Serif Affinity Photo Review (2025)

Affinity Photo is available on macOS and Windows (via a direct download or the respective OS app stores) for a one-time price of $69.99. A 30-day free trial is available. You don't get a discount on future versions, but you can install the software on as many computers as you want. For comparison, Adobe limits Creative Cloud apps (such as Lightroom and Photoshop) to just two computers.

A version of Affinity Photo for the iPad costs just $18.49, though it lacks some features of the desktop version. Alternatively, you can buy the whole Affinity suite (includes Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher) for a reasonable one-time cost of $164.99.

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Adobe Photoshop requires a subscription of at least $239.88 per year. Other Photoshop competitors cost less: ACDSee Photo Studio is $89.95 for a lifetime license, Corel PaintShop Pro lists for $79.99 for a perpetual license, and CyberLink PhotoDirector is $99.99 for the same (or $64.99 per year).

Affinity has been updating the app with point versions over the past couple of years. Currently, it's on version 2.6, which the company released in February 2025. Here are some highlights, listed in order of importance:

Automatic Subject and Object Selection. These use machine learning to automatically select objects or the photo's subject for editing or removal.

Windows on Arm Support. Affinity claims that its May 2024 update brought the "first creative software" with native support to Arm-based Windows PCs, such as those with Snapdragon X Elite processors. Adobe released a version of Photoshop for Arm-based PCs in May 2021, but the Arm version of Illustrator arrived a few months after the Arm version of Designer. In any case, kudos to Affinity for keeping up with the latest platform hardware.

Usability Updates. The program gains over 20 quality of life updates, including the ability to use raw images in layers in more contexts (with the Liquify tool, for example), options for the Clear Mask and Fill Mask features in the right-click mask layer context menu, and the standardization of keyboard command modifiers. Another new convenience is the ability to lock insertion targets, for instance, if you want to only insert a layer behind an existing one. The latest update brings keyboard shortcuts for pixel brush tools, too.

Variable Font Support. You can now tinker with font weights and shapes for fonts that support these attributes.

QR Code Tool. Put a code in your images so viewers can easily hook into your social account or other online assets.

New Camera Support. Like any software that opens raw camera files, Serif continues to add support for new cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others. That applies to smartphone cameras and lenses, too. Serif also claims improved raw support for more than 50 camera models.

Pixel Grid. This view option lets you see individual pixel borders, which is good for very small or zoomed-in work. You might use this when you create icons, for example.

OCIO v2 Support. The OpenColorIO system ensures outputs are accurate and realistic on different output devices.

Making software available via the desktop OS app stores, as Serif does with Affinity, simplifies the installation and update process across multiple computers. After installation on my test PC, Affinity Photo takes up 1.4GB of disk space. For comparison, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop each take up over 2GB. The Windows version uses the modern MSIX format, which optimizes disk and network usage. I'm a fan of this.

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When you first run the program, you see a Welcome panel with links to Twitter and Facebook content, sample images, and tutorials. By registering the product, you can also get overlay packs such as Fog, Rainbow, and Snow.

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A New Document link opens a dialog box where you set image properties, such as size and type. You get a generous selection of image sizes, though not fleshed-out starter content templates like those in Photoshop and CyberLink PhotoDirector.

Serif doesn't include an automated tour of the interface like Corel PaintShop Pro, Lightroom, and Skylum Luminar. That said, I appreciate that Affinity includes a help window that details all the program's features. Many other photo editing apps, including those from Adobe, make you go online for help. Adobe also has an annoying habit of sending you to user forums and even help for its other products rather than official and relevant help resources.

Affinity uses a dark gray color scheme for its interface by default, though you can switch to a darker, high contrast theme or a light theme if you prefer. The software's colorful icons stand out more than those of most other photo editing apps, but you can change them to monochrome if you prefer. As with Photoshop, the interface shows a toolbar across the left and an info panel to the right for things like (in menu order) Layers, Histogram, Swatches, Adjustment, and Transform. You can undock all 25 of its modules.

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Above the main image view are buttons for five Personas; other programs call these modes or workspaces. The default Personas are Photo, Liquefy, Develop (for working with raw camera files), Tone Mapping, and Export. Panorama is another Persona, but it's visible only when you're stitching together multiple images.

