Affinity Photo is a photo editor for Windows and macOS that develops camera RAW files, retouches photographs and combines images into layered compositions. Its separate workspaces, called Personas, provide tools for RAW processing, pixel editing, image distortion, tone mapping and exporting parts of a document.
The standalone Affinity Photo belongs to the earlier Affinity suite, which existing owners can continue using. The newer Affinity application combines photo editing, vector design and page layout in one application.
RAW development
Opening a supported camera RAW file brings it into Develop Persona. Exposure and tonal controls work alongside lens correction, sharpening and noise reduction. Brushed or gradient overlays restrict adjustments to selected regions, while clipping indicators identify highlights and shadows that have lost visible detail. Split and side-by-side previews compare the processed image with its starting appearance.
Affinity Photo offers a choice when developing the file: create a pixel layer or retain a RAW layer. An embedded RAW layer copies the source into the document; a linked RAW layer keeps it at its existing location. Both RAW options allow later redevelopment with the Serif Labs engine. Pixel output commits the development to pixels, so this choice determines whether those original development settings remain available.
Retouching
The Inpainting Brush marks areas to reconstruct from surrounding image content. It can address dust, scratches or unwanted objects, with the painted region defining where replacement content is needed. Clone and healing tools provide further control over repairing an area from another part of the image.
Frequency separation divides a photograph into a low-frequency layer containing color and tone and a high-frequency layer containing texture. The separation radius determines how those details are divided. This lets a retoucher adjust uneven skin color on one layer while working on spots or stray hairs on the other, instead of applying the same correction to both texture and tone.
Dodge, Burn and Sponge brushes alter local brightness or saturation. Liquify tools reshape image areas in their own workspace, while a live Liquify filter keeps the distortion available for later adjustment.
Selection edges
Affinity Photo provides brush, freehand, flood and shaped selections for isolating parts of a photograph. Edge refinement adds controls for smoothing an outline, feathering its transition and adjusting the boundary. A matte brush re-examines fine details such as hair against a background, with different preview backgrounds helping reveal the resulting edge.
The refinement can become a selection, a mask or a new layer with a mask. A mask hides parts of a layer without deleting their pixels, so the cutout can be revised as the composition changes. Grayscale mask values control partial visibility; vector masks use a drawn path or shape as the boundary.
Layer composites
Photographs, painted content, vector shapes and text can occupy separate layers. Layer order, opacity and blend modes determine how they combine. Clipping restricts content to another layer, while masks can target an individual layer or a group. Live range masks also isolate content by properties such as brightness or hue.
Adjustment layers keep tonal and color corrections separate from the underlying photograph. Live filters do the same for effects such as blur, sharpening and distortion. Their settings remain editable, and an effect can be removed without stepping backward through unrelated edits in the document history. Masks restrict these corrections to the areas that need them.
HDR, focus and panorama merges
HDR Merge combines bracketed exposures of the same subject into a document with an extended tonal range. Alignment compensates for differences between frames, and ghost removal addresses subjects that moved between exposures. Tone mapping then adapts that range for an ordinary display, or the image can remain in a floating-point workflow for further editing and OpenEXR output.
Focus Merge instead takes photographs made at different focus distances. It aligns the frames and blends their detailed regions into a new image with greater depth of field.
Panorama stitching assembles overlapping photographs into a wider or taller view. Detected panoramas appear as previews before separate documents are created. The panorama workspace allows masking and alignment refinements, then crops transparent edges or fills missing edge regions through inpainting.
Astrophotography Stack Persona
Astrophotography Stack Persona accepts RAW and FITS imagery for combining exposures of the night sky. Light frames supply the subject, while optional calibration frames address different capture problems: dark frames identify thermal noise and hot pixels, bias frames identify read noise, and flat frames help correct dust and uneven illumination. Dark flat frames can clean noise from the flats themselves.
The stack remains in a linear floating-point workflow for subsequent tonal stretching and retouching. Affinity Photo can also group images from different filters for producing color or narrowband composites.
Painting brushes
Brush controls include size, hardness, opacity and dynamics driven by pen pressure or stroke speed. Custom brushes can use image content or a pixel selection, and ABR import brings in compatible brush resources. Symmetry and mirroring repeat strokes across the canvas, while stabilization smooths their movement.
Macros and batch jobs
The Macro panel records a sequence of editing operations for replay. Recorded steps can be excluded, their parameters adjusted, and selected settings exposed for changes when the macro runs. Saved macros stay in a library and can be exported for reuse elsewhere.
Batch jobs apply saved macros to a collection of source images. They also control output folders, formats and dimensions, including whether resizing preserves the original aspect ratio. RAW files can be developed automatically as part of the batch, with outputs including JPEG, PNG, TIFF and the editable AFPhoto format.
Exporting from Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo can exchange PSD files and work in RGB, CMYK, Lab and grayscale color modes. Whole-document export produces a finished image, while Export Persona divides a document into independently configured output areas called slices.
A slice created from a layer or group outputs that content. A manually drawn slice captures the visible layers inside its boundary. Each slice can have several formats and sizes, allowing different assets to be generated from the same composition without repeatedly cropping the working document.
