Affinity Designer

Following the steps of its older Mac OS brother, Affinity Designer for Windows delivers a professional-grade photo editing and design application ready to assist you in creating compelling graphics and retouch images to obtain results of a better quality.

Before starting to work with Affinity Designer, you should understand its approach, which is a little different. Depending on what your goal is, you should choose a particular 'Persona', which is a name for the various ways of working with the application.

Each Persona changes the working environment, providing another toolset. The default one is the Draw Persona, which encompasses all the vector tools. The Pixel Persona brings to the table additional pixel editing tools, whereas the Export Persona helps you pick areas for export.

Once the working environment is chosen, you can open an image for retouching or create a new project from scratch. Affinity Designer supports multiple layers and bundles a generous collection of raster tools you can work with to create realistic artwork. Pencils and brushes, fill and transparency control tools, shapes, and vector cropping tools are all one-click away in the toolbox, each accompanied by a few instructions displayed right in the main window.

A variety of effects is available to help you transform your photo and enhance its appearance. Moreover, you can tamper with exposure and white balance, shadows and highlights, brightness and contrast, colors, vibrance, and more. Basic layer manipulation controls are also within reach, allowing you to align, rotate, flip, and arrange objects.

Combining pixel editing with vector design options, Affinity Designer brings versatility into the spotlight, allowing both photo retouching and graphic material creation.

The feature set is promising and turns it into a viable competitor for the big players in the design area. But you'll just have to give it a try to see for yourself.