Affinity Photo

If you arrived here looking to buy Affinity Photo, there is nothing to buy. Canva, which acquired Serif in March 2024, rebuilt the entire Affinity line as a single application called simply Affinity, released it in October 2025, and made it free.

Not free-with-limits. Canva's own announcement is unusually blunt about it: "no catch, no stripped-back version, and no gotchas." The full professional toolset, no watermark, no export ceiling, no trial clock. Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher are gone as separate purchases; their capabilities now appear as the Pixel, Vector and Layout studios inside one document window.

This is a bigger change than the pricing headline suggests. The old Affinity pitch was "buy it once instead of renting Photoshop." The new pitch is "don't pay at all." That reframes every comparison anyone has written about Affinity Photo versus Photoshop over the last decade.

The reasonable worry about a free rebuild is that something got cut. Working from Affinity's own feature documentation, the photo-editing capability that justified buying Affinity Photo is all present.

Non-destructive editing throughout — original layers and files stay intact, edits stack and can be reordered, tweaked, or removed without flattening, and Affinity is pointed about not needing smart objects to do it. Full RAW development, non-destructively, from first adjustment to export. Advanced retouching and multi-layer compositing. Live filters and adjustments that update in real time on GPU-accelerated preview. Stacks, batch processing and macros for repetitive work, with no plugin required.

The interface is the more visible change. Panels can be rearranged, tools mixed across the three studios, and the resulting layout saved as a custom studio, switched between in a click, and shared with or downloaded from other users. That last part — shareable workspace configurations — is the sort of feature that only ships when a team is competing on craft rather than on feature-count.

For print, the layout side carries Smart Master Pages, AutoFlow, document-wide styles, baseline grids, OpenType and variable font support, bleed and margin setup, preflight, PDF/X export, and crop and registration marks. Data merge from a spreadsheet is there too.

Here is where a free professional application makes commercial sense.

Every AI feature in Affinity runs through Canva. Generative Fill, Generative Expand, Expand & Edit, Remove Background, Generate Image and Generate Vector all appear inside the Pixel, Vector and Layout studios — and all of them require a paid Canva plan. On the free app you have an excellent conventional editor with no generative capability whatsoever.

So the business model is legible. Canva gives away the tool that professional designers already respected, requires a Canva account to download it, and puts the features those designers will increasingly be asked for behind the subscription it actually sells. There is also a one-click export path from Affinity into Canva for collaboration and publishing, which pulls professional work into the collaborative platform where Canva's revenue lives.

Whether that trade bothers you is a judgement call, not a defect. But it should be stated plainly rather than buried: Affinity is free because it is a distribution channel.

On data handling, Canva and Affinity both state that Affinity content is not used to train AI features, that Affinity cannot access local files, and that anything you upload to Canva is governed by preferences you control in Canva settings. If you handle client material under NDA, read the current Canva privacy policy rather than taking the summary.

Serif's position on V2 owners is clear and reasonably generous. Existing Affinity Photo 2, Designer 2 and Publisher 2 licences remain valid, activation servers stay online, and the V2 learning portal and product help stay published. You can re-download previous purchases from your Serif store account, and add-ons bought there can be linked to a Canva account.

The limit is that V2 will receive no further updates. It is a frozen product, kept alive rather than developed, and Serif openly recommends moving to the new app.

File compatibility runs one way. The new Affinity opens everything from V1 and V2, but new .af files cannot be opened in the older apps. Plan the migration accordingly: once a job moves forward, it stays forward, and any collaborator still on V2 will need to move too.

The other gap is the iPad. Affinity Photo for iPad was one of the genuinely impressive things about the old line. The new unified app shipped for Mac and Windows only, with iPad listed as coming. Until it arrives, iPad users are on a frozen V2 app.

For years the honest answer to "Affinity or Photoshop" involved a price calculation: a one-off Affinity purchase against an indefinite Creative Cloud subscription, weighed against Photoshop's plugin ecosystem and file-format gravity.

The price half of that argument is now over. There is nothing to weigh. What remains for Photoshop is the third-party plugin market — which is deep and which Affinity has never seriously competed in — and the fact that the industry ships PSDs at each other. Affinity opens PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, TIFF and IDML with structure and layers preserved, and Canva's pitch explicitly notes that because Affinity is free, collaborators can open your files without buying anything. That erodes the format argument considerably.

Lightroom is a cleaner win for Adobe. Affinity has never done catalogue and library management, and the new app does not change that. If your workflow is organising and culling thousands of frames before editing, Affinity is the editor, not the system.

A free professional tool from a company valued on subscription growth invites one question: what happens in three years?

Canva has committed publicly to "free forever," and has shipped an April 2026 update since launch, so the current evidence is of continued investment rather than harvest. But the strategic logic that makes the app free today — funnel professionals toward Canva AI, pull their files into Canva for collaboration — is the same logic that would justify moving more capability behind the subscription later.

Nothing about the current release warrants suspicion. It is a very good application, given away, with a clearly marked paid tier for the generative features. Just go in understanding what the arrangement is rather than believing it is charity.