Adobe is horrible. So I tried the alternative

Affinity photo is a direct competitor to Adobe Photoshop the difference Photoshop costs $600 a year while Affinity photo is a onetime payment and if you decide to kindly cancel your Adobe subscription you're going to be slapped with a big cancellation fee sometimes more than the cost of affinity photo this leaves a lot of people with only two options venture out into the Seas where danger awaits or look for Alternatives that's Affinity photo so let's test it out I just yink the Affinity photo free trial as one does and let's download it for Windows what's the

difference between msix and MSI /ex let's just go for the first one download initiated while it's downloading let me explain what I'm going to try to do I just yoinked one of the thumbnails from one of my previous videos that I made in Photoshop and so I thought why not try to recreate this inside of affinity photo and see how well it compares to Adobe Photoshop there are a bunch of different layers masking groups different effects so I think this will be a decent stress test for Affinity photo that's the plan oh it has downloaded

install Affinity photo 2 it's the first time I'm seeing this kind of an installer it's weird install thanks for downloading please enter your Affinity ID and password below to activate your license what's my password 7-Day trial available start free trial successful continue analytics would you like to contribute no oh the lessons window just popped up since I haven't watched a single Affinity photo tutorial I should probably go through all of these like the photo Basics yes I should so what is all of this there are tools on the left just like in Photoshop there are

a bunch of panels on the right also just like in Photoshop and there are a bunch of controls and menus at the top just like in Photoshop feels familiar let's go to file new and create a new file oh this is definitely a different interface a YouTube thumbnail is 720p so 1 1280 by 72 pixels image placement prefer embedded prefer linked no idea what that is everything else looks good create boom ooh and the tools light up nicely okay let's first configure everything and see if all the keyboard shortcuts are at least similar so in

Photoshop to zoom out usually do alt and scroll on my mouse or hold Z to temporarily toggle the zoom tool and then drag left or right let's see if that works here alt and scroll just Scrolls up and down what about Z oh this works oh it snaps into place when it hits 100% which is the actual size I'm not sure if I like that so let's go to file or edit and look for settings control comma that's a great keyboard shortcut the same as on Mac OS command comma on Mac OS brings up settings

of any application ooh there a bunch of settings that's what I like to see enable save over imported PSD files so you can import Photoshop files into Affinity photo okay import PSD smart objects where possible yes performance RAM usage limit so it's limited to 24 GB it goes up to 65 GB but I have only 32 GB what that doesn't make any sense undo limit 1,000 that's pretty good user interface background gray level well that doesn't do anything this one does something let's move it slightly up UI brightness oh there it is I can make

it completely black let's do slightly brighter similar to what I have in Photoshop UI contrast default high oh that just reset everything UI style dark light there's light mode doesn't look as good icon style color or mono so this removes all the colors from all the tools let's do color why not tools use Mouse wheel to zoom yes shortcuts here we go here are all the categories for all the keyboard shortcuts this will probably cost a lot of time so I'm not going to go here now okay those are all the settings I'll definitely be

coming back to shortcuts many many times so let's begin building out the thumbnail I don't like this panel here so I'm going to close this I probably shouldn't have closed it adjustments oh there we go beautiful so first let's begin with the background it's completely black at the bottom and there's a slightly brighter blue color on top of it which is hidden on the edges of the layer with a layer mask this is how it looks like just blue going into black so let's try to create that first the layers panel is here and I

think this is the color no this is adjustments what's here these are blend modes and this is for a layer mask so can't you add a single color layer within Affinity photo that's a group that's a pixel okay so what happens if I paint with the brush tool oh it becomes a pixel drag to start painting drag shift to continue last stroke drag and ALT to use Color Picker so if I just click alt it doesn't give me a Color Picker I need to hold alt and then start dragging for the Color Picker to appear

that's definitely strange Behavior the letter X switches my background and foreground colors exactly like in Photoshop and if I do shift and click it continues the pre previous stroke that's nice oh and this hides and shows the layer that's interesting I'm definitely used to it being on the left so how do I add a solid color layer or do I have to just color this whole thing black and that's how it's done brushes stock wait there's free stock photo is built into Affinity photo hello yes please cow no way so do I just drag and

