Affinity Lightroom Replacement

In Affinity Photo, the Color Replacement Brush Tool is in the Paint Brush Tool menu from the Tools panel. When you select the tool, its parameters appear at the top of the screen. The Color Replacement Brush Tool has many of the parameters of a regular brush such as Width and Opacity.

Photoshop has been the undisputed leader when it comes to photo editing software for well over 20 years. It has come a long way in that time and cemented its self as an essential program for any photographer. Much to every amateur photographers disappointment, nothing has really presented itself as much of a competitor to Photoshop. Until now, in 2015 Serif began to change the scene with their new Affinity range of creative software including Affinity Photo.

Give Affinity Photo a try, it won’t replace Photoshop for everything but it can certainly replace Photoshop for editing photography. Affinity is due to release Affinity Photo 1.5 which will bring a load of new features such as a dedicated HDR persona and 360 image editing capabilities. Affinity Photo is aimed at deep work with one shot, while Lightroom, on the contrary, is designed for fast photo color correction and batch editing. If you are shooting in RAW format and the only methods of image editing are cropping, skin defects neutralization. Raw Therapeeis an open-source free Lightroom alternative, albeit one with a much more limited feature set. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s a particularly good option if you’re looking for something free and lightweight. Darktableis free, open-source,. Lightroom is also coupled with Photoshop, a mobile app, and cloud storage. DxO PhotoLab doesn’t require a subscription, however, and lists for $129 to $199. Best Lightroom and Photoshop.

Affinity Photo was built for the Mac from the ground up, unlike Photoshop that has legacy code in new versions. Affinity Photo is very much targeted at photographers. Whereas Photoshop has become a tool for creatives in many different fields, not just photography. So I will be looking at how I replaced Photoshop with Affinity in my photography workflow.

There are a few different reasons why I decided to switch over to Affinity Photo and ditch Photoshop for photography, here are a few of the main reasons.

Much quicker processing
Better RAW development
Intuitive interface for Photography editing
Quick and powerful removal of objects with the inpainting tool
Cost. Affinity Photo cost just £30ish (one off), compared to the current Adobe CC subscription you can pay around £16 per month for Photoshop. Technically you are renting Photoshop with the Adobe CC subscription model

Break up your workflow with Persona Workspaces

Opening a raw image into Affinity you will start off in Development persona, there are 4 personas in Affinity. Personas in Affinity Photo are different work areas for performing different processes. I like how Affinity give you a work area for each process so you aren’t stumbling around menus trying to find what should be right at your disposal.

In Development mode, you can make powerful adjustments to your RAW image before moving onto the Photo Persona. Development is what I love the most about Affinity Photo, you can perform almost all edits here such as basic edits, lens corrections, tone adjustments, detail refinement and my favourite is the use of overlays for controlled adjustment of the part of the image. The overlays are particularly useful for landscape where you want to adjust the exposure or contrast in the sky without effective the foreground or landscape of the picture.

After you have finished developing your RAW image you can move along to the Photo persona to make further adjustments and access more powerful tools for manipulation of your image. With this image, I just used the inpainting brush and the burn brush. The Inpainting brush was used to remove the power lines in the image, inpainting allows for much quicker removal of unwanted elements and works extremely well in most cases as you can see in the example below. Removing elements is a much quicker process in Affinity than in Photoshop.

You can see in the examples below the difference between the original and the effects of just 10 minutes of editing. How far you go with your edits is entirely up to you but with Affinity, you can achieve just about anything you want with your editing.

Conclusion

When comparing the £39.99 price for Affinity Photo to even Adobe’s Photographers subscription it still works our much cheaper and you can use it on as many machines as you want.

Last week, over at Kelby One, we did a free webcast for Photoshop World coming up in just over a month. We had videos and tutorials from lots of various Photoshop World instructors, and I jumped in to do a some quick Lightroom tips as well as a tutorial on replacing a not-so-great sky in landscape photos.

Replacing the sky is one of those questions I hear about a lot. I’ll tell you up front, that in order for it to work, you need similar conditions. For example, if you take an image from a blah cloudy day, and try to replace it with a sky from a bright sunny or colorful sunset, then things aren’t going to look right. This tutorial is really meant for when the sky is just plain and cloudless, and you want to replace it with something more interesting.

Here’s a link to the webcast. Now, the entire thing is over 2 hours so I’ll save you some time. The tutorial on replacing skies starts at 42:10. It’s about 7 minutes long. I also did two very quick Lightroom tips which start at 1:06 (ish). Again, it’s free to watch and there’s lots of other tips and things in there if you want to check it out. And of course, I’ll be at Photoshop World in September teaching Photoshop and Lightroom. My full-day Lightroom pre-conference workshop is sold out, but you can probably get on a waiting list. But I’ll have lots of other classes during the show so please stop by and say hi if you’re gonna be there.