I had a hard time resetting the interface to the default appearance after removing some panels. I finally discovered a reset option in the Window > Studio menu, but all the original tools still didn't reappear. A simple reset option under the main View or Window menus would be preferable, as would preset interface layouts for things like drawing, photo editing, and so on. Like Photoshop, Affinity Photo now lets you save custom layouts.

Holding the Ctrl key and scrolling the mouse wheel lets you zoom in on a photo, while double-clicking switches you back to the Fit view. One Affinity Photo interface feature I approve of is that double-clicking a control slider sets it back to its original state. I also like the side-by-side and split views that show your image before and after edits; these are accessible from clear buttons atop the program window (though these aren't available in the Photo Persona). A circular back arrow button lets you reset each adjustment group, and you can uncheck each group's checkbox to turn off the edits. Unlike most photo apps, the app lacks a full-screen view. Hitting Tab hides most interface elements, however.

Affinity Photo supports a decent selection of keyboard shortcuts, but I don't know why (as in Photoshop) the one for exporting requires you to press four keys simultaneously (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S). In Lightroom, it's just the intuitive Shift+E. I appreciate the simple C keyboard shortcut for cropping, but you don't get much in the way of right-click context menus.

You can undo and redo actions up to the limit you set in the settings, while a History panel with a slider lets you take your work back to earlier states. The main interface adapts well to my 4K Lenovo ThinkVision P27u-20 monitor; some programs show tiny interface text on high-DPI monitors.

Affinity is not a workflow solution like ACDSee, CyberLink PhotoDirector, Lightroom, or Zoner Photo Studio. You don't get tools for importing or organizing photos, let alone a panel that shows drive locations like in DxO PhotoLab, Exposure, and PaintShop Pro. In other words, you can't just load all the photos from a card after a shoot. Even Photoshop and Photoshop Elements offer complementary apps, Bridge and Organizer, to handle those organization functions, but Affinity doesn't bother.

When you open a raw camera file in Affinity, you at least don't have to open a separate window like in Photoshop. Instead, the software just switches you to the Develop Persona. Here, you can adjust clarity, contrast, exposure, noise, white balance, and more, but you don't get auto settings as you do in Photoshop and most alternatives. You can come back to the Develop Persona later; you have to tap the Develop button again when you're done with edits in this mode. By contrast, Photoshop offers a Raw Camera filter for similar adjustments without the need for redeveloping.

In the background, the Develop Assistant can apply auto exposure, noise reduction, and tone curve adjustments on loading raw images, but you can't see the difference they make (even with the before-and-after views). You then hit the blue Develop button to output a pixel layer or raw layer. The latter lets you work nondestructively, keeping the raw image in a layer of its own.

Affinity Photo supports a fair number of raw camera file formats, even from recent cameras such as the Canon EOS R5 II, Nikon Z 6 III, and Sony Alpha 1 II. I was even able to load a raw photo from the fairly new Sigma BF successfully, with the correct metadata. As for phones, it supports the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but only up through the Galaxy S22 lineup (the Galaxy S25 models are the most recent versions).

The software now supports the JPEG XL format, which combines ultrahigh resolutions with reduced file sizes. It naturally works with Photoshop's PSD and Illustrator's AI format. The DNG, EPS, GIF, PDF, SVG, TIFF, and WebP file types, along with other less common formats, round out the options.

Affinity Photo took about 50 seconds to load a dozen raw images, and then I had to develop each separately. Opening multiple raw files in Photoshop is noticeably faster (less than 15 seconds). Adobe's photo editor places multiple raw images in a filmstrip view along the bottom of the Camera Raw utility's windows, and you can select all images in the filmstrip to open them for editing. On a positive note for Affinity, zooming in and out on large, raw images feels snappy.

The initial rendering of a raw image file in Affinity Photo isn't as good as in Lightroom; the latter develops an image with better detail and more lifelike colors. Lightroom and Photoshop use the same technology for raw conversion. The Adobe software also lets you choose among different rendering profiles. For this test, I use the default Adobe Color profile. Affinity seems to simply use the camera's default rendering settings, which is fine, though Adobe gives you more options; its excellent Adaptive Color option, for example, uses AI to analyze image contents and produce a custom color profile.

