7 Photoshop features that aren’t available in Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is lauded as the best alternative to Adobe Photoshop. While the Affinity suite can easily be compared to Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering, there are many direct comparisons between Photoshop and Affinity available to educate you on making the switch. Many of Photoshop’s tools and features are available in Affinity Photo, but there are still more than a handful of Photoshop features which are not available in Affinity software.

7 Animation timeline

Photoshop offers animation abilities

Although Photoshop shouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for animating, the fact that Photoshop offers an animation timeline can come in handy sometimes. Many Affinity users want to see the addition of an animation tool or entire video software from Affinity, but until that happens, you must use alternative programs or workarounds.

A workaround for creating animated GIFs from Affinity Photo is to save each frame as a transparent PNG. Upload your PNGs to an animation tool, such as Ezgif or similar, and save your frames as a GIF that way. But it’s not ideal – you can likely create much better animated GIFs or images in other software from scratch.

6 Powerful AI Content Aware Fill

Affinity’s inpainting tool doesn’t compare

Affinity does have an alternative to Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill tool; however, it isn’t as successful or intuitive in comparison. Content Aware Fill allows you to remove elements from your photo and replace them with similar background to the area surrounding what was removed. It’s an excellent AI feature in Photoshop.

Affinity doesn’t have any native AI tools, so its inpainting feature uses traditional technology rather than AI algorithms and machine learning. Due to that reason, it isn’t as successful at filling in the gaps with realistic filler materials like Photoshop can.

Affinity’s inpainting brush acts similarly to a clone tool — although there are separate clone and healing brushes in Affinity Photo — it repeats patterns and the results often betray that it’s obviously been used. If Affinity adds AI to its software, this tool could be transformed.

Affinity doesn’t offer a one-click select solution

Photoshop’s AI subject and object selection tools are some of Adobe’s best AI features. Similar to the issue of Affinity’s inpainting tool not offering quick or smart results due to the lack of AI features, that explains the lack of a one-click selection tool in Affinity Photo.

Without AI, Affinity’s selection tools just work with contrasting color boundaries. While there’s no direct one-click selection tool, Affinity Photo does have a Selection Brush Tool and a Flood Select Tool.

Both of these tools can be used to select and drag, or to select neighboring areas to increase the selection area based on similar elements. It is less accurate than Photoshop’s Subject Selection tool, and it takes longer to use, but you can somewhat accurately select large areas and subjects.

4 Bustling filter library

Affinity doesn’t offer the same filter gallery

There is a filters and effects library in Affinity, but it only has basic filter tools like blur, sharpen, noise, and some distortion filters. There are also basic layer effects like masking, color overlays, glow effects, or similar.

These are typically fine for most basic uses, but they don’t compare to the neural filters available in Photoshop. Again, like other missing features, the Photoshop neural filters utilize AI and ML technology — something not available in Affinity programs in the V2 suite.

To add more extensive filters and effects to your images in Affinity Photo, you’ll have to find more long-winded and traditional ways to manipulate your images.

3 Cropping pixels that extend the artboard

Affinity’s crop tool ends where the artboard boundaries begin

Affinity’s crop tool doesn’t remove pixels outside document bounds. This means when cropping even up to the boundary of your artboard, if you need to move the image around the artboard, anything that was initially outside the boundaries will be moved in, since they were not actually cropped off. In Photoshop, a cropped image is cropped wherever the crop boundary lines hit — whether that’s in or out of the artboard boundary.

You can work around this in Affinity. Select the layers you want to crop and right-click on them. Choose Rasterize and Trim, which will crop your image wherever it hits the boundaries. Choosing Rasterize alone doesn’t crop any image parts that exceed the artboard lines.

2 Make a path from selections

Photoshop offers multiple ways to make paths

There isn’t a workaround for this in Affinity; you cannot make a path from a selection. To make a path, you must use a path-based tool like the Pen tool. You can do most things in Affinity without the need to create a path from your selection, so not having the option isn’t a game-changer to your workflow.

1 Intuitive keyboard shortcuts

Luckily, you can customize your own shortcuts in Affinity

This is a minor variation from the other Photoshop features listed here which you won’t find available in Affinity — you can actually incorporate some useful keyboard shortcuts with a little customization.

Affinity tools and shortcuts are different from Photoshop’s. Although most shortcuts are universally shared across different creative software, Affinity does have some differences from Photoshop’s most common keyboard shortcuts.

This can easily be changed by customizing your shortcuts in Affinity though. Go to your Affinity Settings and choose Shortcuts to add your chosen custom keyboard configurations. You can match them to your Photoshop preferences or create new-to-you shortcuts.

Learn the nuances between Photoshop and Affinity

Affinity Photo is a popular alternative to Photoshop, but it doesn’t come with everything. There are small differences between tools offered in the industry-standard Adobe software and Affinity Photo. You can do most things in Affinity without the need for frustration or turning to other software, and most of the tools not available in Affinity Photo aren’t going to destroy your workflow by not having direct ways to do those things. Overall, the Affinity toolbox is a near-perfect option for former Photoshop users.