Affinity Photo Comes to iPad: The First Full-Powered Photo Editor on a Tablet

Affinity Photo,the photo editing and retouching program that has wooed many a photographer away from Adobe Photoshop, is now available on iPad. And we’re not talking about a ‘lite’ tablet version either. This is a full-featured, no-compromises build—truly, the first full-powered photo editor on a tablet.

Up until now, photo editing on a tablet—even one as powerful as the iPad Pro—meant using mobile optimized versions that skimped on features. If you wanted REAL editing power, you still had to crack open your laptop or sit down in front of your desktop PC. No longer.

What Serif has done with Affinity Photo for iPad is transform a full-powered photo editing and retouching program into a functioning tablet version—combining all of the conveniences of Apple Pencil and multi-touch capabilities with the advanced editing tools usually reserved for desktop editors.

“Developed without compromise, Affinity Photo for iPad is the first full blown, truly professional photo editing tool to make its way onto the Apple tablet,” explains developer Serif. “[It’s] built from exactly the same back-end as our award-winning desktop version, and fully optimized to harness the full power of the iPad’s hardware and touch capabilities.”

This quick demo shows you what this powerful app is capable of:

The worry here, of course, is that either features have been left out or performance will suffer. Affinity Photo promises that neither compromise has been made.

“Every tool, panel and control has been completely reimagined to optimize for touch. All rendering, adjustments and filter effects have been fully hardware accelerated,” reads the announcement. “The result is an all-new way to interact with your images, with performance you will find hard to believe.”

Non-destructive adjustments, accurate selections, a liquify workspace, real-time effects preview—a full complement of professional editing tools have been ported over, each of them allegedly optimized to work seamlessly whether you’re using your fingers or Apple Pencil. And you can work with RAW files, PSD, PNG, TIFF, JPG, SVG, EPS, PDF, GIFs and more.

What Affinity Photo is promising with this release seems, at least on the surface, too good to be true… which would make it that much more impressive if it turns out to work as advertised. We’ll just have to give it a go to see.

Affinity Photo for iPad is compatible with the iPad Air 2 and newer, and is available to purchase right now on the iTunes App Store for a special introductory price of $20 (regular $30). To find out more about the new app, click here. And if you want to buy it for yourself, take advantage of that limited time discount here.

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