Adobe Photoshop has had a monopoly in quality photo editing software for years. It looks like that monopoly might be being challenged…. at least for Mac Users.
Graphics software company Serif have recently announced a new professional standard image editing product. It is called: Affinity Photo. The website for the product can be found here: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
I am not a Mac user, so I have not been able to test the software out myself but the promo video on the above website does look very impressive. There is a beta program available which I believe is free to sign up for.
Will Affinity be better than photoshop? I don’t know. But I for one certainly welcome the competition into the market place. This might be the thing that will push Adobe to have a more customer centric attitude and may cause the price of editing software to fall dramatically.
Serif already have “Affinity Designer” which is their answer to Illustrator and look at the price tag – just £39.99 – so if Affinity Photo, does have all the features of Photoshop and if it comes out at a similar price, then there is likely to be a big move of people over to it. Especially those who don’t like having to pay for their software each and every month. That in turn might force Adobe to reduce their prices – especially in the UK where we tend to pay a lot more than US customers do.
Affinity Photo is definitely one to keep an close eye – it is just a shame that there is no windows version available – nor is one planned.
Even on PC Adobe is the image manipulation software which all others are compared to.
Photoshop has moved from being a product to being a verb.
Agree with Paul.
I remember in the early days of Photoshop there were other programs like Paint Shop Pro that were equally popular. But while these other programs still exist (often under different names to their original release), they are no longer anywhere near as popular as Photoshop.
With Lightroom and Elements also in the Photoshop family, it is hard to see anything breaking their dominance.
In the past Apple had its own pro programs for photo cataloguing and editing, but seems to have given up competing.
This is all true but a bit of competition can only be a good thing.