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

​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.

Czech 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.

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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.)

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