Subscription-Free Photo Editing

Screen shot of Serif Affinity Photo

For me, dumping Adobe has been a long time coming and, even though I currently get a great discount (because I teach at a university), I've decided now's the time to cancel my monthly payments and adopt another software program do the job. 

Why do this? Like many of the students I teach at the Uni, I'm a bit tired of paying the monthly Adobe stipend - and think it would be nice to go back to an arrangement where I actually own the software, outright. 

Mad? Sure! I've been using Adobe Photoshop since version 4.0 (that's about 24 years) as well as Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe InDesign - although the latter two apps for only half that period.

Another reason prompting me to to jump ship is that although Adobe is quick to bank my monthly payments, it [apparently] doesn't pay tax. And that doesn't sit right with me. (We can discus Apple's tax arrangements at another time!).

There are so many excellent photo editing applications on the market that do the same job as Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. Some might say, many can do the job better...

Everyone Likes a Bargain

I have to admit that another driving reason to migrate from Adobe was a recent half price offer from UK-based Serif software for its Affinity programs: Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher.

I'd used Affinity Photo a few years before and at the time considered it a good challenger for Adobe's product, Photoshop. On special at half price ($38) it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. And after a month of using it, I'm happy with my decision, and impressed with the huge range of features it offers - many of which are similar to what I'm used to with Photoshop. And more importantly, because of my long experience with Photoshop, it's also relatively easy to use.

Above: Serif Affinity Photo ships with a raft of amazing edit features, including a very capable HDR edit mode

On the surface, the biggest difference you'll experience with Affinity Photo is probably its Personas. The program is divided into several different editing modes, called 'personas'. These include: Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping, and Export.

Develop is used for RAW processing (it's similar to Adobe's CameraRAW utility), Photo is used for everything else to do with picture editing (once outside of CameraRAW), Liquify is used mostly for 3D modelling, Tone Mapping is used for creating (impressive) HDR effects, and Export is used to set the file format, resolution, compression (where necessary) and proportions for the finished result.

Was it easy to use coming from years of working in Adobeland? Actually, Yes, it was pretty simple - even many of its keyboard shortcuts are the same as Photoshop. But what's immediately noticeable as missing is an image browser. Photoshop comes with Adobe Bridge, an app that permits fast browsing of your images, regardless of file format, folder by folder.

As it stands, Affinity Photo currently has no browser - maybe it will in future updates - so you are forced to either follow the well-worked keyboard action of File>Open, then search for the image among your filing system, or you can use use a third party browser.

Screen shot of XnView
It takes a couple of minutes to link this application to Affinity Photo (thru its Preferences) enabling you to right-click one or more images and to bring them directly into Affinity. Easy.

At first I was a bit stumped by this browser software shortfall - but then discovered XnView for Mac (and PC), a free application that works as fast as Adobe Bridge - plus it can be set to open the images directly into Affinity Photo - or any other third party application.

On my PC I have adopted FastStone Image Viewer - although XnView also works on Windows computers. Both are free, fast and easy to use. I'll be posting more information about using Affinity Photo shortly...