organization
If you want to manage and organize your image files, Lightroom is the way to go. Affinity doesn’t offer that functionality. Lightroom is known for its capabilities as a catalog system for organizing photos, which is why so many professional photographers gravitate towards it.
Lightroom allows you to work with many (and large) image collections. You can group your files to create as many catalogs as needed. (Larger catalogs can sometimes slow things down.)
Lightroom’s search functionality is also excellent, making it easy enough to browse, select, and even rate images. As an editing software, you can search, find, and open an image and make the edits without having to open another program.
Because Affinity Photo doesn’t have cataloging capabilities, you’ll likely have to find another way to catalog in a different program that offers digital asset management. This means slowing things down since you’re switching between programs and transferring image files.
editing capabilities
Affinity has a bit of an edge over Lightroom regarding editing. It’s more like Adobe Photoshop than Lightroom because it does everything Lightroom does and more.
Affinity Photo offers a more comprehensive editor, and you can work with multiple layers and create composites. You can also work with multiple images simultaneously, use masks, apply filters, add text to an image, and more. You can open and edit vector files with Affinity Photo (but not in Lightroom).
Lightroom does offer a good number of basic editing tools and is non-destructive. You can adjust elements like exposure, add contrast, apply crops, and adjust perspective distortion. There are a few advanced tools, such as an adjustment brush and subject masking. Lightroom also offers editing presets, which can speed up your workflow with a simple click. (You can also purchase Lightroom presets from our sources, such as the ones we offer here at BeArt.)