drop no way just imported this cow Straight From Within Affinity photo that's crazy how to add solid color Affinity photo from the layers menu select new fill layer okay is that right click is it here task layer adjustments layer effects live filters group layers add pixel layer I don't see any fill layers maybe it's here layer new fill layer it's here why is it there so it just filled with white can I now change the color oh double clicking on the layer image fits it to the screen which is completely different Behavior compared to photoshop

because here it opens the actual Color Picker with which I can change the color that's interesting do I change this oh yes it's down here okay so let's select this color baste it in over here do I click away yes yes and enter or close wait why did it not change oh there's also fill up here so let's try to change it from here paste it in here enter yes there we go I need the other one for the black color underneath so I'm holding alt and dragging the layer to hopefully duplicate it and yes

it does duplicate what is this color wheel hex sliders oh I can just do it here so now there's a black one underneath and so let's mask this one out so that only the center is visible this is the layer mask oh that's different in Photoshop the layer mask is right next to the layer but here it's underneath which is kind of suspicious and I'm not sure if I like that or maybe I don't yet know that I like it so let's search for a gradient tool this probably yes okay so here I'm assuming I

can customize the gradient radial I want a radial gradient going from black to white just like this but inversed so reverse and I think we are good so if I drag it oops what happened here oh did I accidentally click on the layer mask why is it white here in the preview what if I double click what happened there's a little pixel here where it took me what's that can I delete it and that deleted the mask let's add the mask once again now it's white good gradient tool and then paint like so okay I

need to choose radial gradient and then once again the colors are gone why are they gone let's do black on one side yes and like this wait why is it fully black am I customizing The Mask here and not the actual gradient tool yes the mask becomes darker as I switch between these colors okay so how do I customize the gradient tool then like what happens when I do this it just gives me a normal gradient but how do I customize it or do I just do this and then customize it that doesn't make any

sense so now if I change this to a radial gradient what that's so weird nevertheless we got the background oh I can collapse The Mask that's beautiful so now if I add a mask here will it also yes very nice you have a bunch of options so let's do a new layer that's new document contrl shift n yes that adds a new layer wait I just moved this layer inside of the fill layer what is that what if I paint here so what is this this oh this is where the fill is showing through what

if I add another layer and then move it inside here what does this do so it reveals and shows both of them they're all like different layer masks so this layer mask added these black edges so you can see here in the preview it hit the edges of the fill layer then this one hid everything on top of that except this mess over here and then this one hid everything from the previous two layers and only revealed this snake pattern and this right here is black because it's black in the second layer that's insane I

now see why the Mask doesn't appear on the right side it's because you can have infinite amount of masks I then have this circle in the center underneath the penguin so let's add that first boink this is one of the wallpapers that I experimented making for one of my wallpaper packs but it's not finished why does this pop up every time I want to place something oh that's because I don't need to click enter to place something in Photoshop if you move something you have to click enter to then place it in place but in

Affinity photo you just move stuff without clicking enter and it stays there interesting so let's oh I did it again okay so let's create a mask wait can a normal layer be just a mask for this how do I make it so yes and now if I just get the circle tool the ellipse tool I mean I can just draw this put it in the middle how do I make it snap in the center is it control oh control duplicate oh that's the center the little dot in the middle wait is it no okay let's

see the menus arrange move back one move inside outside Al line Center okay that's cool there's a magnet here called snapping so does that work there we go so now I I want this wait why does it move with the circle as well can I not move it without the circle how can I only move the layer without the layer mask hold up control shift alt do I have to lock this every time even if I lock the layer this moves with the layer mask or is this not considered a layer mask what if I

add just a normal mask then paint something here and if I move this layer does it move with the mask it does and if I lock the mask so yes the behavior is the same just like with the circle so how do I make the mask stay in place do I have to remove it from the group then transform this and then move this into the group now that's so weird okay but I'm just realizing that I need the opposite effect not black in the middle and wallpaper on the sides but the complete opposite wait

hold on this is not even a layer mask now if this was hiding the wallpaper the blue should be visible underneath the circle so what does putting layers together like this do even is this like a group I can put something in a group so no or is it a group surely not and if so why is this on top of that layer what is that okay I'm fully confused let's do the eclipse tool once again then move it into the center and then clip this layer onto the eclipse so is this just the clipping

