You couldn't pay me to use Affinity Photo. Nor Photoshop Elements.
I tested both PSE 2020 and the latest version of Affinity Photo. Not impressed with either. Granted, I'm spoiled by decades of using the full version of Photoshop, so these rather watered down apps are both distracting and limiting to me.
Plus sides of both:
- Excellent retouching (clone brush) controls.
- Both have what you would expect for curves, and hue/saturation corrections.
- Layer palette.
- History palette (one of the best ideas Adobe ever came up with, IMHO).
- Lots of other features that can be found in Photoshop reproduced very well in either app.
Minuses for PSE 2020. I did this all in Expert mode to try and get the most out of the app:
- Terrible color management controls. Your only choices (besides the very bad choice of "none") are optimized for screen and optimized for print. If you use the first, it will recognize and use an embedded RGB profile. Untagged images automatically get tagged with sRGB or Adobe RGB. But it decides. You have no control over new or untagged images, and can't covert it to the one you would prefer afterwards. For the second, why does it even have a radio button to optimize for print? What does that even mean in PSE? Print can only mean CMYK, and Elements doesn't support CMYK at all.
- You can't arrange the palettes to your liking. The layers palette will not tear off so you can stack it vertically with Actions, History, or other options. You can only put those alongside or over Layers, taking up yet more space you could otherwise use to view the image you're working on.
- Basically, even in expert mode, it's too dumbed down. At least for someone like me who is very used to the full version of PS.
Minuses for Affinity Photo:
- Yup, they added many file types you can save rather than just JPEG or TIFF. Problem is, they're still only available as an export option. I opened a flattened TIFF. Did some corrections, added a couple of layers and exported a .psd file so I wouldn't get their proprietary format. Did a few more changes and pressed Command+S. Sounds normal until you check to see what happened after that last Command+S save. Rather than saving over the .psd file you just last told it to save, it creates a new proprietary image with the latest changes. The .psd remains as it was when you exported it. In other words, in order to prevent getting your images trapped in their useless "only Affinity Photo can open this image" format, you have to remember to do an export every - single - time ! Not impressed with that in the slightest.
- Compared to PSE 2020, there wasn't anywhere near as much to gripe about with Affinity Photo. Far better color management (almost identical to Photoshop) and it supports CMYK images! Didn't see a way to convert an image to a different color space, but I may have missed it in the menus.
- Layered files in Affinity's native file format are HUGE. A 48 MB TIF I started with turned into a 248 MB Affinity file with only two simple adjustment layers added.
Big minus for both (to me) is the crummy, "Let's force everything into an application frame" interface. This is a Windows thing. I hate it, and always have. Even when I was using Windows years before getting my first Mac, I disliked this design of encasing every app separate from the desktop. Why is there no option for floating palettes and images? I'm using a Mac, not Windows.
Yes, I'm spoiled with Photoshop. I know it too well and can't easily go backwards to less capable apps. I just installed and activated Encore CS6 on an otherwise bare install of Mojave to make sure I can continue using it. I know Adobe shuts down the activation servers on older titles after a certain amount of time (CS3 or CS4 was one that got axed recently). You may have a legal copy, but if you can't activate it, you essentially have demo software that will time out. I'll have to do another saved .dmg of Mojave with all of my CS6 Master Collection apps on it before they shut down those activation servers. Don't know when that will happen, but better safe than sorry.
Overall, I thought Affinity Photo was pretty darn good. Especially for a $60 app. But their insistence of saving all files in their proprietary format is a complete deal breaker for me. You can get around it, but you have to be very vigilant about exporting every file you work on. The user shouldn't have to do this.
