Imaging and graphic designers who are Windows loyalists are in for a real treat as Affinity Photo, in beta form, has arrived on the Windows platform and it is indeed looking impressive.
Advertisements and marketing materials may have people thinking that Affinity Photos is simply just a cheaper alternative to Adobe Lightroom. However, that is totally incorrect as it is not a mere photo management and photo batch editing solution, it also provides a raw editing environment.
With extensive capabilities for editing, enhancing, compositing photos, and other features, Affinity Photo has become much closer to Adobe Photoshop than before.
Affinity's Personas feature comes into play with editing photos, as it has some level of complexity. What the Persona feature does is it splits the complex processes involved into manageable pieces. This is real genius as Affinity is considered a multifaceted piece of software.
The Persona feature is also where you'll find all of the most familiar photo editing tools and where you can add vector objects, text layers and do most of the compositing.
With Affinity, you can run tone mapping on single images and even put together a composite HDR image with its custom HDR merging function. The tone mapping feature of Affinity is highly customizable with several options provided.
These are not the complete list of features of Affinity as there are too many to properly breakdown. Since it is still in beta, some bugs are to be expected but now is the best time to give it a try and be amazed without having to spend fifty bucks. When paired and utilized properly with the Affinity Designer, this app can be used to power your design studio.