mask oh I see okay the way it seems to work in Infinity photo is the top layer are the bounds and what's underneath or within that layer so now if I add another one in here and paint it should only paint within the circle yes it only paints within the circle so this is just like the clipping mask in Photoshop it's when you do alt and then click in between the two layers that's crazy so next we have Kowalski holding an Arch Linux logo Kowalski penguin PNG I think that's the one I used copy image

contrl V to paste okay so now the question is if I resize Kowalski and then size it back up again does it lose quality just like in Photoshop so now it's very small and it doesn't lose quality which means that there are probably no smart objects within Affinity photo let's double check Affinity photo cannot create smart objects that's a feature of Photoshop live filters act in a very similar way to smart objects in Photoshop you can apply one and then go back sometime later to edit it that's very interesting let's position the penguin next is

the Arch Linux logo boink next he needs to be holding the actual Arch Linux logo which means that I'm going to need the arm Kowalski penguin and here's one with the arm and paste it in so I can recreate the arm let's make sure they're pretty similar size how do I decrease the opacity beautiful oh this is so strange when I'm resizing from the corner I don't have to hold shift to resize proportionately and if I'm resizing from here I have to hold shift which is so annoying just make it the same make it so

I either have to hold shift or not hold shift to resize normally because I keep just doing this all the time there we go and let's try the pen tool to recreate the arm okay seems just like your regular pen tool wait it's suggesting where I should place the handle how does it know okay can I press alt and move only one handle yes I can oh what happened there okay and can I turn this into a shape maybe I don't even have to turn this into a shape can I just choose a different fill

ooh yes I can and now to move this I can just move it around one arm is going to be here alt drag then flip horizontal like this oh that's not it how do I flip it horizontally is it under transform yes flip horizontal I'm sure there's an easier way can I select both and change their colors both at the same time oh I can okay success we have yed the arms next our hands will need some detail here on his head there's a bunch of light and a bunch of texture so I want to

replicate that for the hands also I just watched this video from Affinity photo clipping versus masking layers and turns out that I didn't understand it correctly at all so here's what I know if I add a new layer and let's paint something with blue over here this is a normal layer but if I drag this on the image of another layer it becomes a mask for this layer so now only Kowalski's head is visible however if I drag it out and drag it inside of Kowalski this becomes a nested layer which means that whatever I

drag on here will not go out of bounds of the topmost layer interesting oh I see this happens not only on the visible pixels but also on the invisible pixels since Kowalski is just this Square that's why it's confined to the square how do I make it apply only to pixels that are visible collapse all parents that's coel Affinity photo clipping mask only visible pixels rasterized to mask oh what just happened okay so say I want to add a blue Highlight on the side of Kowalski how do I make it so the Highlight only applies

to to visible pixels because I don't want it on the background I would probably have to mask him oh what is happening here and then the Highlight would only appear here but this is a lot of extra steps in Photoshop if I want to add a highlight I can simply add a new layer then hold alt and click between in the two layers and then simply paint my highlight onto wherever I want and it only appears on the arm it doesn't appear outside of it but in Affinity photo I first have to select the subject

mask it and once I do that I can add a new layer then move it outside like this outside like this I mean wait this has to be a mask and now I can paint only on Kowalski which seems like a lot of unnecessary work since I always do this I always create clipping masks I hope there's a simpler way to do this okay back to the arms so they're both in a group and so first I need this sort of texture here that's similar to what he has on his forehead and for that I

can just use a noise filter filters noise add noise and see how much noise it adds let's do uniform noise and monochromatic wait when I drag with my mouse on the screen left and right it increases the slider but what if I want to move to a different place of my image I have to zoom out and then zoom in with my scroll wheel I can't pick it up and drag never mind so we want something like this much beautiful but what if I want to add it back later is there a way to make

this nonpermanent let's see I think I saw live effects somewhere layer effects live effects okay so there should be a noise effect yes add noise oh why is it applying it everywhere and not only on this layer interesting okay how do I make it only apply to this group select it and then mask it now it's only applying on the group Next I'm going to need a bunch of highlights on the arms like these so I want to clip a simple layer onto one of the arms and then paint only on the arms without touching

