Object removal and retouching in Affinity Photo 2

Image retouching is both a skill and an art form. It is, of course, the center of some controversy too, so there are bound to be debates about how much is permissible and when it’s OK to remove objects from scenes. All that aside, this is a look at the different retouching tools in Affinity Photo 2. It doesn’t have the generative AI capabilities of Photoshop and other programs, so this article is more about cleaning up images to make them look neater and less cluttered.

Affinity Photo's Inpainting brush is one of its most interesting tools, offering similar results to Photoshop’s content-aware fill, but you can also fall back on traditional manual cloning tools for areas that don’t respond well to automated fixes. Manual cloning is still an important skill, even today.