Amazingly, the iPad version of Affinity Photo has all the power of the desktop version. Here’s just a taste of what it can do. Here’s a rooftop vista turned into a miniature scene with Affinity Photo’s Depth of Field filter and a Curves adjustment, all saved in separate layers in case changes. It warrants saying at this point too, that while Pixelmator is rightfully pushing the angle of its Mac integration, keep in mind Affinity Photo is also well integrated, and of course Affinity Photo has the iPad version which is near-as-makes-no-difference the full application but on mobile – combined with iOS 11 and Apple’s ‘FILES.
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Description
** Apple Mac App of the Year Winner **
Faster, smoother and more powerful than ever, Affinity Photo continues to push the boundaries for professional photo editing software. With a huge toolset specifically engineered for creative and photography professionals, whether you are editing and retouching images, or creating full-blown multi-layered compositions, it has all the power and performance you will ever need.
Performance and power:
• Live, real time editing
• Massive image support (100+ Megapixels)
• Panning and zooming is always live at 60fps
• Open, edit and save Photoshop® PSD files
• RGB, CMYK, Greyscale and LAB colour spaces
• Full 16 and 32-bit per channel editing
• Work with all standard formats like PNG, TIFF, JPG, GIF, SVG, EPS, EXR, HDR and PDF
Unsurpassed productivity:
• Full support for unlimited layers, layer groups, adjustment layers, filter layers and masks
• Edit live filters, adjustments, effects, blend modes and masks non-destructively
• Undo history can be saved with the document so you can always undo your changes
• Record and play macros for ultimate productivity
Professional image processing:
• Open RAW and other images in a dedicated pre-processing workspace
• Adjust exposure, blackpoint, clarity, vibrance, white balance, shadows, highlights and much more
• Advanced lens corrections including chromatic aberration, defringe, vignette and best-in-class noise reduction
• Paint areas or use fully customisable gradients to mask adjustments
• View histograms, blown highlights, shadows and tones as well as detailed EXIF information
• Focus Merge, HDR Merge and Tone mapping for advanced image processing
Quality retouching and correction tools:
• Intuitive selection brush and refinement makes selections simple, even down to strands of hair
• Instantly remove unwanted objects with an incredibly advanced Inpainting brush
• Dodge, burn, clone, patch, blemish and red eye tools
• Smooth and retouch skin with built-in frequency separation
• Dedicated Liquify persona gives freehand control over warps, twirls, pinch, punch and turbulence
Advanced brush engine:
• Huge library of painting, drawing, textures and professional DAUB® Brushes included
• Create custom brushes and nozzles with full control over advanced dynamics
• Combine multiple brushes together and paint in a single stroke.
• Full support for Wacom and other graphics tablets, including pressure, tilt and shortcut buttons
• Real-time preview of your nozzle – see what you are about to paint or erase before you do it
Fast, customisable effects:
• Massive collection of effects available, including blurs, distortions, tilt-shift, shadows, glows, lighting and many more
• Choose to apply effects non-destructively with live effect layers, enabling you to erase away or mask effects after they have been applied
Built for Mac:
• Takes full advantage of the latest macOS technologies including Metal compute, OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics
• Full support for MacBook Pro's Touch Bar and Force Touch trackpad
• Fully optimised for 64-bit and multi-core processors
• Supports regular, retina and multi-monitor set ups
• External eGPU support
What’s New
• Support for multi-page Affinity Publisher documents
• Various stability and performance improvements
• Massive performance increases with full end-to-end metal acceleration
• eGPU compatible - performance scales with additional GPUs attached
• HDR / EDR monitor support
• At least 2x faster loading of RAW files
• More effective noise reduction, hot pixel removal and wide colour space development.
• New Sub Brushes to combine multiple brushes in a single stroke
• Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported - including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring
• On the fly nozzle rotation now available with left and right arrow keys
• New “Procedural texture” and “Voronoi” filter effects
• Live filter effects have been rewritten to improve performance
• HSL adjustment layer has been rewritten, supporting custom hue ranges, new UI and picker controls
• Many PSD import / export improvements
• Layers studio now includes options for transparent backgrounds, different thumbnail sizes and colour tagging.