the background so let's do a new layer then I should add it inside one of the arms like this and I should be able to paint it only on the arm that's correct okay now here comes a very important keyboard shortcut inside of Photoshop I can hold alt and drag left or right by pressing on my right mouse key to increase or decrease the brush size and also drag up or down to increase or decrease the hardness does this exist on Affinity photo it's not the same keyboard shortcut for sure let's do settings with command

comma going to shortcuts and is there a search functionality no increase brush size Affinity photo shortcut selecting motorcycles and Tra lights okay good news it exists it's control alt and then right or left for increasing and decreasing and then up or down for increasing or decreasing the hardness so let's make it something like this and then also let's select a white pixel that will be our highlight and then let's paint on the arm like so erase a little bit of it and I think I don't really want to see the noise now is there a

smoothness slider rope mode the brush is dragged as though it's attached with the Rope useful for smooth selections yes length of the Rope well that didn't change anything I'm looking for this it's called smoothing in Photoshop if you enable it it lets you get these smooth lines do I enable the stabilizer oh yes it is the stabilizer and it shows the actual rope so where it begins and when it starts dragging my brush that's interesting let's paint the highlights on the other arm so now the arms look more like arms and they have a shape

let's enable the noise well that looks horrible can I double click to change it a lot less please and let's do gsh and Noise okay that's pretty good oh I found a way to paint something on only visible pixels of a layer without it going out of bounds let's do this with the Arch Linux logo I'm going to need some Shadows behind the arms so it's more realistic so I'm going to add a new layer then move it inside of Arch Linux and if I were to paint something now it would paint inside visible and

also invisible pixels of Arch Linux but if I rightclick and choose rasterize and trim now if I add a new layer move it inside of Arch Linux which means I created a clipping mask and paint something on here it only paints on the visible pixels now I'm not sure why this is not the default Behavior because I can't think of a reason why I would want to paint on invisible pixels but nevertheless there is a way so let's add a shadow under the arms and then mask out the top here so that it looks like

the shadow is coming from under the arm let's do the exact same thing for the other arm and erase off the aess and let's decrease the opacity so that it's not 100% black very nice and subtle next the Arch Linux logo needs a shadow of its own in Photoshop you could do do this by double clicking on the side of the layer which would bring up the layer style options and here you can choose drop shadow let's see if that's the same in Affinity photo no layer effects are these the effects ooh yes these are

the effects there's a gsh and blur effect here why is that here I thought I would find it in the filter options but good to know it's here so let's add an outer Shadow increase the intensity the offset make the angle point to another way oh it snaps into place but if I hold the shift it weirdly l lags behind my mouse cursor and the more I do it the more it lags let's increase the radius to make the shadow bigger and can I move the actual Shadow with my mouse in Photoshop you can actually

pick up the Shadow and move it around but here it seems like you can only do this with these sliders which is okay oh and this angle shows where the shadow is instead of where the light is in Photoshop the angle shows where the light is coming from so the light's coming from here and that's why the shadow is down there and here it's the opposite this is the angle of the Shadow itself I don't like how laggy this is and before I leave there's also a little light on the edges of this logo so

let's add that as well should be inside bevel and emboss pillow inner outer emboss yes okay it's inner emboss I can increase the depth ooh okay I like this just needs time to update okay I'm happy with that Mr Kowalski also has a shadow so let's click on him and go into layer effects and add a shadow as well so it doesn't seem to save all the preferences so what I'm going to try to do is hold alt and drag to copy the effect and then double click to change it from here let's make it

slightly bigger with the radius now one thing I must say I don't really like is when I'm moving these sliders around Kowalski becomes pixelated and then when I release I can only then see the full effect the same thing happened with the noise on the hands or the bevel and emoss on the Arch Linux logo so that's not the best a better life preview would be very nice next we have the gigantic feet I yed these from the Linux penguin this gentleman right here there he is and I'm going to use the pen tool once

again to cut these out the pen tool is pretty much the same as in Photoshop you can hold space to move the handles around but I don't understand how it guesses where I want to put the next handle it's insane here it's suggesting me in green where I should put the next handle how does it know there we go o one thing I'm wondering is if I can create a vector mask so if I drag this curve on top of the image does it create a mask with the Curve doesn't seem to do that so

