New features in Affinity Photo 2

This article is the first in a series I wrote for Amateur Photographer in conjunction with Serif, the publisher of Affinity Photo 2. There is also a set of accompanying YouTube videos on the Amateur Photographer YouTube channel.

The videos came first and the magazine tutorials followed, rejigged to fit a print template but using the same material. I made the videos as a screen recording with a VoiceOver. With later videos for Amateur Photographer I’ve started including live intros and outros. I don’t have a professional recording studio, but I have developed a mic and computer setup which delivers decent sound quality. The videos are edited in iMove for simplicity. In fact, iMovie is easily sufficient for this kind of editing – I do also use Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, but that’s overkill for this kind of work, which needs to be done quickly and simply if it’s going to be cost effective for both the publisher and the content creator.

This first instalment in the series looks at the new features in Affinity Photo 2. This is a very interesting Photoshop alternative on a number of counts. First, it’s every bit as powerful as Photoshop, though it does some things in a way which might be unfamiliar at first to Photoshop users. Second, it’s subscription-free, and I know Adobe subscriptions are a sore point with many photographers.

Can you use Affinity Photo 2 as a Photoshop substitute? Absolutely! In some ways its low price works against it because photographers expect an inferior ‘budget’ product – but Affinity Photo 2 is neither.