Affinity photo and Affinity Designer: valid alternatives to Adobe products (i.e Photoshop and Illustrator)

In the past I always used Adobe suite (e.g. Photoshop) to manage and retouching my pictures, but now I started to use the Affinity suite that seems very good too … and cheaper!

You can buy it even from the Microsoft Store (Affinity Photo; Affinity Designer) so you can always easily download it to any new PC you will own in the future too. I bought both the programs but, for the time being I started to use only Affinity Photo. and not yet the other vector graphic design software.

At the beginning you could be a little lost because the tools are sometime different from the ones you are used to find in Photoshop, but there are a lot of official and unofficial very nice video tutorials that can help you. You can find them both in YouTube and in Vimeo.
Moreover there is a nice forum where you can find the right answer to possibly your questions and even ask for more and you can also have a look and subscribe to their Facebook site.

If you login into your Affinty Account: Affinity site, you can both manage your account/products and access to tutorials/forums.

Finally, launching the program and looking into the popup Wellcome page, you can access to a page that allows you to download a free Macro Pack that comes with a QuickStart_Guide.pdf that explains how to impost in the program Macros, so also those ones.

If needed, but I don’t think so, there are also workbook that explain the tools … even though I think they are a bit too expensive, it could be worth to buy them (it is strange but you can find a better price on Amazon than from the Affinity site … no shipping costs!).

As stated here, the tutorial set includes a lot of information on every aspects:

Beginners Series

Opening & Saving – YouTube / Vimeo
Layers – YouTube / Vimeo
Adjustments – YouTube / Vimeo
Filters – YouTube / Vimeo
Exporting – YouTube / Vimeo

Introduction

Basics

Transforming

Selections and Masking

Making Selections
Refining Selections
Pixel Selections from Layers
Quick Masks
Mask Layers
Exposure Merging
Clipping vs Masking
Vector Masking
Using Adjustment Layers on Masks – YouTube / Vimeo

Correction

Adjustment Layers
Levels
Curves
Shadows/Highlights
Split Toning and Selective Colour
LAB Colour Mode
Defringing and Chromatic Aberration
Live Perspective
Haze Removal
FFT Denoise
Removing Lens Flares
Changing Eye Colour
Graduated ND Filter Effect
Salvaging Underexposed Images
Dual Perspective Correction
Perspective Skew Correction – YouTube / Vimeo (New: 20th April)

Retouching

Cloning
Inpainting
Frequency Separation
Liquify: Retouching
Vector-Based Retouching
Enhancing Landscapes/Architecture
Vector Architecture: Worked Example
Enhancing Camera Phone Photography
Making Images Pop
Revealing Sky Detail
Bringing Out Water Detail
Quick Inpainting Crooked Horizons – YouTube / Vimeo

RAW Development

Raw: Discover Develop
Raw: Developing Images
Raw: Overlays
Raw: Redeveloping Images
Raw: Noise Reduction
Maximising Raw Latitude
Custom Tone Curve
Raw Development Quality
32-bit Raw Development – YouTube / Vimeo
Raw Colour Quality
Automatic Lens Corrections
Raw: Recovering Overexposed Highlights
Raw: Exposure Bias

Getting Creative

Design Aids

Channels

Filters

Panoramas

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

Focus Merging (Focus Stacking)

Live Stacking

Live Projections (360 editing, perspective projection)

OpenEXR/32-bit

3D Render/Texture Work

Seamless Textures
Clone Sources: Texture Creation
Enhancing 3D Renders #01
Enhancing 3D Renders #02
Tone Mapping 3D Renders
3D Relighting with Normal Map Passes – YouTube / Vimeo

Colour Management

OpenColorIO Setup
OpenColorIO Adjustment
Soft Proofing
Printing on Mac
Printing on Windows
Wide Colour Profiles vs sRGB – YouTube / Vimeo

Macros

Finishing Off

Plugins

Projects

Nature Portrait
Supermoon
Product Shot Retouching #01
Nighttime Architecture Workflow – YouTube / Vimeo
Portrait Retouching Workflow – YouTube / Vimeo

Bonus Content

Uplift Epic Skies (1.6 Bonus Content) – YouTube / Vimeo

Windows Workflow videos

In addition to the regular tutorials, we’ve also got some workflow videos shot on the Windows version of Photo that cover using a variety of features to edit an image to completion. These tend to be released on a more informal basis.