Serif Labs’ Affinity Photo was named the best app of the year in the Mac App Store.
Affinity Photo is a new professional photo-editing application for Mac. Released earlier that year, it set out to compete with the dominant Adobe Photoshop. Unlike Photoshop, it does not use a subscription model, which alone made it a welcome alternative for many users.
Built for Mac
The developers spent five years building the application completely from scratch. Unlike Photoshop, it was not developed on top of existing code, allowing it to make full use of newer Mac platform technologies such as OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics. It was fully optimized for 64-bit systems and multiprocessors, and also supported standard, Retina and multi-monitor setups.
For Photoshop users, working with the new application was not a major leap into the unknown. Many features worked in familiar ways, making the program feel intuitive, while the growing number of tutorials available on YouTube helped users quickly learn anything unfamiliar.
Whether it could replace your own copy of Photoshop was something you had to decide for yourself, but it brought a breath of fresh air to the image-editing market and had the potential to challenge Adobe Photoshop’s monopoly—a positive development for professional and enthusiastic photo editors alike.
