If you are going to use it for normal photography with a small amount of astro then i would recommend it, but even then you would probably want at the very least star tools or similar as well.I’ve been using Affinity Photo on and off for a few years now, across Windows and Mac machines as well as my iPad, and I can honestly say I’d be happy using it if my work licence of Adobe Photoshop expired tomorrow. However, i don't feel that it's very good for astro stuff, there are, as yet no plugins for astro, i think there is one add on for removing stars but don't quote me on that. Layers and masks are easy to understand and the tutorials are easy to follow and direct, i would have a look at a couple before you buy. I dumped PS for Affinity but not for astro work ( i have PI).Īffinity is not in anyway as comprehensive as PS but it does what it does very well and it's very intuitive.

What experience do people have here? What do you like, what do you use most and what do you miss in any of the two? Did any of you try the Hubble processing in any of the two? What about gradient removal? Producing starless layers and the like? I would not mind to pay the few bugs for Affinity Photo, if it would be faster, safer and really has (as mentioned in many reviews) the same capabilities as PS. Other than that, what I always was missing in GIMP was the selective colors from PS (which made it quite so easy to produce those nice gold and turquois 'Hubble' images. This apparently did not change in the new version. I was used from older versions already that you had to duplicate layers a lot to be on the safe side. I understand that the big miss with GIMP is the lack of adjustment layers. I wonder how much experience people have around here with the two programs.

Also, I somehow felt that some of the processing, including loading the program and loading images, took quite some time. I downloaded and installed GIMP 2.10 yesterday, but didn't had a lot of time playing with it. Just to realize that earlier this year, they made it! Now I tried to find some reviews and, for the first time, learned of the existence of Affinity Photo. For years on end, I was looking out for the 32/16 Bit version to come as a stable release. I started processing my images with GIMP 2.7 (quite some time ago).

Affinity photo vs gimp