Below you can see the rendering of a raw camera file in Affinity Photo (left) and Adobe Lightroom (right).

Left to right: Rendering of a raw photo in Affinity Photo and Lightroom (Credit: Serif/Adobe/PCMag)

After editing or rendering, you have to export your edited image to a standard file format like JPG or PNG to use it in the real world. Like Photoshop's files have a .psd extension, Affinity uses the .afphoto extension.

Like ACDSee, DxO PhotoLab, and PhotoDirector, Affinity Photo now includes lens profile-based corrections for chromatic aberration and geometry distortion in the Develop Persona. Affinity Photo's corrections leave you with more aberration compared with Lightroom's. The Defringe option improves matters somewhat, but the software doesn't have an eyedropper to home in on the offending share of magenta like Lightroom.

Left to right: Results after lens corrections in Affinity Photo and Lightroom (Credit: Serif/PCMag)

Noise reduction is available only in the Develop Persona. It works acceptably, especially with color noise. As with competitors' similar tools, however, it tends to blur details. You get far better noise reduction in DxO PhotoLab or Topaz Photo AI. Affinity Photo's AI-powered Denoise feature is better but not as good as DxO's or Topaz's equivalent.

As with Corel PaintShop Pro, Affinity lets you open vector images in the AI and SVG formats, and save to the latter, but not the former. You can combine vector and raster image layers in the same file and work on both, though, as you might expect, Adobe Illustrator is much more capable for vector editing. Serif’s Affinity Designer offers more Illustrator-like capabilities.

The program supports batch operations and macros, helpful in converting multiple files, rotating them, or stripping their metadata.

In the Photo Persona, you see a stacked group of tabbed panels on the right side of the program window. The top one shows (in order) a histogram (with warnings for clipping), color picker, swatches, and brushes. In the middle is the Layers panel, which you can switch to Channels, Brushes, or Stock modules. The lower panel offers a photo navigator and sections called Transform, History, and Channels.

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The Layers panel shows you which edits apply to each layer. The Layer menu at the top of the program window offers scores of choices, including Live Mesh layer, accessible from three menu levels deep. It lets you warp an image to match another surface. The Effects tab in this panel offers blur, glow, outline, and overlay options, while the Stock tab lets you find images from Pexels, which provides a lot of free content.

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In the Photo Persona, you get colorful buttons at the top for Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colors, and Auto White Balance. On some photos, they work fairly well, especially for levels and white balance. On one dark image, they did nothing, however.

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The crop tool offers presets and a straighten tool (a line on the screen that you adjust to fit the horizontal axis in your image). But there's no auto-leveling or content-aware crop fill like that in Photoshop. I like that Affinity Photo lets you start cropping either by drawing in the image or from the edges.

As mentioned, Affinity Photo is primarily meant for Photoshop-style editing. It has excellent layer support, a good selection of effect filters, and useful masking tools. You can link layers and add Pattern layers. The latter type is helpful for reproducing a pattern across the entire image as you draw. It's fun to use.

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Another layer feature lets you save visibility states so you can easily switch between views of a project with many layers.

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A Gradient tool offers conical, linear, and radial gradients options, as well as controls for positioning the different color transition points. You can even add more colors to your gradient at these stop points along the control line. However, I miss Photoshop's extensive selection of preset color-combo gradients.

AI Selection Tools

Affinity now has AI-based auto-selection tools for objects and photo subjects. With Object Select, you hover the mouse cursor over parts of an image to select objects. Subject Select automatically determines the main element in a photo. These require separate downloads of AI model code (290MB and 72MB, respectively).

Object Select gets a dedicated toolbar button in the cute shape of an owl, while Select Subject is accessible from the Select menu. These tools both worked well in my testing of photos with a plain background.

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With Select Subject, you can't use a brush to add to or remove parts of the selection, but you can use Refine Selection to extend or feather the edges. The selection tool works acceptably, but it's nowhere near Adobe Photoshop's state-of-the-art selection tools that automatically detect and select multiple objects and can handle complex things like hair (Capture One is also good at this). The healing tool requires you to select a source area to replace a blemish or unwanted object. It's not as sophisticated as Photoshop's content-aware Patch and Move tools.

