Adobe Photoshop has stood pretty much uncontested in the realm of image editing software for years, if not decades. Sure, alternatives exist, but to claim they're equally easy and powerful to use is just incorrect. That made the launch of the free Affinity app by Canva all the more interesting.

From a personal perspective, the fact that Affinity could run on Linux was especially great, because it finally gave Linux users such as myself something comparable to Photoshop in terms of features and ease of use. But I thought maybe that would be all: I would Affinity on my Linux laptop when I couldn't have my Mac Mini with me, and on Mac, I'd keep using Photoshop. But that hasn't been the case.

Affinity has remained on my Mac ever since it launched back in November, and I almost never find myself reaching for Adobe software anymore. That speaks volumes of how great this app really is, and it could shake up the industry in a huge way. It's not a perfect replacement, but for many people, including myself, it's more than enough.

My workflow is (almost) just as simple

Presets make things easier

Most of the work I do in Affinity is less comparable to Photoshop's "core" features and has more to do with Lightroom, which is essentially a subset of Photoshop focused on raw photo development. It's where I spend the most time, and thus, my biggest point of comparison. When I first tested Affinity a couple of months ago, I noted that one of the things it was missing was the ability to apply automatic corrections to photos.

One of the great things about Lightroom is that it can change all the lighting sliders automatically to obtain the "ideal" result with a single click, and I initially missed that in Affinity. But I quickly learned that this doesn't make much of a difference because Affinity allows me to save presets: I can find close to ideal settings to apply in a given lighting condition, and then save that as a preset I can instantly apply to future shots. Most of my pictures are taken in similar conditions, so I don't need to do a lot of tweaking. And to be fair, I never blindly trusted Lightroom's automatic corrections, either. I'd apply them and then do some tweaking to get what I consider the perfect result, and it's exactly the same here. Just load a preset and do some light tweaking.

Somehting similar applies to noise reduction. Lightroom applies very effective noise reduction using AI, and it's still a fantastic tool to have. But with Affinity, once I've applied a noise reduction profile once, I can save that as a preset and use it for future shots too. In this case, it's almost better, because my Mac Mini would normally take about 40 seconds to run Lightroom's denoising algorithm, but the presets in Affinity are applied instantly. It might not be fair to say that the results are just as good, but I doubt anyone who isn't a keen-eyed photographer would be able to tell when I switched from Lightroom to Affinity.

Everything I need is here

Basic image editing is just as easy

I may not spend as much time creating images in Affinity as I do developing photos, but I still do it, and frankly, after a couple of months on Affinity, there really isn't much I miss about Photoshop in my workflow.

I use a few different tools when making images, though admittedly, there's nothing too crazy going on with my workflow. A big feature I need a lot of the time is object selection, something Photoshop does better than any other competitor I've ever tried. A lot of my editing involves cutting something out of a photo (usually myself), and overlaying it on top of a different background. While Affinity's object detection usually isn't as accurate as Photoshop's, it's pretty close, and there's an essential feature I don't often see in other competitors: a smart selection brush.

Once I've made an automatic object selection with Affinity, I can refine the edges or things like gaps using the smart selection brush, which keeps using a similar kind of logic to select objects properly around the edges. I don't usually need to have pinpoint precision with my strokes because Affinity can snap the selection to the edges of an object, making it easy to select what I want. No other tool (aside from Photoshop itself) has made things this easy for me, and I can't overstate how glad I am to have it here.

Otherwise, a lot of features from Photoshop are here and work in somewhat similar ways, such that the learning curve is relatively small. Managing layers took some getting used to, but it's a natural enough transition, and all the features I'm used to are here. I can easily add an outline, drop shadow, or glow effect to any layer I select. In fact, I can add multiple layers of outlines if I want to make text "loud" to put in a YouTube thumbnail. I can also select elements from a single layer and then easily copy and paste them into a new layer, so composing an image is relatively easy.

Where it still falters

Affinity isn't perfect

While I love Affinity, that's not to say some compromises aren't there. When adjusting the levels in Lightroom, you get separate sliders for highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. Affinity kind of has equivalents to all these, but the sliders for whites and blacks don't have quite the same logic and feel a little less useful to me here.

Denoising also seems to make things just a little too soft in Affinity — specifically text — even when the detail slider is turned up. I've found it better to apply a sharpening filter after developing the raw photo, rather than try to make it look perfect while denoising. This does add a little bit of time to the editing process, but it's very easy to do and makes the final result much better.

To me, though, the real bummer of Affinity is that it's not ready to be a Lightroom replacement when it comes to developing raw photos in bulk. Lightroom lets you load up an entire folder of photos (in fact, you can browse your directories directly in Lightroom), and you can skip from one photo to the next, making edits as you see fit. When you're done, you can export all the edited photos in one fell swoop.

Affinity works more similarly to Photoshop itself in that loading a photo opens it in a new tab. Every open tab loads the image at a high resolution and ready for edits, whereas Lightroom only needs to load thumbnails for most images, and you generally only open one full photo at a time. This doesn't just mean the export process is more tedious and repetitive, but it has a big impact on performance. If you have 20 photos you want to develop, trying to open them all at once will bring your computer to its knees and make it impossible to get anything done. You have to pace yourself and take a handful of photos at a time; I've found that 5 or 6 is a fine number for an M4 Mac Mini, though more powerful hardware may be able to handle more.

I only need to load this many photos when I work on a product review, where a lot of original photos are required, so this hasn't been a huge problem for me. Most of the time, I only take one or two photos for a given article, and that's completely fine. But someone who works with a lot of photos would struggle here.

Getting all this for free is amazing

It's the best alternative we've ever had

Even with its flaws, Affinity has become my go-to app for image manipulation and editing, and it's honestly impressive on all fronts. For one thing, it's worth noting that Affinity incorporates features from both Photoshop and Lightroom while being significantly smaller and lighter. Affinity launches noticeably faster than Adoobe's apps on my computer, and looking at the app sizes, Photoshop and Lightroom combined take up around 10GB of space, whereas Affinity is only 3.5GB in size.

But most of all, it's incredible that we now get this kind of tool for free. Before this, free alternatives to Photoshop suffered from both a lack of features and an easy-to-use UI, often offering convoluted interfaces and more manual methods for everything that required a lot more work from the user. Affinity is offering the closest competitor in terms of capabilities and ease of use I've ever seen in this space. It's so much better than something like GIMP.

Of course, Affinity isn't free in quite the same way, since you need to sign up with a Canva account, and there are some AI features that require a Canva Pro subscription. A project like GIMP is fully free of charge and has no online connectivity required at all, whereas you do need the internet to log into your Canva account the first time on Affinity.

Still, for most people, I suspect that trade-off is worth it. It certainly is for me. Not only do I not have a need for alternatives like GIMP on Linux, I'm not even using Photoshop anymore on my Mac, either. That's a major achievement, and suffice it to say Affinity comes highly recommended.