Affinity Photo on iPad

I’ve been using the Affinity apps, Photo and Designer, on my Mac for the past couple of years and thanks to them I’ve largely left Adobe behind. In fact, I only use Adobe for InDesign projects and for Illustrator’s trace functionality. It’s rare that I open up either Illustrator or Photoshop and I look forward to the day that I don’t need to have them installed. The Affinity apps are, in my experience, true replacements for those two Adobe apps.

As I’ve transitioned more if my work to iPad I’ve been waiting and hoping for the Affinity apps to make the jump. Monday at the WWDC event it was announced (via an on stage demonstration) that Affinity Photo was now available for iPad. I purchased it immediately and after a few hours of trying it out I can say I am very satisfied. I should note that I’m using it on an iPad Air 2, not a Pro, and that performance is excellent. I’ve already used the app to do work for two clients and expect to do a lot more. This is a full version comparable to the Mac version rather than something only a small subset of features. It is a fantastic experience. I can’t wait to give it a go on the new 12.9″ Pro next week!

By way of comparison, I’d previously been trying to use Pixelmator on iPad and while it occasionally proved useful for bitmap-based work it was never as powerful as I needed and so I often ended up back at the Mac using Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer. With Affinity Photo installed I will likely remove Pixelmator altogether. There really is no comparison. Now I’ll be able to that much more work on iPad. The only difficulty that I expect to encounter is in the area of available fonts but that’s a shortcoming of iOS not this app. In such cases I’ll save a copy to my Mac towards the end of the project and finish it off with the Mac Affinity apps.

Once Serif releases Affinity Designer for vector focused work I’ll have a nearly complete iPad toolkit for graphic design. I expect I will, from that point on, only return to the Mac for InDesign and for projects that require additional, Mac-only fonts. I also expect that one day Apple will allow for an easy way to add fonts as we see fit.

This is exactly the kinds of app needed to help move the iPad toward being a fully Pro tool for those of us that do this kind of work and who choose an iPad as our primary device. I can say, without a doubt, Affinity Photo will be one of my most used iPad apps.