If you've found this tempting, you can try it out for yourself. If, however, you are a Creative Cloud customer like myself I'm not sure I'd want to cut out Photoshop just to use this software. If you own Lightroom outright, it may be a good Photoshop alternative once it's out of beta. You may find, like me, that it's enough for your personal retouching needs. You have absolutely nothing to lose by giving it a try. Its customizability, nifty little tricks, and Apple-esque interface make it a pretty tempting option for someone like myself. Even after a couple weeks using Affinity I've been able to come up with a decent little workflow. This isn't an option I see retouching professionals going for, but it's definitely something I'd encourage people to check out. In addition, it seems to have room for growth. For me, Affinity appears to have all I want in the way of basic retouching. While I'd love to see it replace both Photoshop and Lightroom, I don't think that's in the cards. Furthermore, Affinity does nothing in the way of cataloging and storing files like Lightroom does. While there wasn't much apparent difference between Affinity beta 1 and 2 in this category, I'm hopeful that further revisions will come closer to the competency of Adobe's Lightroom or ACR converter. So much so that I'm continuing to import to Lightroom, export a corrected image, then pull it into Affinity. Lightroom's raw converter really blows this out of the water. I'd love to see this app in the hands of a master retoucher. I found the retouching process in Affinity to be intuitive and powerful enough to accomplish my needs. Please excuse the grain, the above portraits are shot on Cinestill 800T tungsten balanced 135 film, rated at 1600 ISO, and pushed in development. It may be the result of an early build or just the difference in sophistication between Adobe's offerings and Serif's, but images imported into Lightroom 5 (CC) appear to have better color, sharpness, and more punch compared to the rather bland and flat files produced by Affinity as seen below. I found, however, the raw converter in Affinity to be rather lackluster. I love the idea of importing, doing all my color work, then taking care of any retouching issues all in one place rather than bouncing around from app to app. I'll be totally honest, the idea of having my raw conversion and heavy-duty post all in one place is something that got me pretty excited. Since raw conversion is where the process starts for us *ahem* non-jpg guys, it's a good place to start this article. Its raw converter seems to target apps like Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw, its retouching ability goes toe-to-toe with Photoshop, and its creative effects may give apps like Alien Skin and Rad Lab a run for their money. Affinity is a pretty unique application that boasts some pretty powerful tools.
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