Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
Procreate
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Savage, headquartered in North Hobart, Tasmania, is dedicated to making exceptional creative tools. They are the creators of Procreate, a digital art and illustration app for iPad. Offering 100s of handmade brushes, a suite of artistic tools, advanced layer system, and its Valkyrie graphics engine — Procreate is designed to enable the creation of expressive sketches, rich paintings, gorgeous illustrations and beautiful animations.
For single-person teams or very small teams, I think Affinity Photo is great as it has a one-off cost and no ongoing subscriptions. If people are familiar with the Adobe products it might take a period of adjusting to Affinity Photo. It might also be overkill for some people's needs. But it does offer everything and room to grow. So weighing up what you need to do with photos and seeing if it fits is important.
Procreate is well-suited for any illustrator, whether they're a beginner or an expert. It offers a vast range of features that will allow anyone with an artistic inclination to start creating right away. It's also appropriate for budding designers, artists, and animators. While the animation options offered aren't super premium, it is a good place to start learning about animating in layers, e.g., in Photoshop. Procreate isn't suitable for people who want to illustrate vector-based images. The app currently only supports raster images that can't be scaled up.
Almost all of Adobe Photoshop's features for a fraction of the cost. It was an easy decision for our organization.
The interface and most of the features are an almost mirror image of Photoshop. Flat fees instead of high yearly fees are much more desirable for our small team.
They have a great support forum for the little one-offs that aren't quite like the Photoshop app, or don't have the same exact name as Photoshop. The forum really helps when this happens. The YouTube support from the company and other users has been very helpful as well.
I use Sketch as my primary vector design tool. Affinity allows me to take a .ai, .eps, or other proprietary format and convert it to .svg for use/manipulation with Sketch and back. I can't say enough for this feature. It has helped me stay less pigeon-holed into Adobe products, which have lacked innovation for a long time in my opinion.
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
Procreate is the easiest to understand out of all this software. I use it on my iPad, and I find that drawing with the Apple Pencil straight on Procreate is intuitive and simple, unlike using the complicated pen tool on Adobe Illustrator. As I've mentioned earlier, Procreate is a great app for beginners, whereas both Illustrator and Photoshop have steep learning curves. If you want to dive into designing right away, Procreate is your best option!
