Affinity Photo 2 bills once and never again

What you get and what it costs

Affinity Photo 2 is a raw-capable, layer-based image editor sold by Serif under a perpetual licence — pay once, own it. As of June 2025, on Serif's own pricing page, the desktop version costs £67.99 (around $69.99 in the United States), and the iPad version is a separate purchase at a lower price. There is no monthly plan to cancel, no cloud storage tied to your access and no feature wall that lifts if you subscribe. The file is yours to run until the hardware underneath it changes.

That model is now genuinely unusual. Adobe moved Lightroom and Photoshop to a subscription in 2013 and has not looked back. Capture One, from Phase One, offers both perpetual and subscription options but prices the perpetual licence at a significant premium. Most of the industry has decided that software as a recurring service is easier to sustain and easier to sell. Serif decided otherwise — or at least has so far.

What the software actually does

Affinity Photo 2 handles raw files, non-destructive adjustment layers, masks, curves, frequency separation, and a tone curve editor that competes with anything in its price bracket. The raw development module (Serif calls it the Develop persona) applies demosaicing, white balance, exposure and lens corrections before you enter the main layer-based workspace. That clean separation between raw conversion and pixel editing mirrors the approach Lightroom Classic takes with its Develop module and Photoshop, but it happens inside a single application.

The masking tools improved substantially in version 2. Refine-edge selection, inpainting and live filters brought the application closer to parity with Photoshop's equivalent tools. It supports output sharpening, soft proofing against an ICC profile, and export to a full range of colour spaces including sRGB, Display P3 and the wide ProPhoto working space. DNG, TIFF and PSD are all readable and writable. For calibration-aware colour work, it reads ICC profiles produced by devices from Calibrite and Datacolor correctly.

What it does not have: a cataloguing system. Affinity Photo 2 is an editor, not an asset manager. You open a file, you edit it, you save it. For photographers who already organise files through Finder, Explorer or a dedicated DAM, that is no inconvenience. For photographers who rely on Lightroom's star ratings, collections and develop history, the absence is real.

The Canva question

In 2024, Canva acquired Serif. This is the thing worth watching. Canva is a browser-based design platform built on a subscription model and funded by venture capital — structurally the opposite of what Affinity Photo 2 represents. At the time of acquisition, both companies stated that the Affinity product line would continue under its existing model. That commitment has held through two subsequent years; version 2 updates have continued to ship, and the pricing structure has not changed as of this writing in mid-2025.

But the history of acquired software ↗ suggests wariness is reasonable. A perpetual licence is a one-time revenue event; a subscription is a recurring one. What benefits the parent company financially is not always what benefits the user who bought in. Nothing has changed yet — but the incentive structure exists, and anyone building a workflow on Affinity Photo 2 should know who now holds the roadmap.

What Affinity Photo 2 offers right now is a fully professional-grade editor at a price that is paid once, on a platform — macOS, Windows, iPad — that most photographers already own. That combination is rare enough that the software earns serious consideration on those terms alone, independent of whatever Canva decides to do with it next.