Affinity Photo 2

Serif's powerful editing app gets a serious update

- Ian Evenden

> £17.99 (for iPad; universal licence £144.99) > FROM affinity.serif.com > NEEDS iPadOS 15 or later

Serif’s Affinity suite rivals Adobe in bringing pro-grade image editing without a subscription to Macs and iPads. The latest releases of the three Affinity apps, released as version 2 rather than a free update, may mean you have to pay once more, but a universal licence – which gets you all apps on all platforms with no extra costs – is about the same as one year of equivalent Adobe apps. There’s a 30-day free trial too.

The iPad version of Affinity Photo 2 is probably the most interesting of the updates, as it has the broadest appeal and is cheaper than the Mac app (which costs £69.99 if you buy it separately). And while the both Mac and iPad versions takes on Adobe Photoshop, the Mac version lacks the organisational tools of Adobe Lightroom or the browsing capabilities of Adobe Bridge, and there is no equivalent on iPad either, which is a shame.