Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
Corel PaintShop Pro
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
PaintShop Pro is an all-in-one photo editor with advanced photo management, editing & creative tools that deliver everything a photo & design enthusiast needs, from Corel Corporation.
For single-person teams or very small teams, I think Affinity Photo is great as it has a one-off cost and no ongoing subscriptions. If people are familiar with the Adobe products it might take a period of adjusting to Affinity Photo. It might also be overkill for some people's needs. But it does offer everything and room to grow. So weighing up what you need to do with photos and seeing if it fits is important.
Corel PaintShop Pro is well suited for photographers wanting to adjust photos and also for designers who want to create designs from scratch, working in layers and merging various elements. Due to slow load times, Corel PaintShop Pro is not well suited when you only have a few small tasks to do and when a lightweight alternative will do the job just as well (e.g. cropping and red-eye removal).
Almost all of Adobe Photoshop's features for a fraction of the cost. It was an easy decision for our organization.
The interface and most of the features are an almost mirror image of Photoshop. Flat fees instead of high yearly fees are much more desirable for our small team.
They have a great support forum for the little one-offs that aren't quite like the Photoshop app, or don't have the same exact name as Photoshop. The forum really helps when this happens. The YouTube support from the company and other users has been very helpful as well.
I use Sketch as my primary vector design tool. Affinity allows me to take a .ai, .eps, or other proprietary format and convert it to .svg for use/manipulation with Sketch and back. I can't say enough for this feature. It has helped me stay less pigeon-holed into Adobe products, which have lacked innovation for a long time in my opinion.
I would like to see better smart cropping, we have the need for use in our carrying and travel cases for foam cut-outs. This requires a picture to be taken of the product and then outlined. The latest Apple update does a much better job of it than Corel. A definite need in our business
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
I previously tagged Corel PaintShop Pro as an 8, but I'm moving on up to 10. I've been a user for many years. I always purchase the updates when they come out, and they have consistently gotten better with each release. Corel PaintShop Pro provides features that I haven't seen in other similar apps at this price point - alot of bang for the buck. If Corel keeps making and updating this program, I will absolutely keep purchasing it.
I would say that the program loads a LITTLE slow, but that's not a problem, considering everything that likely needs to load in the background for it to do what it does. Once running, the program performs very acceptably.
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
