Can Affinity Beat Photoshop?

Switching away from Photoshop sounds tempting until you hit the parts of editing that punish you for being slow or slightly sloppy. If you shoot in rough light, push exposure hard, or do regular cleanup work, the gap between “good enough” and “clean” shows up fast.

Coming to you from Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect, this blunt video puts Photoshop and Affinity Photo side by side in the places where you either save time or lose it. Dinda starts with a raw file opened in Adobe Camera Raw, cranks exposure, and uses the Denoise control to pull noise down while keeping fine detail looking intact. The point is not that noise reduction exists in both apps. The point is what happens to edges, texture, and tiny patterns when you push the settings beyond polite use. You end up deciding whether you can live with a smoother, softer look, or whether you want detail to survive aggressive fixes.

The video then moves into selections, and this is where the comparison gets uncomfortable if you rely on fast cutouts. In Photoshop, “Select Subject” and “Remove Background” are treated like everyday tools, not special occasions, and the demo focuses on tricky shapes and busy backgrounds. Affinity Photo can select objects too, but the difference shows up in the missed bits, thin gaps, and fussy areas you do not want to rebuild by hand. Dinda also points out how Photoshop’s people-based selections can isolate specific features, and how sky selection can be used for quick targeted adjustments. If your workflow includes masking hair, clothing, or skies on a deadline, this section forces an honest cost check.

Cleanup is the next pressure test, especially removing complex distractions. Affinity’s inpainting can work, but the demo is aimed at the kind of scene that breaks simple fill tools: layered backgrounds, repeating patterns, and objects crossing in front of other objects. Photoshop’s Remove Tool gets compared directly, including a “find distractions” approach for things like wires and cables, which is the kind of job that can chew up an evening if you do it stroke by stroke. There is also a segment on removing groups of people quickly, framed as time saved rather than a magic trick. If you do travel, event, or location work, this part should make you a little uneasy about how many hours you have normalized losing.

After that, Dinda stacks up the quieter differences that usually decide whether you feel relaxed or irritated while editing. Raw sliders and highlight and shadow recovery get a direct comparison, with the emphasis on how the controls behave when you push them to extremes. Reflection removal comes up as a specific example of a feature you might not think about until you need it, then you wonder how you lived without it. Masking is treated like a real-world task, not a feature list, including how quickly you can target water, vegetation, or clothing without painting everything by hand. The video also touches newer generative tools, including Generative Expand in Photoshop Beta and the quality difference Dinda sees when trying similar options elsewhere. Later, he brings up model choice inside Photoshop’s generative features, including Google’s Gemini 3 Nano Banana Pro, and shows why “editing” and “replacing” are not the same thing when you want a precise change. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Dinda.