• Significant improvements to selection refinement
• Alternate futures for document history have been added. If you undo a lot of steps and start on a different path, you can always branch back to your original position
• HEIF images can now be loaded, including loading of any depth map
• Added support for 12bit and 16bit CMYK TIFF files
• New Assets Studio available to store and drag and drop regularly used assets
• Huge macro and batch processing improvements
• 100s of other bug fixes and improvements - too many to list!
No more Photoshop
I had been hesistant to cut off Adobe from taking my money each month but. I am so glad I did, I dove into Affinity Photo and Designer head first and forced myself to take the time to learn their UI. I have to say I am glad I did... I was worried that these apps wouldn't live up to their Adobe competition but I was surprised to see that the developers at Serif have put more though into their UI/UX. Speaking as someone who has developed software, their hard work shows. Don't listen to anyone out there who says this application isn't as good as Photoshop or others. Give it a try and take the time to actually learn how things work and you wont be disappointed. I am finding personally that Affinity is speeding up my workflow and making things less complicated. I especially love that they let me use a caculator on colors right within the app, this is super helpful. Also full screen preview of filters is brilliant. I also picked up the apps for iPad Pro and they are almost 99% the same as the desktop give or take one or two things. It is surprising that a bigger company like Adobe is still lagging bringing their desktop experience to iPad. I am now a true Affinity believer! Thanks Serif!
Excellent editor
I'm an amateur hoping to improve my photo and print editing skills. Retired, my wife and I travel a lot, so most of my photos are travel-related, landscapes, buildings, shorelines, sunsets, etc. In the month or so that I have intensively used this app I find that it is logically structured and intuitive in how the UI works. It’s pretty stable; I have to do something really unnatural to crash it like inadvertently trying to print a 200mb file in a 5x7 format…sigh. It nicely supports my attempts at establishing a consistent workflow. I can easily experiment with alternatives. I struggled trying to understand LR and finally gave up with the new licensing. What I like: 1) the desktop is well organized, logical. Context-appropriate windows work well. 2) adjustment tools are intuitive, easy to apply and back off. 3) nice layer management. 4) fantastic built in help function. it’s an operator’s manual, very complete, virtually a course in itself. 5) The app seems to support almost any image storage organization I choose. Nice.
Haven’t played around with the macros or special effects as yet. Just starting to shoot raw, so can't say anything about is raw format processing. Stay tuned
Goodbye Photoshop
I used to love Photoshop until they started forcing me to buy sofware in a suite (I only wanted Photoshop, not a bunch of other software that cluttered up my computer). And then they switched to a subscription model. I did the math and it would have been more expensive to get the subscription than a one-time license. AND the software had barely changed over the 10 years that I’ve used it. When I moved to a new computer and realized that Adobe had removed my ability to download my old Photoshop licenses from thier site, I tossed in the towel and decided not to be forced into a subscription model that scavenges my bank account every month (20 a month!). So, I started looking around and found Affinity Photo. The price was fantastic and best of all, no subscription! And I did the math… even if they did provide a subscription, it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than PhotoShop. As for Affinity Photo itself, it feels so much like Photoshop and actually, I think it feels a bit more professional and less clunky. Thank you Affinity Photo folks for taking on the big boys who want to force us to ingest bloatware at a ridiculous price.
Information
OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
![Affinity designer for ipad review Affinity designer for ipad review](https://projectrawcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/affinity-photo-layers-and-masking-ipad-pro.jpg)
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish
Family Sharing
With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.
The new iPad Pro has an A12X Bionic, 8-core CPU and 7-core GPU. In benchmarks, it beats some models of the Core i7 MacBook Pro. The new 11-inch and 12.9 inch iPad Pro is a beast. It has a gorgeous screen, an all-new design and an Apple Pencil that’s finally seamless to carry and use.
