This is a consideration that’s becoming increasingly important for those who work cross-platform or are leaning more on their iPads for work. We also considered availability, which is to say where else you can access your investment beyond macOS.
subscription, and so on that are beyond the scope of this comparison.
This is very subjective territory and we recognize that there are differing schools of thought on price ranges, single-payment vs. can not only help with the initial learning process, but also speed up workflows for more confident users.Ĭost and Availability: Cost is a tricky subject, but in general we’re looking for products that have a clear, understandable cost structure and that feel like good value for money. The availability of communities, tutorials, classes, etc. We looked for something that’s relatively easy to start with, but has room for growth as your needs and skills develop.Įcosystem: A crucial aspect of an app’s appeal is the ecosystem of supporting resources that build up around it, both from the manufacturer and from third parties. The availability, speed, and effectiveness of these features are what set the apps apart from each other.ĭesign and Ease of Use: Though much of the core functionality is shared between apps in this category, the way tools are presented, how granular the controls are, and how customizable the interface is can all influence how you work. We focused primarily on features that pertain to photographers and those looking to do common image manipulation tasks like adding text, resizing, etc. Having focused our attention only on pixel editors, we examined eligible apps according to the following core characteristics:įeatures: The scope of work that you can tackle with this category of app is daunting. Though they’re generally used for photo editing, many people also turn to pixel editors for graphic design, print preparation, digital painting, and many other use cases that go way beyond the scope of pure photography. We’ve already covered photo editors with DAM (Digital Asset Management) capabilities in a separate piece. The latter are sometimes called pixel editors, and we’re using the term here to make it easy to differentiate between them and the other kind of photo editing app.
Pixelmator pro and affinity photo plus#
We’ll take a look at why Affinity Photo was selected, what the competition looks like, where it falls short, and what sorts of users are best served by each choice.īut first… What is a Pixel Editor, Exactly?Īlthough the terminology is a bit hazy, the photo editing landscape has two main kinds of app: the all-in-one asset management plus editing environment options, like Lightroom, and the standalone editors designed to perform deeper modifications on single photos at a time, like Photoshop. The basic layout of Affinity Photo resembles Photoshop, making it easy to go from one to the other. While it remains the most powerful option - and a great choice for anyone who’s interested in exploring it - we believe that Affinity Photo is an easier, quicker solution for most users.Īffinity Photo offers most of the same capabilities for less money, and is equally at home on macOS and iPadOS - a claim that Photoshop still can’t make, despite its recent re-release on iPadOS.
Photoshop has been the king of the hill in this space for many years, having had decades to establish its dominance. These days I use Snapseed for processing and Photo Raw for asset management.When the editing demands of photographers exceed the capabilities of solutions like Lightroom, they turn to dedicated pixel editors like Photoshop.
It's not Pro-level but has a great set of features, including most of the processing that Photo Raw includes. My other recommendation is to look at Snapseed. It's much more like Lightroom than Photoshop so there are some things it can't do like make your photo look like a charcoal drawing (though I wouldn't mind betting someone has made it do something like that) or twirling a picture out of shape like it's been stirred by a stick (cos you really need that, right?) so if money isn't too much of an object you might want to get Affinity Photo as well. It includes all of the usual processing features with sliders, curves, and so on, plus presets, effects, retouching, layers, masking, AI portrait, focus stacking, HDR stacking, panorama stitching, plus pro-level asset management features for culling, tagging, star rating, etc to IPTC standards. It's very much like Lightroom on steroids. My recommendation would be On1 Photo Raw.
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