Affinity Photo Introduction and 6 Best Photo Editor Alternatives [2023]
Last Updated on January 31, 2023 by Peter Wood
Affinity Photo 2 is a fully-loaded photo editor with advanced features. If you do not like Adobe’s subscription plans and need some professional photo editors, it should be one of the best choices. It is not only available for Windows and Mac, you can also find the iPad version is available now. But will you purchase the software for US$49.99? Is there an alternative to Affinity Photo 2 for editing photos on Windows and Mac? Just learn more from the review and find the 6 best alternatives from the article now.
Part 1. Affinity Photo 2 Introduction and Review
As a powerful photo editor has the non-destructive development of embedded camera RAW files, PSD, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and more. Besides the retouching features, you can also stitch photos into panoramas, blend images with multiple focuses, provide automation with Macros and batch processing, merge photos to HDR images or panoramic pictures, and provide multiple brush tools to touch-up photos. Moreover, you can also use layers and masks, as well as the mesh warp tool.
Pros
1. Provide more than 10 stack modes and multiple settings to get very different results.
2. Create, manage, and customize brushes with textures, behavior, settings, and others.
3. Support professional color, palettes and swatches, global colors, and advanced rendering.
4. Design vectors by drawing paths and shapes with a best-in-class Pen Tool and selections.
Cons
1. It is complicated to download the trial version with an account with verification.
2. Difficult to master the desired effect with too many tools with multiple modules.
3. Require a high computer configuration to install and use Affinity Photo 2.
Part 2. The 6 Best Affinity Photo 2 Alternatives
1. Affinity Photo Alternative – WidsMob AI Retoucher
WidsMob AI Retoucher is one of the most powerful photo editors with multiple AI algorithms. Besides the RAW file formats, it also supports WebP, AVIF, JPEGX, and others. As an Affinity Photo alternative, you can find dozens of stunning filters for lights, textures, and others. Moreover, there are multiple AI algorithms, including AI portrait, AI faces mosaic, AI noise reduction, AI low-light recovery, AI haze removal, AI cartoonization, AI style transfer, and more. It has a whole series of HSL parameters and B/W files to touch up photos.
1. Provide basic photo editing features to rotate, flip, convert, mirror, and compare photos.
2. Convert pictures to cartoons, paintings, pencil sketches, analog film photos, and others.
3. Edit photos automatically with AI for portraits, cartoons, mosaic faces, enhance photos, etc.
4. Apply multiple filters and effects and further edit them with the multiple HSL parameters.
2. Affinity Photo Alternative - WidsMob Viewer
WidsMob Viewer Pro is more than a photo editor as Affinity Photo 2, which enables you to browse photos and play videos. It also provides multiple adjustments and effects, which you can preview directly. You can rename/resize images and adjust exposure, contrast, saturation, and other parameters. When you need to select the desired photos, you can also add them to the Favorite folder within the library. Moreover, it creates some slideshows from the selected photos within one click.
1. Provide multiple viewing modes, like full screen, library, thumbnail, EXIF, and slideshow.
2. Support retina-quality viewing for high-resolution images, such as gigapixel panoramas.
3. Work with most RAW file formats, GIF, AVIF, PNG, TIFF, WebP, and other animated files.
4. Provide editing features to rotate, flip, convert, and resize all photos with a batch process.
3. Affinity Photo Alternative - Pixelmator Pro
Pixelmator Pro is another Affinity Photo 2 alternative to edit photos, draw illustrations, create designs, paint digital paintings, and more. It provides more than 40 presets that create cinematic, vintage, photographic film, and many other looks. You can also remove unwanted objects from images using the incredible Repair tool. Moreover, there are different templates for web pages, posters, resumes, and more. Similar to Affinity Photo 2, you can also use a full set of vector tools, including Pen and Freeform Pen tools to create vector designs.
1. Provide AI de-band feature to remove color banding and compression artifacts automatically.
2. Choose from different built-in color palettes and alternatives to create all-new templates.
3. Enhance the photos with denoise, super-resolution, match colors, and other AI algorithms.
4. Transform images via lighting, shapes, effects, illustrations, and other elements easily.
4. Affinity Photo Alternative – Paint 3D
Paint 3D is a free pre-install photo editor for Windows 10/11 as an alternative to Affinity Photo 2. Of course, you can also find similar and basic editing features to touch up photos with Paint 3D. But the entire purpose is to create fun, cartoony 3D objects and scenes. Moreover, once you have updated to the new version, it now has evolved more features, like multiple layers, and extensive editing tools. Compared to other Affinity Photo alternatives, it lacks some essential features to edit the photos.
1. It is a fast and built-in photo-editing tool on Windows 10/11 without installing extra software.
2. Microsoft has integrated 3D image-creating and editing tools within the latest version of Paint.
3. Provide a marker, pen, pencil, crayon, brush, and more to create and edit some basic 3D images.
4. Add an extra dimension to casual image creation and save 3D project files for further editing.
5. Affinity Photo Alternative - GIMP
GIMP is an open-source photo editor and the best alternative to Affinity Photo for cross-platform users. It has the basic features to soften noises, correct image colors, choose different brushes, and more. You can create photos with similar features as Affinity Photo, such as brush, pencil, airbrush, clone, and more. Moreover, you can also explore more features augmented with plug-ins and extensions. It is an all-in-one photo editor for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
1. Load, edit and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format with MNG support.
2. Install plugins to work with new file formats and apply new filters without a new update.
3. Select the desired part with a rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, and other tools.
4. Provide some basic photo editing tools, like crop, resize and adjust colors, and various filters.
6. Affinity Photo Alternative - PicMonkey
PicMonkey is an online Affinity Photo alternative to touch up photos for free. When you need to design some templates, including logos, banners, thumbnails, and more, it should always be a nice choice. Moreover, you can find editing features to touch up photos, change colors, and remove the background of images. Since it is an online photo editor, you do not need to download and install anything on their computers. You can also share them with others via multiple social media platforms.
1. Apply Super artsy effects like Edge Sketch and Posterize to dial up the drama.
2. Provide multiple photo editing tools, like crop, rotate, sharpen and resize.
3. Import photos from cloud services for editing directly, such as Dropbox and Flickr.
4. Users could also use Text and Frame features to beautify their photos.
Conclusion
Affinity Photo 2 is a professional photo editor as the Photoshop alternative, which provides advanced masks and layers to touch up photos. But it should be too complicated to polish photos and take too much time. When you need to have an advanced AI photo editor as Affinity Photo 2 alternative, WidsMob AI Retoucher is the desired choice you should choose.