Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
Corel PaintShop Pro
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
PaintShop Pro is an all-in-one photo editor with advanced photo management, editing & creative tools that deliver everything a photo & design enthusiast needs, from Corel Corporation.
For small, fast-changing design/photo editing teams, it's a no brainer. More seats for less cost and an almost unnoticeable difference in the feature set. For older, more established or antiquated teams, you almost have to stick with Adobe. I know which side we're on. Innovation, a.k.a. Affinity. If you or your clients require specific formats like .psd, .ai, or .eps, Affinity can give you an alternative or more robust options to manipulate those files.
Corel PaintShop Pro is well suited for photographers wanting to adjust photos and also for designers who want to create designs from scratch, working in layers and merging various elements. Due to slow load times, Corel PaintShop Pro is not well suited when you only have a few small tasks to do and when a lightweight alternative will do the job just as well (e.g. cropping and red-eye removal).
If you're a long time Adobe user of Photoshop or Illustrator, there is a learning curve, but it's not too major. This learning curve was well worth the cost of admissions for our organization.
I'd like to see them use the same names for certain features as Adobe's products, but feel like licensing/copyright concerns as the reasoning behind this. Overall, the transition has been smooth from Adobe to Affinity.
They just recently released their Publisher program for print designs, similar to InDesign. They're a little late to the game in this arena, but I'm very interested in a low-cost alternative to Adobe. I wonder how they'll compare to other competitors like Canva in the space?
I have the 2018 version and every now and again upgrade ads will pop up in the bottom right of my screen which I find rather annoying
How to save your work and where it gets saved is confusing. It took me a while to realize that projects were saved in "pspimage" files. The knowledge base article “The Basics Of Saving Files In PaintShop Pro” did not mention pspfiles. They also have the concept of workspaces, but I eventually realized that this is not where your work is saved.
I find that a tool called paint.net is massively easier to use, but, then again, paint.net has far fewer features. I think an option in PaintShop Pro for temporarily switching down the functionality and interface to resemble paint.net would be a useful feature, so users do not get blinded by the extensive interface.
I feel like the program is not only powerful and intuitive, it's also extremely affordable. I've been a PSP user for many, many years, and I've really not looked at any other alternatives since then. At the time, anything remotely close was very expensive. PSP does everything (and MUCH more) that I need it to effectively and affordably. As long as that continues, I'll continue to be a satisfied user.
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
This program is not dependent on outside resources. Again, this is a desktop app. Load it up and use it. As long as your machine is reasonably powered and otherwise behaving, PSP runs great.
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
Nothing in particular. This is a desktop app. Install the program and use it. It's very straightforward for general graphic manipulation, and very intuitive for more complex processing.
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
From an ROI perspective, we moved entirely away from PhotoShop because we could not justify the cost vs performance. Corel PaintShop Pro is simply more cost-effective and offers the same performance and tools.