Affinity Photo's masking options include live masks based on frequency band range, hue, or luminosity. They update if you change the source image. You can also now combine masks into compound masks and edit them nondestructively.

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Liquefy gets a dedicated Persona. In this mode, you get 10 tools that let you push and swirl an image's pixels. One use is remodeling faces. But Adobe's Face-Aware Liquify tools are far better since they identify parts of the face and offer sensible editing options. With Affinity, you're on your own.

Affinity Photo includes a good variety of brushes, including sub-brushes (combined brushes), symmetry drawing, and even wet-brush-edge paint accumulation. Brush styles include Acrylic, Engraving, Gouaches, inks, markers, pens, and pencils—a full toolbox with a high degree of customization.

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The Panorama tool had no trouble stitching three test images together in testing. You get options to apply noise reduction, automatically align the images, perform an HDR merge, and remove ghost images in the overlapped areas simultaneously. All this took nearly a minute using three 12MP images from my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The software also has an Inpaint Missing Areas option, which takes effect only after you hit Apply. You don’t get Lightroom's cylindrical, perspective, and spherical merging options. The program nevertheless did a good job of matching the different perspectives from the component shots.

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The HDR Merge tool in the Tone Mapping Persona is impressive, though it takes a long time to process images, much longer than Lightroom's equivalent. The process includes alignment and denoising, in addition to tone mapping. When it's done, you can choose (in menu order) Natural, Detailed, Cool, High-Contrast Black and White, Dramatic, and Crazy. Affinity can also combine images for focus stacking, which is of particular interest if you shoot macro photos.

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One unique tool Affinity Photo provides is the Astrophotography Stack Persona. It requires special images such as calibration shots and long exposures, but it can help make night skies look clear and detailed.

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When I tried opening a PSD file in Affinity Photo, I had no trouble moving, resizing, and selecting a text box, but I couldn't change the text. However, The program has dedicated text tools: Artistic Text, Frame Text, and Shape Text. Artistic Text is for display type, Frame Text is for longer text entries, and Shape Text is for placing text inside shapes. Granular formatting is possible, with thousands of OpenType fonts at your disposal. You can align letters along a path and choose ligature styles, but you don't get Photoshop's Match Font tool or the level of glyph editing that Illustrator offers. Kerning and tracking are as detailed as you could wish, however.

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The Export Persona lets you create custom image slices, but it doesn't have an Export button. You have to choose File > Export from the menu, just as you could in any other Persona. You can export your creation in the EPS, GIF, HEIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, PSD, SVG, TIFF, or WMF format. The program offers soft proofing and color management (including ICC profile importing).

Another interesting option is the Lanczos 3 resampling option, which takes longer but is supposed to result in superior resizing results. However, I saw more detail enlarging a photo with Photoshop’s automatic bilinear option. In the image below, I enlarged the left side from 6,024 to 10,000 pixels wide using Photoshop’s Automatic bilinear algorithm. On the right side, I used Affinity Photo’s Lanczos 3 process.

Left to right: Enlarged photo via Photoshop’s Automatic bilinear algorithm and Affinity Photo’s Lanczos 3 process (Credit: Adobe/Serif/PCMag)

Serif Affinity starts up and shuts down quickly, and switching between Personae isn't slow the way it is in ON1 Photo RAW. Affinity Photo uses graphics processor acceleration to speed up some operations. I noticed that zooming was snappier than in the past, and the program was mostly responsive during testing on my reasonably powerful PC, a 3.6GHz Core i7 with 16GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics processor. But performing some adjustments (and even loading photos) takes longer than in other software. Opening the Tone Mapping Persona involves waiting for the effects to load, and you have to accept edits or cancel them before moving between most Personae. The latter, in particular, can make things feel slow. In Lightroom, you just click a mode to switch to it. I'm not sure why the Serif developers don't do the same and assume you want to keep the edits you make.

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Affinity Photo is a cost-effective and powerful image editing program that provides most of the tools you are likely to need for color manipulation, filters, layers, and raw file editing. We like that it lets you edit raster and vector images simultaneously and that auto-selection tools are now available, though they aren't as powerful as Adobe's. The app also trails top competitors in performance and offers nothing in the way of workflow tools for organizing your digital assets. For unparalleled photo editing features, turn to our respective Editors' Choice winners for image manipulation and management, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.