what if I want these points to be a mask or in other words a vector mask just like in Photoshop does that exist to add a vector mask draw a filled Vector object example line or shape which is to be your mask oh so I need to fill it in and now if I move it here it should mask yes beautiful so we have one foot and of course the beautiful thing with a vector mask is you can choose a node tool then click on one of the points and adjust them however you like so

if you want the foot to look like this there you go let's duplicate this then right click transform and flip horizontal so I have the second foot resize them both so I can put them over the old tinier feet let's actually create a layer mask and mask out the old feet of Kowalski so they're no longer visible of course on the Arch Linux logo they're also going to need a shadow like this so that it's more three-dimensional and down here as well and also one Shadow layer above the background so the feet cast a shadow

on the ground as well beautiful now probably no one would notice that Kowalski has two sides of hands this one is actually sticking out here a little bit so I'm going to mask that one as well beautiful but what's bothering me is that he has two sets of hands one's right here and the other ones by his side so I want to remove those I'm going to add a new layer get my brush tool also the stabilizer will be very handy here and I'm going to paint in like this so that now this becomes his

body and not his hand on the other side as well beautiful and next to blend it in slightly I'm going to pick a color from his actual body then decrease the flow of my brush increase the softness and paint off the edges like so is this too sharp let's make it slightly less sharp like this on the the other side beautiful next we have these mouse cursor icons which in my true fashion I yed from somewhere else this time it was from GitHub Source SVG light and we have a bunch of mouse cursors they're not

the same because I couldn't be bothered let's select them all resize them actually resize them a lot and position them all around Kowalski beautiful see when I click to move something everything suddenly becomes a lot more pixelated and weird and when I release everything starts looking nice this is something that I don't really like Anyway let's put all of these in a group with contrl G I hope that works then go to layer effects and let's add an outer glow to all of the icons okay so if I pick the arch blue color does it

not work so I have the color picked with the Color Picker but it doesn't actually apply why not but if I want to do more than 100 pixels can I do 150 I can beautiful looks about right one more thing this control alt shift e merge all layers oh it does and if I go to filter is there a camera raw filter probably not that sounds like Adobe trademark Photoshop camera raw filter how in Affinity photo exactly what I'm wondering the develop Persona would be the closest match to that in Affinity photo but it can

only be used on pixel-based layers develop Persona okay weird names so is it not under filters oh there are different workspaces here liquefy Persona so I can liquefy Kowalski develop Persona this is like your camera raw filter tone mapping Persona and Export Persona okay let's go into to develop Persona ooh and this is the camera raw filter so is there an auto button doesn't look like so this definitely looks a lot simpler compar to photoshop Photoshop gives you a lot more things to fidget with I especially like to go into filter camera raw filter and

then here inside of the color mixer to play with all the colors but I can't seem to find it here in Affinity photo nevertheless camera raw filter exists or develop Persona exists which is really good news so let's go into the export Persona and see how can we export this H what is this oh you can draw a frame around something Windows 7 style window which I'm assuming would export only this part of the image that's very nice so I have to select this in order to be able to change the width and the height

of the image what if I do times 100 oh it just made this Frame larger so what if I want to upscale this image and where's even the export button I'm confused can I not export by going into file export it's Control Alt shift s so let's do it the pro way oh and this is more like the panel I expected I can change the size set the picture format and change a bunch of settings beautiful let's export this Photoshop Affinity photo this one might even look better so how was my Affinity photo experience well

it took a little bit of time to understand how masks work and how clipping masks work and also having to rightclick and choose rasterizing Trim in order to add a clipping mask on only the visible pixels of a layer was slightly confusing seems like an unnecessary step also a couple things that I don't like very much is that the thumbnail previews load very slowly and that when you try to do something like move something on the screen everything else becomes pixelated and blurry but other than that I've been able to recreate my thumbnail perfectly just

the same as with Photoshop I only ran into issues because I didn't know how Affinity works and once I explore all the keyboard shortcuts who knows what's going to happen so yeah I've been able to do exactly what I do with photoshop with affinity photo that's pretty good well I've decided to buy it right now it's on sale so it cost me €37 which is like $40 oh and if you like this wallpaper it's from one of my wallpaper packs Link in the description