Affinity Photo is a full-featured photo editor and raw processor for macOS, developed by Serif, that rivals Adobe Photoshop at a fraction of the lifetime cost.
What is Affinity Photo?
Affinity Photo is a professional-grade raster image editor built natively for Mac, offering non-destructive editing, advanced retouching, raw development, and compositor-level layer control without a subscription. Serif launched it as a deliberate alternative to the Creative Cloud lock-in, and it has earned a loyal following among photographers, illustrators, and designers who want serious power without a monthly invoice.
It covers the full editing pipeline — from lens correction and raw conversion through complex compositing and batch export — in a single application. The personas system (Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping, Export) keeps specialist workspaces cleanly separated without ever forcing you to hand off to another app.
What does Affinity Photo do best?
Affinity Photo shines at non-destructive raw processing combined with pixel-accurate retouching in one seamless workflow. The Develop persona handles RAW files from virtually every major camera manufacturer with per-channel curve control, chromatic aberration removal, and lens profile corrections. Move to the Photo persona and you have every retouching tool you'd expect — frequency separation, inpainting brush, clone and heal — plus a masking engine that genuinely competes with Photoshop's Select Subject.
- Live filters and adjustments — every adjustment layer is editable at any point; nothing bakes destructively until you choose to export.
- 16-bit and 32-bit HDR editing — the Tone Mapping persona processes 32-bit HDR merges that most hobbyist tools can't touch.
- Photoshop PSD compatibility — opens, edits, and saves PSD files with high fidelity, including smart objects, layer effects, and adjustment layers.
- GPU-accelerated performance — on Apple Silicon the canvas pans and zooms with zero perceivable latency even on 100 MP files.
Where it is weaker is in ecosystem breadth. The plugin library is smaller than Photoshop's, and if your studio runs a Lightroom catalog, the migration path requires some effort.
How much does Affinity Photo cost?
Affinity Photo is available as a one-time purchase — no subscription, no per-seat renewal. Serif has periodically offered it at a steep promotional discount, and there is a fully functional free trial so you can test it against your real workflow before committing. Compared to Adobe Photoshop (which requires a Creative Cloud plan), the total cost of ownership over three years is dramatically lower. An optional universal licence covers macOS, Windows, and iPad under a single purchase.
Who should use Affinity Photo?
Affinity Photo is the right tool for photographers and digital artists who want professional results but resent subscription pricing. If you shoot raw, need precise masking, or do any amount of compositing, it will cover the vast majority of your work. I use it daily for product retouching and client portrait edits, and the only task that ever sends me back to Photoshop is running an obscure third-party plug-in that hasn't been ported yet.
It is less suited to large creative agencies where team members share cloud libraries and Lightroom catalogs are deeply embedded in the workflow. For solo practitioners and small studios, though, the trade-off is overwhelmingly in Affinity's favour.
What are the best Affinity Photo alternatives?
The obvious competitor is Adobe Photoshop — deeper plug-in ecosystem, industry-standard file format support, and tighter integration with Lightroom and Illustrator, but it requires an ongoing Creative Cloud subscription. Pixelmator Pro is a lighter, more Mac-native option that integrates with Apple's ML tools; it is excellent for everyday editing but lacks the 32-bit HDR pipeline and some advanced compositing features. GIMP is free and open-source but its UI requires patience, and its non-destructive workflow is nowhere near as polished. For raw-first workflows, Capture One outperforms Affinity in tethering and colour grading, but it is subscription-only and does not do pixel-level retouching.
Affinity Photo occupies a sweet spot: more capable than Pixelmator Pro, cheaper than Photoshop, and far more polished than GIMP.
How does Affinity Photo compare to Adobe Photoshop?
Photoshop still wins on raw ecosystem depth — Neural Filters, Generative Fill, and the Lightroom bridge are genuinely difficult to replicate. Affinity Photo counters with a one-time price, noticeably faster canvas performance on Apple Silicon, and a non-destructive workflow that Photoshop has only partially caught up to. For most photography and compositing work I've done, Affinity Photo produces identical output in slightly less time. The gap matters most if you rely on Camera Raw's AI masking or on Photoshop-exclusive plug-ins from vendors who haven't shipped an Affinity build.
