After its beta release, Serif has now released their Affinity Photo image editing app. It is designed as a competitor to Photoshop and offers “RAW processing, PSD import and export, 16-bits per channel editing, and ICC colour management”, as well as “camera lens and exposure corrections, accurate adjustments, live filter layers, high-end controls for channels and masks, advanced layer handling, and built-in frequency separation editing”

It is available now from the Mac App store at a U.S.A. Introductory price of $39.99

Press release

Affinity Photo for Mac Launches in the Mac App Store

5 years in the making, Affinity Photo redefines professional photo editing software for Mac

NOTTINGHAM, UK — July 09, 2015 — Serif is delighted to announce that its hotly-anticipated professional image editing app for the Mac, Affinity Photo, is now available on the Mac App Store at a special introductory price of only $39.99 / €39.99 / £29.99.

Affinity Photo is the second in an all-new suite of professional creative software for the Mac being developed by Serif. The first, Affinity Designer, was launched in October last year and has already achieved incredible success—culminating in receiving an Apple Design Award just last month. The company is now hoping to build on that success by setting its sights on the lucrative professional photo editing market.

“The whole ethos around the Affinity range is producing incredibly fast, sophisticated tools that are focused to provide a productive workflow for creative and photography professionals” said Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Serif. “We want to create game changing products, and we believe that Affinity Photo truly is a revolutionary photo editor”.

Affinity Photo was originally launched as a public beta in February to great fanfare. Even at that point it was a blindingly fast and robust app including high-end capabilities such as RAW processing, PSD import and export, 16-bits per channel editing, and ICC colour management. Over 230,000 people downloaded that beta version, really helping Serif develop the product further in the last 5 months.

“One of the things we take really seriously is listening to our users,” said Tony Brightman, head of Affinity development. “The beta period has been invaluable to us and we’ve worked round the clock implementing the features and making the improvements the community has been asking for.”

The release version of the app features all the tools required for professional processing including camera lens and exposure corrections, accurate adjustments, live filter layers, high-end controls for channels and masks, advanced layer handling, and built-in frequency separation editing. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of the product is how fast it is—nearly everything in the app happens live, in real time, as you work.

“The performance of the product is what we are most proud of,” said Tony. “We take full advantage of all the latest Apple technologies like OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics. What this means to the user is whether it’s a 100 megapixel image or a complex composition with 1000s of layers, you can still pan and zoom at 60fps and see live views of all adjustments, brushes, blend modes and filters with no compromise. It’s this speed and depth of features which really makes Affinity Photo a joy to use, and sets it apart from anything else out there.”

Affinity Photo is available exclusively in the Mac App Store for the special launch price of $39.99 / €39.99 / £29.99 until 23rd July where it will revert to its normal price of $49.99 / €49.99 / £39.99 with no subscription.

Affinity Photo Features

Engineered for Professionals

• Open, edit and save Photoshop® PSD files.
• RGB, CMYK, Greyscale and LAB colour spaces.
• End-to-end CMYK workflow with ICC colour management.
• Full 16-bit per channel editing.
• Open system colour palettes, .ASE Adobe® swatches, and import Adobe® ABR brush files.
• Work with all standard formats like PNG, TIFF, JPG, GIF, SVG, EPS and PDF.
• Panning and zooming is always live at 60fps with live previews, live tools and real-time editing.
• Open and edit massive images without compromising performance or running out of memory.

Unsurpassed productivity

• Full support for unlimited layers, layer groups, adjustment layers, filter layers and masks.
• Resize layers without any loss of quality. Lock, hide, duplicate and merge layers easily.
• Edit live filters, adjustments, effects, blend modes and masks non-destructively.
• Undo history can be saved with the document so you can always undo your changes.
• Task-focused workspaces for developing, post-processing, liquify and export.
• Work in windowed, full screen, or separated modes with fully customisable toolbars and drag and drop panels.
• Comprehensive vector drawing and text editing tools.
• Advanced snapping system with pixel perfect alignment when required.
• Export @1x, @2x, @3x from layers, slices or whole documents—continuously as you work!.

Professional image processing

• Open RAW and other images in a dedicated workspace.
• Adjust exposure, blackpoint, clarity, vibrance, white balance, shadows, highlights and much more.
• Recover detail thought to be lost by editing in an unbounded linear color space.
• Advanced lens corrections including chromatic aberration, defringe, vignette and best-in-class noise reduction.
• Paint areas or use fully customisable gradients to mask adjustments.
• View histograms, blown highlights, shadows and tones as well as detailed EXIF information.

Quality retouching and correction tools

• Intuitive selection brush and refinement makes selections simple, even down to strands of hair.
• Instantly remove unwanted objects with an incredibly advanced Inpainting brush.
• Dodge, burn, clone, patch, blemish and red eye tools.
• Smooth and retouch skin with built-in frequency separation.
• Apply high quality single-plane and dual-plane perspective correction as well as fully customisable mesh warps—all in real time.
• Dedicated Liquify persona gives freehand control over warps, twirls, pinch, punch and turbulence.

Advanced brush engine

• Huge library of painting, drawing, textures and professional DAUB brushes included.
• Create custom brushes and nozzles with full control over advanced dynamics.
• Full support for Wacom and other graphics tablets, including pressure, tilt and shortcut buttons.
• Real-time preview of your nozzle—see what you are about to paint or erase before you do it.

Fast, customisable effects

• Massive collection of effects available, including blurs, distortions, tilt-shift, shadows, glows, lighting and many more.
• Customise all aspects with precise controls, seeing a real-time preview of the end result before you apply.
• Swipeable split or mirrored screen always available for before and after views.
• Choose to apply effects non-destructively with live effect layers, enabling you to erase away or mask effects after they have been applied.

Built for Mac

• Takes full advantage of the latest OS X technologies including OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics.
• Use the Force Touch trackpad to paint with pressure sensitivity.
• Fully optimised for 64-bit and multi-core processors.
• Supports regular, retina and multi-monitor set ups—including the latest 5k iMac.
• iCloud Drive support.

For more details, please see the Affinity Photo Web Page.