Affinity Photo 2.6.5 Mac

Affinity Photo runs on any Mac with macOS 10.15 Catalina or newer, including both Intel machines and Apple Silicon models. The current release, version 2.6.5, continues to offer the same toolset Serif Labs has built the application around.

Nondestructive layers keep every edit revisable

The application is built on a nondestructive layer system. Live filters, adjustments, blend modes, and masks can be stacked and revised at any time without baking changes into the original image.

Which file formats can it open?

Affinity Photo handles common raster formats including PNG, TIFF, JPG, and GIF. It also imports SVG, EPS, EXR, HDR, and PDF files, with support for RGB, CMYK, LAB, and grayscale color spaces.

What pro-level features are included?

Focus stacking, HDR merging, and tone mapping are built in. A macro recorder can capture and replay editing steps, and the inpainting brush lets users remove unwanted objects from a frame.

Machine-learning assists steer a different course

Three names tend to dominate the conversation around pro photo editing on a Mac, and they each approach the job differently. Pixelmator Pro leans hard into machine-learning assists. Its one-click background removal and automatic subject selection are genuinely quick, but the layer and mask controls feel trimmed-down next to what Affinity Photo offers. Photographers who need frequency separation, focus stacking, and CMYK proofing usually hit a wall in Pixelmator sooner than they do here.

GIMP is the wildcard. It handles 16-bit and 32-bit per channel work now, and the 2.10 series brought enough curve and level refinement to satisfy a lot of open-source loyalists. The gap shows in RAW processing and in the sheer friction of the interface — GIMP still ships without a dedicated RAW workspace, so you are juggling Darktable or RawTherapee alongside it. Affinity Photo pulls that into one window, with lens correction profiles and chromatic aberration removal already wired in.

Between the three, Affinity Photo lands in a spot that Photoshop once owned: a single app that can take a RAW file through development, heavy retouching, and CMYK prepress export without sending you to another program. It does not have the neural-filter gloss that Adobe ships now, but it also does not split the toolkit across five apps.

Drag a RAW file to the dock to start developing

The application talks to macOS in ways that speed up a working day. Drag a RAW file from the Finder onto the dock icon and the Develop persona opens immediately; drag a PSD back out and the Finder saves a copy with layers intact. The Share menu hooks into Apple Mail and Messages, so sending a flattened JPEG to a client takes two clicks without leaving the workspace.

Affinity Photo also sits naturally next to Apple Photos and Preview. You can set it as the external editor inside Photos, round-trip a shot through frequency separation or an HDR merge, and save the result straight back to the library. Quick Look integration means pressing the spacebar on a layered .afphoto file shows a preview without launching the app — small thing, but it saves time when you are hunting through a job folder.

Focus merge stacks thirty RAW frames automatically

A product photographer has thirty frames of a ceramic mug, all shot on a tripod under flat LED light. She opens Affinity Photo and chooses File > New Focus Merge. She selects the thirty RAW files, and the app stacks them into a single pixel-sharp composite inside thirty seconds. The result is a 16-bit TIFF with every glazed detail crisp from rim to base.

She switches to the Photo persona. A slight yellow cast from the light tent needs fixing, so she adds a white balance adjustment layer and clicks a grey point on the mug's shadow side. The cast vanishes. Next, a curves layer lifts the midtones without blowing the white glaze, and a live unsharp mask filter brings out the texture in the clay. None of this touches the pixels underneath.

The client wants the background swapped. She paints a quick mask over the mug, refines the edge with the selection brush — it grabs the handle's curve in one pass — and outputs the selection to a mask on a new background layer. A second file, shot as an HDR bracket, is merged while she works; the HDR merge dialog auto-aligns the three exposures and the tone-mapping persona gives her full control over local contrast before she pastes the merged result into the main composition.

She saves the layered .afphoto file for later revisions and exports a print-ready PDF with crop marks through the Export persona, all inside twenty minutes.

Complex mask dragging no longer triggers the beachball

Version 2.6.5, the current release, tightened several things that affect daily editing. Mask rendering in documents with many live filter layers is now noticeably faster on Apple Silicon — the beachball that used to appear when dragging a complex mask has mostly disappeared. RAW loading for CR3 files from recent Canon bodies became more reliable, with fewer crashes during batch opens, which matters if you come back from a shoot with four hundred frames.

Earlier in the 2.5 cycle, Serif Labs reworked the brush engine so that the real-time preview updates even on high-resolution canvases with a Wacom tablet connected. Pressure and tilt curves now respond without lag that some users reported on Intel iMacs, making the dodge and burn tools useful for tablet retouchers who had been working around the delay. The inpainting brush also received a sampling-area refinement; small-object removal against textured backgrounds — brick walls, foliage — produces fewer repeating-pattern artifacts than it did a year ago.

• macOS 10.15 Catalina or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac