Affinity Photo Brings Plenty of Photo Editing Power to your iPad
Photography is big on the iPhone, simply because the built-in camera rivals much more expensive dedicated hardware. To really take your craft to the next level, you need a photo editing app that's powerful and full-featured. For years, that mean Photoshop on the desktop, but several developers have tackled the problem for iOS devices. Affinity Photo, an iPad-only app, brings a wealth of photo editing power to your iPad.
App Feels Like
Affinity Photo for iPad has an intuitive interface, but it's quite complex. Some might say it's difficult to learn. However, the app does come with a wealth of tutorials and sample images to get you started.
Begin with the first tutorial, and work your way through them. You'll get a solid introduction to the interface and controls, as well as the techniques that will make your photos really stand out.
As you progress through the tutorials, feel free to break away and try out your techniques with your own images or the samples. I've found that's a solid way to really learn and embed the knowledge from the tutorials into your mind and muscle memory.
The first fully-featured photo editor for the iPad
One of the most useful tools in Affinity Photo is the dedicated inpainting brush. This allows you to quickly and easily remove objects from your photographs, such as pulling the sailboat out of an oceanscape to get just the beauty of the water.
The app also provides support for layers, layer masks, and every Photoshop feature I can think of. There may be some missing, such as support for plugins. However, the developers make up for that by incorporating features that you'd need a plugin to use in Photoshop.
The integration with Apple Pencil is top-notch. You can use the accessory to make any edits, selections, or refinements you might wish. It makes editing photos on your iPad like working with a Wacom tablet that has the image you're working with superimposed on the surface.
Once you get a workflow down in Affinity Photo, the app becomes even easier to use. It truly is the first fully-featured photo editor for the iPad. It has taken away my need to do any serious image editing tasks on the desktop.
When your project is finished, you can export it into just about any file format you might need. Affinity Photo even supports exporting to Photoshop PSD files and SVG documents.
There's precious little not to like about Affinity Photo. If anything, the menus might be a bit too busy. Finding the export button, for example, can be a tedious chore.
The app also sometimes shows some lag, especially when downloading sample images to work with. That's only an occasional problem, though. Overall, the app is quite snappy and brisk, with complex operations taking very little time to complete.
The verdict
This is one of the most useful and feature-packed photo editing apps I've come across. It offers a wealth of power and capabilities, and turns your iPad into an image-editing workstation. The tight integration with Apple Pencil makes an already excellent app even more of a pleasure to work with.