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Sep 20, 2017 Usually, the price of software comes at the end of the review, but with Affinity Photo 1.5, the image editor for Mac and Windows, the price is the starting point, along with a prominent qualifier from the product’s website: 'No subscription.' Professional editing tools for almost anyone who needs. Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision. Born to work hand-in-hand with the latest powerful computer technology, it’s the only fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS. Affinity - the fastest, smoothest, most precise professional creative software. Affinity Photo is an exciting new addition to the professional photo editing market, combining powerful layering, masking, adjustment and effects tools with an extremely competitive, subscription-free price. It’s now available in both Mac and Windows versions, too. Overview of the New Affinity Photo Editing Software A Post By: Suzi Pratt In early February, software company Serif announced the free beta version of Affinity Photo, a Mac-only photo editing program said to rival the likes of other editing tools, including the standards for creative professionals, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Jun 05, 2019 Affinity Photo is a professional photo editing app for both the Mac and iPad. The Mac version is well regarded, and considered by many to be a Photoshop alternative, while the iPad version is a.
Introduced with a discount of 25% , valid until December 4th, the Affinity Photo Workbook is the only official companion to the photo editor from Serif.
Available in English and German, the Affinity Photo Workbook joins the Affinity Designer Workbook as a must have tool to users of Serif’s new programs. I received a note from the company last week, inviting me to buy the book, which I did immediately, as I did for the Affinity Photo editor in December 8, 2016, when it was launched for Windows. The same note mentioned that “to celebrate its release until Thursday, 30 November we are offering a 25% launch discount, meaning for the first week you can purchase a copy for just $36.99 (+ shipping and handling).”
My copy of the book arrived yesterday afternoon, and only today, after browsing through the pages, I write this note about its availability. There is still time, if you’re really interested, to get the Affinity Photo Workbook at a special price. Even if you don’t get it now, if you’re a Affinity Photo user, I believe you should get the book. No matter how much information is available online – and Serif has a lot of videos and info explaining the program – nothing beats having a book on your desktop, always available to open and read.
Getting the book in my hands felt as exciting as when I got my manual for Aldus PhotoStyler SE (or Special Edition) which was, as far as I remember, one of my first photo editors, along with the shareware Paint Shop Pro – which I paid for, as I believed it made sense. Aldus PhotoStyler, from 1991, was the first 24 bit image editor for Windows – running on Windows 3.0 – and the SE edition was usually distributed with hardware. Aldus PhotoStyler was the main competition to Adobe Photoshop, and in 1994 Adobe bought Aldus and put an end to PhotoStyler.
I picked my Aldus PhotoStyler manual from the bookshelf and placed it besides the Affinity Photo Workbook, for a photo that also has a cat tail, as Yellow, the family cat, decided she wanted to be in the photo. This trip down memory lane made complete sense for me, because buying this book made me relate to the excitement it was to discover PhotoStyler some 25 years ago. Comparing the manual for PhotoStyler, with 186 pages and small illustrations, and the 488 glossy colour pages filled with more than 600 illustrations and app screenshots, reveals how much everything has changed since the first image editing tools made it to the market.
The book, though, is much more than a guide to the features the program offers. App developer Serif has commissioned professional photographers and digital artists from around the world to create 16 projects which will help readers make full use of the unrivalled range of tools available in Affinity Photo on desktop. The projects are split into Enthusiast, Commercial and Creative chapters, supported by free downloadable resources including the original imagery, project snapshots for reference and final project files, allowing users to follow along and recreate the work.
A 48-page hands-on Core Skills section allows users to familiarise themselves with the essential photo-editing techniques the pros use. There’s also a 68-page guide to the user interface of the desktop app, including panels and toolbars.
More than 600 illustrations and app screenshots add to the high-quality look and feel of the book. As an added bonus, for users of the app on Mac or Windows there are five tear-out card keyboard shortcut ‘cheat sheets’ on sturdy card for easy reference.
Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Serif, says: “The Affinity Photo Workbook really is an essential companion to the app on Mac and Windows, and puts the ability and knowledge of professionals at the fingertips of every reader. “Rather than an A-Z manual, it’s designed to inspire users to create their own unique work in Affinity Photo, by taking inspiration from some amazing projects and advice. Because it focuses on professional skills and techniques, the Affinity Photo Workbook will still be completely relevant even when updated versions of the app become available.”
To help boost your productivity Serif also included five keyboard shortcut cheats sheets in the back of the book. They include shortcuts for both the macOS and Windows version of Affinity Photo and can be torn out and kept aside for easy reference!
Highlights of the Affinity Photo Workbook include:
- Enthusiast photo-editing with adjustments, masks, HDR and Black and White techniques.
- Innovative solutions to challenges in night/day urban photography.
- Recreate Affinity’s iconic Photo panorama for yourself.
- The popular double exposure effect.
- Professional food and model retouching.
- Pro compositing techniques for greater realism.
- Create and apply raster hair brushes.
For the first days of sale, until December 4th, the Affinity Photo Workbook is available priced £27.99 / $36.99 / 32,99€ only from the Affinity website. The new publication follows the sell-out success of the Affinity Designer Workbook, the official companion to Serif’s graphic design app, which was published a year ago. As an added bonus, Serif is also discounting the Affinity Designer Workbook by the same amount. The usual price will be £37.99 / $49.99 / 44,99€.
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The name Serif has been synonymous with budget-priced, Windows-based desktop publishing, image-editing and vector drawing programs for the last couple of decades.
Of these, PhotoPlus X8 is the latest version of Serif's competent photo-editing package, which includes helpful learning guides for beginners and some advanced tools, including layer-based editing, for more seasoned users. However, it doesn't cross the bridge from amateur to pro-grade solution – and again, it's only available for Windows PCs.
Affinity Photo is something altogether new and entirely different. It's been developed over the last six years purely for Macs – indeed, there's still no Windows development waiting in the wings. It's also vastly more 'professional' than any other Serif program to date, going head-to-head with the industry-standard, full-blown edition of Adobe Photoshop.
As a result, what Affinity Photo lacks in beginner-friendliness, it makes up for in top-end features and a power-packed, fully customisable interface.
Adding to the attraction, Serif has also developed a companion graphic design package for the Mac, which goes by the name of Affinity Designer. Images for both programs share the same file format, and are therefore fully interchangeable.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Affinity Photo is its price. Whereas mid-range programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 and Corel Paintshop Pro Ultimate X8 cost around £80/$100/AU$130, Affinity Photo 1.4 is just half the price, at £39.99/$49.99/AU$79.99.
Considering that two major upgrades have already been delivered for free since Affinity Photo went on sale, the price stacks up very well compared to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which combines Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC in a monthly subscription and works out to about £100/$120/AU$120 per year.
So what exactly does Affinity Photo give you for your money?
Meet the cast
The main players in Affinity are a set of modules called 'personas'. These include the Photo, Liquify, Develop and Export personas, each of which has its own dedicated workspace. However, they go above and beyond mere workspaces, with each bringing to the stage its own set of tools and modes of operation.
For processing raw files, your first stop will be the Develop persona. Support for new cameras and lenses is being continuously added, with updates to the program so far being free for users. The control panel has a wealth of tools arranged in tabs for Basic, Lens, Details, Tones and Overlays.
In the Basic tab, for example, you'll get access to exposure, black point and brightness adjustments, enhancements for contrast, clarity, saturation and vibrance, white balance and tint tools, shadows and highlight adjustments and options to add your own presets to the default settings.
Moving along the tabs, the Lens corrections include chromatic aberration and defringing tools, as well as distortion, rotation, horizontal/vertical perspective and vignetting corrections. The Details section adds sharpening refinements and noise control, while Tones contains curves, black & white conversion and split toning adjustments.
The main raw processing tools are many, varied and powerful, and there are additional tools arranged in a vertical button strip down the left-hand side, for things like removal of red-eye and blemishes.
