Blogging for Thor: An Acquired Affinity

Recently a local photographer posted about a new software being launched as a free beta: Affinity Photo. Supposedly this is a new, Mac-only competitor for Photoshop. I think that's great, because Adobe has not had any serious competition in years, not since they gobbled up Macromedia. Even before that, there hasn't been a serious competitor to Photoshop since the term "photoshop" became synonymous with editing a photograph digitally. Corel's Paint Shop Pro limps along, open source GIMP is pretty gimpy and Aperture didn't last long before being given up for dead by Apple.

So, I was excited to sign up for the free open beta and download a copy of Affinity Photo. There's just one problem: I can barely use it.

Don't get me wrong! The interface looks sleek, things seem to be a bit more intuitive than Photoshop and supposedly it can do all kinds of things at blinding speeds. Well, that's great... in theory. I can't get to that. Let's start off with the fact that I'm running on a mid-2010 iMac. Sheila's a great computer, but she's five years old. That's pretty toothy for a computer being used for heavy image processing. Still, she runs Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5.7 without any issues. I only experience lag during extremely heavy processing, or when loading dozens of images.

Affinity is crawling along. I'm waiting 5-20 seconds for changes I make to be applied. I gave up after an hour of fiddling around with a RAW file. I never even got past their Development Persona (that's what they call modules) because I simply couldn't deal with the lag and delays in processing. We're not even talking heavy changes. I'm trying to edit a contrast curve. Forget trying to reduce noise, that almost locked the program up entirely.

On the bright side, this appears to be a bug. At least, that's what the developers said when they replied to my Facebook post. I hope they're right. Other beta-testers are giving them good reviews, and they're taking feedback seriously. They replied to my post within hours, which is a pretty fast response. I like their videos, I like the features they claim to have put in. I'm really hoping the final product is useful, affordable and successful.

That's all for this post, Spiders. If I get Affinity Photo sorted out, I'll post a more in-depth review.