After using (“a version of”) Photoshop CS6 for many years, I decided to go legit. But at Adobe’s prices (over £100 a year)? Not for me, Clive. Saw a recommendation for Serif Affinity Photo somewhere and had a look into it. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to offer a trial version, so had to torrent one to have a look at it. It’s very Photoshoppy, so it’s easy to pick up the essentials. It does have its idiosyncracies (like Personas), but seemed to do everything I need, so I bought it – £48.99 perpetual licence, and cheaper than even the (limited) Photoshop Essentials.
And thought I’d be unconvential and start with a clean slate of ignorance rather than ploughing straight into it and missing something of the “ethos”. There are some excellent tutorial videos freely available on Youtube – over 200 of them! I have 4k Video Downloader for downloading from Youtube, but the free version doesn’t allow downloading from a huge playlist, So, not fancying downloading 200+ videos individually, I got a licence for that too (£13+), and let it get on with the job.
Affinity Photo is excellent. So far, I particularly like the Haze Removal tool, which has done a brilliant job with just one click on some photos I struggled to improve with Photoshop. I don’t think it’ll be able to import Photoshop Actions (of which I have many), but it does have a macro capability, so I can (probably) regenerate them without too much pain.