Once you've finished in the Develop persona you may feel that your image is ready to go and needs no further work. In this case you can go directly to the Export persona, where you'll find a wealth of options for outputting images in 8-bit or 16-bit colour depth, in a variety of file formats.
A compatibility bonus when sharing files with other people is that Affinity Photo can directly import and export Photoshop PSD files, complete with full layer support.
Picture this
The real power of the program resides in the Photo persona. Non-destructive alterations are readily available via layer adjustments, which include just about everything you could think of, from brightness and contrast to white balance, colour balance, vibrance and beyond.
Fully automatic corrections include auto levels, auto contrast, auto colours and auto white balance (even for JPEG files).
The Photo persona also has a vertical strip of tools arranged down the left-hand side, most of which have further pop-out options. For example, the Healing Brush tool set includes the regular healing brush and additional tools for patching, blemish removal and red-eye removal, plus a context-aware Inpainting tool that does an excellent job of removing objects from a scene and intelligently filling the space to blend in with the surroundings.
Finally, the Liquify persona hosts an array of pinch, push, twirl and turbulence tools, complete with mesh view and the ability to freeze or thaw selected areas of the image. The speed and fluidity with which edits are updated on screen is particularly impressive.
Alive and kicking
That speed is on show throughout Affinity Photo. Not only are the editing tools very good, with excellent fine-tuning and customisation options, they're also super-fast in action.
Most adjustments can be previewed live, in real time and without any lag, even if you're working on images with huge numbers of layers. This makes the editing process wonderfully fluid, and enhances the creative experience.
The 'live' aspect of watching images update as you work on them extends to customisable effects that include lighting, blurring, tilt & shift, and many more. It's great to be able to get instant feedback on adjustments, which can also be applied as 'live layers'.
Affinity For Mac
The same immediate, constantly updating previews also apply to live layer blends, for which 30 options are available. Similarly, live filters offer instant previews and non-destructive application.
Similar speed and dexterity is available when retouching images, using tools like dodge and burn, clone, blemish removal and red-eye fix. The latest 2015 edition of Photoshop CC offers a noticeable speed increase over previous versions when using its healing, spot healing and patch tools but, even so, Affinity Photo has the edge.
For ultimate control, you can create custom brushes and nozzles with advanced flow dynamics, and there's built-in support for Wacom and other graphics tablets.
New tricks
For more extreme adjustments, single-plane and dual-plane perspective corrections are easy to apply, and there's also a customisable mesh system for applying warps, again in real time. The latest V1.4 brings yet more fun to the party, with new additions like panoramic photo stitching, live stacks, a haze removal filter and split toning, plus a whole lot more.
Affinity Photo Beta Mac
Working outside the box, so to speak, V1.4 also adds six extensions for the Apple Photos app. These enable you to use powerful tools from Affinity Photo within the Photos app, including develop, haze removal, liquefy, miniature, monochrome and retouch.
If there's a flaw in Affinity Photo, it's that the seamless support of Photoshop image files (including complex layered files), doesn't yet quite extend to plug-ins. Some work fine, others don't, but it's an area in which Serif have been making strides to ensure greater compatibility with existing third-party plug-ins, and a growing range of new ones.
Also, much like Photoshop itself, image organisation and cataloguing tools are basic in the extreme. In this respect, the Serif program could do with a companion app along the lines of Lightroom.
Verdict
Overall, Affinity Photo is a fabulous program that really does rival the best professional and enthusiast-level image-editing packages on the market. It easily takes the lead over previous Serif programs that we've seen for PC, and is a worthy winner of Apple's 'Mac App of the Year' award, 2015.
Well.I get nothing! All I hear is a couple of clicks (very minimal in noise) but that is only when I plug the power cord to the mac.pressing the power on button does not turn anything at all. Power mac g5 disassembly manual. I tested the back up battery, still gives more than 3.5 v. Logic board diagnostics lights are not on.
As with most photo-editing programs, a 30-day free trial version is available. Try it – you'll love it. And when you can't give it up after a month, you'll also be pleased that it's so 'affordable'.