I have been using Photoshop for more than 15 years now. It has been a solid tool for my living. But at some points, the performance can be so sluggish. It may be from my hardware side, but Photoshop has been added with so many features that caused it runs heavily.
I am always open for alternatives. There is Photopea who once took my attention due to the portability through web apps. Though I love to have Photoshop-like editing through phone and can be accessed anywhere, Photopea performance is rather poor and much slower.
Finally Affinity Photo came up. There had been an overwhelmingly positive reviews about this app. The strongest Photoshop rivals they said. I was motivated to try it. I installed the trial version and right jump to it.
The love at the first few touches
Not gonna lie, Affinity Photo is indeed an amazing graphic tool. Its tools and features feel so snappy. Fonts are loaded fast without wait, unlike the sluggish Photoshop to load fonts in my system. Even some filters preview, like Gaussian Blur, the effects intensity occurs right whenever you drag the slider. In Photoshop, you drag the slider first to a certain value, then the effect follows. It is just fast fast and fast performance. I feel like my 10-year-old PC is like a new PC again. It feels much more alive once again.
But that's about it.
When to put Affinity Photo in context, I mean, in a real-world design project, the flaws start to show up. Some features that I used to have in Photoshop is missing greatly in Affinity Photo. Here are some key points on it why Photoshop is still better than Affinity Photo.
Cannot export a proper PSD file.
Affinity Photo can import and edit PSD file, even faster than the Photoshop itself. Some filters and adjustments layer may not be perfectly imported, but overall it works well. But the trouble happens when you try to export back into PSD file. The text layer is not preserved, but it is rasterized. When you open the exported PSD into Photoshop, you cannot edit the text layer.
What does this mean? If you work in a team or in a collaboration with people that using Photoshop, you will face extra hassle. Your team will not be able to edit text anymore. That may be a good thing, for example if they don't have the font used in the text and they don't need to edit it. But what about other case where you will exchange for future edits?
Cannot Read Photoshop Smartobject
Photoshop SmartObject has loads of function such as preserving raster effects, adjustments, as well as nesting several layers into one. Affinity Photo has similar feature. However Affinity cannot read Photoshop Smartobject properly.
This means you miss a lot of PSD mockup files. Sure you can still make a mockup within Affinity Photo, but sometimes it's just much faster to use a mockup template, especially for tight deadlines.
Limited Shortcut.
Maybe a bit nitpicky here, but customizable shortcuts is king when you regularly working on a program. It just make the workflow runs faster. Less clicks, faster workflow.
Will I switch to Affinity Photo, even with cheaper price?
Unfortunately no. For me who works in the industry, and still using a lot of other Adobe tools, Affinity Photo is not an efficient tool to work for it. If you work solely in photo editing or compositing, Affinity Photo may be a sensible choice. Even if Affinity Photo price is much cheaper and you just need to pay once, the poor integration with the other industry-standard tool isba major deal-breaker for me.
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