All this amazing hardware deserves amazing software. While iOS 12 is still nowhere near as extensible as macOS, individual apps are catching up. And in some cases (mostly creative), it’s actually better to use the iPad than to use a MacBook.
If you’ve just got an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil you should install the following apps and really take the new hardware for a spin.
Procreate
If you’ve got an iPad and an Apple Pencil, Procreate is an app you should buy (doesn’t matter if you’re not a creative/artist). You can do so much in this app. You can create complex drawings, illustrations, or just make awesome patterns or mandalas. Procreate is also the best way to do lettering work on the iPad.
There are tons of Procreate resources available online. You’ll find YouTube videos that will teach you to draw just using the Apple Pencil in Procreate, and you can download templates, calligraphy worksheets and more.
Download: Procreate ($9.99)
Pixelmator
Pixelmator is one of the best photo editors on the iPad. It’s not a Photoshop replacement (we’ll get to that in a second), but it’s more than enough for quickly fixing images, and editing them. You’ll find all the standard retouching and editing tools in the app.
Download: Pixelmator ($4.99)
Microsoft Outlook
Funnily enough, Outlook is the best email app for both iPhone and iPad. It’s feature-rich, reliable, and supports a myriad of email services. The best part about Outlook is its all-in-one approach. You’ll find your inbox, calendar, and files all in the same app. This makes it easy to schedule meetings, set a reminder, attach files and send it all in a nice email to your boss.
Download: Microsoft Outlook
Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo is the Photoshop replacement for the iPad (until the real Photoshop shows up in 2019). You get the full photo editing suite on the iPad and on the new 2018 iPad, this app is crazy fast. The app supports limitless layers, masks, blends and everything in between (including more than 120 brushes). Of course, you can use the Apple Pencil to precisely select parts of the image you want to edit. Oh and you can import PSD files to edit on your iPad.
The app supports RAW as well, so you get access to desktop level image editing tools right on your iPad.
Download: Affinity Photo ($19.99)
Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is yet another drawing app for the iPad. You can use it to sketch your designs no matter where you are. If Affinity Photo is the Photoshop replacement, then Affinity designer is like using Illustrator on your iPad. You can create artwork in vector. This means you can design any kind of graphics – logos, brochures or posters, right on your iPad.
Use the Apple Pencil to draw directly on the iPad. Then use the available tools to add color, pop and play with shapes to create something truly stunning.
Affinity Designer is a must have if you’re any kind of designer. Even UI designers can use the app to create user interface mockups.
Download: Affinity Designer ($19.99)
LumaFusion
There’s no Final Cut X on the iPad. But LumaoFusion comes close. It’s the best video editing app available on the iPad and on the new iPad Pro, this thing just flies! Even when editing and exporting 4K footage.
You have multi-track editing so you have three separate tracks for video and audio each. Everything else like transition effects, slow motion, audio mixing, text layers, background music, and trimming is all here.
Download: LumaFusion ($19.99)
Autodesk SketchBook
Autodesk has made the full version of their SketchBook app completely free on the iPhone and iPad. This is reason enough to download the app, take your Apple Pencil and just start sketching. You never know where it might lead.
Download: Autodesk SketchBook
Paper
Paper is the a creativity app that is a must-have on the iPad, even if you don’t use your iPad for art. It’s one of the first apps on the iPad that proved how easy and fun it was to just doodle and draw on the screen. And this was ages before the Apple Pencil showed up! Now, you can use Paper to take notes, doodle, create art, and even make graphs and charts.
Paper can serve as a great tool to offload whatever is going on in your mind. You can use templates like a grid paper or an iPhone body to even create UI wireframes for apps. Paper is super extensible.
Download: Paper
LiquidText
LiquidText will change how you interact with documents and PDFs. It’s a must-have app for students, researchers, writers, editors and academics alike. The app lets you easily annotate papers, extract parts for taking notes (which you can arrange and control independently).
