override those lens corrections.

​What I found especially interesting – more to the point, helpful, was the methodology to address Chromatic Aberration. Color fringing, or chromatic aberration, is caused by the lens. It should not be confused with purple fringing, which is caused by the sensor and addressed by the “Defringe” correction. Again, the application could follow the lens profile when “Chromatic Aberration Reduction” is requested. But Affinity Photo also affords you another means to correct this misalignment of colors, with “Estimate from Image.” From my experience, this alternate approach worked well to alleviate the problem.
 
One useful tool I found was the White Balance Tool. It lets you set white balance by clicking on a specific area within the frame – much easier than using the sliders. Simply find a neutral tone (OK, sometimes easier said than done – it may take several tries). I targeted the back of a street sign in one scene in Berlin - looked, more or less, like the perfect “gray card” value to restore the color balance. And it did prove to be the ideal solution.
 
Affinity Photo also supports overlays and layers. This part of the picture tends to get a bit technical, but suffice to say that, once you learn to use and master them, you’ll never go back. One useful overlay tool is the Overlay Gradient Tool. Think of it as a graduated (“grad”) filter, except that here you can control the effect in the Affinity Studio. Overlays and layers can make practically any image pop. Layers, I should note, are a function of the Photo Persona, where the complexity of the image you create is virtually unbounded.  (Think of layers in a cake, with each adding its own brand of flavors and textures – one bite is a scrumptious delight!)
 
 Which brings us to the…
​Photo Persona – A Personality All Its Own
This is where the bulk of your editing is done, where you have the opportunity to fine-tune and manipulate the image and add various effects – and essentially finish the job prior to exporting (or saving) the image. The array of tools (stage left) is almost mind-blowing. They include dodge/burn, blur/sharpen/smudge, gradient and flood fill tools for openers. What I found myself using mostly were various selection tools, with one similar to a magic wand that finds edges practically on its own. In this group you’ll also find the machine-learning-based Object Selection Tool (noted earlier). Oddly, automatically selecting “subjects” with the help of machine learning is achieved separately via the Select menu option (scroll down to Select Subject). Again, these machine learning tools require an M-series (Apple Silicon) Mac or Windows computer.
 
Also of great value are the perspective control tools. Perhaps not as comprehensive as I might have wished (for instance, there are no auto options for simple one-click corrections, or guided options, where you align guides on either side to correct for converging verticals, or “keystoning”). Still, they do a commendable job.
 
Affinity’s Perspective control gives you a choice between single-plane and dual-plane corrections. Single plane corrections are more basic and two-dimensional, whereas dual plane adjustments give you a virtual 3D playing field.
 
Then there is the Mesh Warp option. Aside from using it to distort images, I put it to work to pinch in the frame, so that featured architectural elements were represented more truly proportional. It’s tricky, but with patience, it works. Just make sure you view the image at 100% at critical stages.
 
Shift over to the Studio on the right and you’re greeted by over 20 adjustment panels. Click on a panel and you're treated to one or more thumbnails depicting an adjustment variation. Use this as a starting point, with an adjustment window at your fingertips so you can fine-tune the effect.
 
Go to the main menu to discover an equally expansive world of editing opportunities. To my mind, I’d focus on the Layer, Select and Filter options. Click on each in turn and familiarize yourself with what’s available in each list. With all this at your fingertips, you can let your imagination soar – and have fun in the process.

Picture
TV Tower, Berlin. Choosing one of the Recolor adjustment thumbnails (Photo Persona) made this colorful effect an easy choice, with some added modifications. ©Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.

​What I’d Like
There’s a lot to like about Affinity Photo 2. There are functions and tools I haven’t even touched on and many that require a deeper dive. Some are on the more esoteric side, but many are of immeasurable practical value. Any way you look at it, I had fun and achieved the results I was after.
 
Still, there’s always room for improvement. Serif hasn’t been sitting idle in this department. They’re constantly improving the software, so if something appears to be wanting, it will likely pop up in a future release. Anyway, here’s my wish list for Affinity Photo.

- White Balance (WB) factory presets and WB reset. Factory presets provide a great starting point, often pointing us in the right direction. With the option to start fresh.
- Better noise-reduction (NR) algorithms. What’s here is good, but could be better.
- Resizing option for Affinity explorer thumbnails (icons). And preferably a gallery view, as found in Mac Finder.
- Generative AI-based eraser/removal tool. The Inpainting Brush here appears to sample surrounding pixels but doesn’t achieve its full potential. For example, when removing an intrusive figure from the scene, I found it necessary to supplement the cleanup with the Healing Brush and Clone Brush tools. Not that AI tools are a surefire solution – they’re not, but they often go further, if not faster.
- Reset-to-default (global and for each panel). I don’t want to have to keep hitting Undo or to go back to an earlier editing stage through the History or Snapshots. I just want to start fresh with one click of the mouse.
- Additional perspective adjustment tools (as noted earlier). The current perspective control tools are nice and do the job well, but sometimes we need to take a different tack.
- Machine Learning extended for use with any Mac (and iPad), not just M-series - at least going back 5 years.
- Generative AI Canvas Expansion and other generative AI tools to widen our perspective on the universe.
- Factory presets for the Develop Persona. It would be great if one of these presets relied on Machine Learning and was able to read the component pixels. Maybe take a lesson from Adobe and call it Affinity Adaptive. It could even be a new Adaptive Persona, with all the Machine Learning and, if available, GenAI tools bundled under one roof.
- Copy & paste settings in Develop Persona. Being able to select one or all settings to copy and paste from one image to the next optimizes our workflow, giving us an alternative to Presets which may not address each situation.
- Context-sensitive pop-up wizards to guide you, so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing to refer to the Help guide, which intrudes on the workflow.
- Maybe relegate the more obscure Photo adjustment panels to a “See More” option.

​A Look Back – and Forward
Affinity Photo 2 provides you with a spice rack full of enhancements that can add complex flavors to any image. (Hint: check out the lead photo.) But even if you’re a straight shooter and prefer to keep the images in your photo library sacrosanct, you need the right tools to fully realize your vision, without overindulging. You have that here in Affinity Photo 2. And if you want to overindulge, that’s within reach.
 
Each of us has our own style of working. I’ve given you some examples of how I work with Affinity Photo 2 on my desktop. It’s comforting to know I have the luxury of working in a fashion that makes me feel at ease and unstressed. I dove in and resurfaced assured I have yet another route to take with my digital image editing.
 
I’ve managed quite well in a few days working in Affinity Photo 2. What I haven’t mastered may take a bit longer, but I’m confident I’ll get there. Affinity Photo may not be perfect but show me an image editor that is. The important thing is that, for the most part, I achieved what I set out to do – and that Affinity Photo 2 provided the tools to do just that – and more.



​Help Is Only a Click Away
In addition to the numerous online tutorials, this link will take you to a page that should give you a clearer picture of what you can do in Affinity Photo 2. It will open your eyes to digital editing capabilities you may never have imagined or only wished for. I know it did for me.

There is Affinity Photo functionality still awaiting exploration – and I can’t wait to dive deeper and deeper. Or, to put it another way, to open my digital editing kitchen to an ever-rewarding cooking experience.

​Here’s one online guide to get you started: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/learn/photo/desktop/quickstart/.
 
For more information on Affinity Photo 2, please visit: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/.
1 Comment
Robert Weingast
4/27/2025 12:01:32 pm

I like the crispness and how the imaging enhances the contrasts.
It's all unbelievable and gives you a different look that can change your perception and feeling about the subject matter.

Reply



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