I’ve been using Photoshop for a few years now, but it’s no secret that Adobe’s exorbitant pricing and other frustrating decisions have made many people reluctant to use the company’s products. I certainly don’t want to pay a minimum of $20 per month for Photoshop to support the company, but its ease of use has kept me locked in so far.

But now things have changed. Affinity, arguably Adobe’s biggest rival and now owned by Canva, just made a huge announcement that it was becoming free to use. All three of Affinity’s previous apps were merged into one, and it’s now basically completely free. I was already a big fan of Affinity as a potential alternative, but with this change, I can see Affinity making its way onto all of my devices, at least in the foreseeable future.

Powerful, but still easy to use

All the apps in one

Free alternatives to Photoshop are nothing new, but no matter how hard I try to get used to something like Krita, GIMP, or Darktable, the workflow has always just been far more complicated than I can be bothered to learn. There are too many options presented in a too-cluttered way that makes it hard to get used to.

This is something Affinity had already nailed with its previous Affinity Photo app (in fact, I even considered it a bit easier to use for photo development), and it’s all still here in this new app. What’s happened here is that you can go into one of a few preset “studios” in the app, replacing the previous Affinity apps, with the Pixel studio being the one most suited for a Photoshop replacement.

My workflow when it comes to photo and image editing is far from complex, but there are some Photoshop tools I could never get right in a tool like GIMP or Krita. The biggest one for me is the object selection tool, which is extremely easy to use with Adobe’s apps. In addition to the cloud-powered subject selection, one of my favorite parts is how easily I can use the selection brush to refine the selection, and Affinity replicates this almost perfectly.

Once you install the image segmentation model (which is also free since it’s not considered part of Canva’s AI tools), you can select objects in photos with one click, and if the automatic detection makes any mistakes, you can switch to the selection brush to make adjustments, and the app will continually use smarts to snap the selection to the edges of objects nearby, so you don’t need pinpoint precision for basic edits. It’s truly a blessing for removing the background from an image, for example.

Now, I will admit that there are some workflows here that are quite a bit different from Photoshop, such as clipping masks. It took me a bit of frustration and patience to figure out how to use them here, because in Photoshop, I would create a fill layer, then right-click it and create a clipping mask for the layer below it. Here, you have to create the fill layer below the layer you want to apply the clipping mask to, then right-click that original layer and create the clipping mask there.

Additionally, unlike Photoshop, drawing a new gradient doesn’t automatically create a new fill layer. You have to create the layer first and then create the gradient if you want to use it as a clipping mask for another layer. Though if a layer is already a fill layer, such as a drawn shape, you can then draw a gradient directly over it, which is actually a bit easier than using a clipping mask.

Otherwise, a cursory glance seems to show that all the features I’m accustomed to using still work here, so I’m very happy about that.

It replaced Lightroom, too

Not quite on the same level, but still very good

In addition to being a great Photoshop alternative, Affinity’s photo suite is also a very good replacement for Adobe Lightroom. The one big thing that’s missing is automatic adjustments, such as automatic exposure and light corrections, as well as automated noise reduction. Those are two things I love about Lightroom, so it’s a bit of a shame they’re missing, but it’s also totally fine — though I’m confident the automatic lighting correction features were in Affinity Photo before, but I can’t say whether they were purposefully removed from this free app or an accidental victim of the merger of the three apps.

Unlike tools such as RawTherapee or Darktable, the UI for lighting and color correction, lens settings, and noise reduction are all very easy to use from the get-go. When I tried those two apps, I spent a long time trying to figure what each of the dozens of sliders and dropdown menus even did, which is incredibly frustrating for someone who only edits photos as a complement to my job. I don’t have all the time in the world to learn how to edit photos with complex tools when I also need to write these articles (among other things).

Thankfully, Affinity only has a handful of sliders, and it’s really easy to see what each one does. One feature I quickly discovered that really helped me was the option to highlight sections of the image where shadows or highlights were being clipped. Then, I could use the exposure and brightness sliders to bring clipping to a minimum, so my photo looked bright and colorful enough but not completely blown out.

Similarly, the noise reduction sliders are very understandable and easy to use. I only need to mess with a couple of them to get solid results, which is a far cry from how frustrating other free RAW development tools can get. And as nice as the automatic noise reduction is in Lightroom, it’s also a very GPU taxing process, so if I’m editing on a laptop with integrated graphics, chances are I’d be doing it manually either way, so this is not a big deal to me.

Now I just need a Linux version

So close yet so far

When Affinity was leading up to its big announcement this week, a big part of me couldn’t help but hope that a Linux version of the app was in the works, but unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case. While I do most of my work on my Mac Mini at home, I do rely on my laptop quite a bit for portability, so having a version of Affinity I can use on my Linux laptop would have been fantastic.

I was recently made aware of a project attempting to make Affinity usable on Linux using Wine and similar translation layers, so I’ll have to give it a shot in the near future (and you’ll most likely hear about it), but a native version really would have been great to have. I have briefly tried Affinity Photo on Linux through virtualization with WinApps (shown above), and it worked alright, but I haven’t been able to do it with Wine, so it’ll be interesting to see.

Getting all this for free is a dream

But it’s not perfect

I know many people swear by free tools such as GIMP, Darktable, Photopea, or RawTherapee as alternatives to Adobe or Affinity that are completely free to use, or close enough to it, but I simply have not been able to get the hang of those tools in a way that feels remotely satisfying. As such, this release of Affinity is a blessing for me, and it makes my life so much easier. I will admit I do have a work-provided Adobe license that I will likely keep using on my main PC, but since I can only have it active on two PCs at any given time, I will almost certainly be switching to Affinity on other computers I happen to use.

That’s not to say this move to a freemium model is perfect, and I certainly wouldn’t trust Affinity’s new parent company, Canva, to not make things worse at some point. As it stands, you already need a free Canva account to download and set up for the first time, though no online connection is required after “activation”. And the fact that additional AI features are now behind a subscription plan instead of a one-time payment is something to bemoan, no doubt about it — though I also appreciate that at least the paid features are something I have no interest in at all.

But having essentially all the Affinity features I was used to available for free is, for now, absolutely worth it to me. And if you’ve been wanting a great, free app for editing photos

The new Affinity is wonderful (for now)

With Canva owning Affinity, I can only hope things don’t go downhill too quickly in the foreseeable future. As it is right now, I’m very happy about this new app, and I look forward to using it more and more so I can get more accustomed to how it works and hopefully have no need for Adobe anymore.

Image credit: Canva

Affinity

The new free Affinity app offers advanced and easy-to-use photo editing and graphic design tools in a unified interface.