LiquidText takes the rigid format for a PDF and makes it fluid. Just open a PDF, and start doodling, connecting different parts, taking handwritten notes anymore. You can also open web pages in the app.
Download: LiquidText
Microsoft Office Suite
The entire Microsoft Office Suite – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are available on the iPad. And if you’re already paying for an Office subscription, you can use the iPad as one of the devices on your account. And almost all features from the desktop apps are available on the iPad, including keyboard shortcuts, cloud sync, templates and more.
Download: Microsoft Word
Download: Microsoft Excel
Download: Microsoft PowerPoint
Annotable
Annotable has everything you need to annotate an image. You can easily crop, blur, annotate and zoom into a part of the image.
Download: Annotable
iCab Mobile
Safari on the iPad can be pretty frustrating, especially when the UI changes to the mobile view in split screen mode. And iPad Safari is still mobile safari. iCab Mobile is the closest you can get to a desktop browsing experience on the iPad. You’ll get Chrome-like UI, proper tab management, download manager, inspect tool and more. Plus iCab Mobile has its own version of extensions called Modules. Using the modules you can save web pages as ebooks and even do things that aren’t possible on iOS – like play YouTube videos in a picture-in-picture view.
If you’re serious about being productive on the iPad, you should replace Safari with iCab Mobile.
Download: iCab Mobile ($1.99)
Good Notes 4
If you’re looking for a feature-rich notes app on the iPad, something that will be worthy of the Apple Pencil, Good Notes is it. You can import any background to work as a sheet of paper that you can write on, or you can choose one of the built-in templates. If you’re a fan of writing on yellow legal pads, the 12.9 inch iPad Pro with Good Notes is the perfect way to do that.
Unlike the Apple Notes app, handwriting recognition and search actually works in the Good Notes app. And you can easily convert handwritten notes to text. You can import PDFs and annotate them in the app as well.
Download: Good Notes 4 ($7.99)
Ulysses
Ulysses is the best writing app on the iPad. While it’s subscription based, and it might not be worth the price of admission for everyone, full-time writers will get a lot out of this app. It has a gorgeous writing environment and a very sensible interface for managing your documents.
It uses a whole new nomenclature. Documents are called sheets and are stored in a folder. You can easily merge sheets, or move them. Exporting to PDF or Word is just a button press away. But what might be the best thing is Markdown support and keyboard shortcuts for formatting.
Download: Ulysses
PDF Expert
PDF Expert is the best PDF editor on the iPad Pro. The app takes the biggest headache from dealing with PDFs – editing. You can load up any PDF in the app, and just tap on any text box to instantly make it editable. You can change the text, while maintaining everything else – the font size, the spacing, everything.
You can add images, links and edit the font settings as well. If you deal with a lot of PDFs, where you need to approve and change details ever so often, PDF Expert is well worth the 10 dollar asking price.
Download: PDF Expert ($9.99)
Shortcuts
The new iPad Pro ship with iOS 12. And one of the best new productivity features on iOS 12 is Siri Shortcuts. You can use Siri to interact with certain apps. But what’s more interesting is the new Shortcuts app by Apple. You can use this app to create complex workflows where one thing happens after the other. And it can be triggered by simply using your voice!
Download: Shortcuts
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides
Google Docs works on the iPad. It’s not the best experience but it works. It supports Split View as well. You can open Google Docs documents in the iPad and use it with all the supported features like collaboration and sharing.
![Ipad Ipad](https://2672686a4cf38e8c2458-2712e00ea34e3076747650c92426bbb5.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/2018-07-11-09-44-19.jpeg)
It’s the same story for Google Sheets. Here some of the keyboard shortcuts can be really helpful.
And now that the iPad Pro has a USB-C port, you can use it to showcase your Slides presentation without the need for a dongle, or Apple TV.
Download: Google Docs
Download: Google Sheets
Download: Google Slides
Your Favorite Apps
What are some of your favorite apps for the new iPad Pro? Share with us in the comments below.