Affinity Photo available now on iPad for just $20, promises fully-featured, touch-enabled photo editing

Affinity Photo is an insanely powerful photo edting application that has pushed against the tide of cloud-based software. Today they announced the availability of Affinity Photo for iPad, and it boasts to being the first fully-featured, professional photo editing tool to arrive on the Apple tablet. Serif, Affinity's developer, has put a ton of features into this mobile application, and it looks rather impressive. 

Serif says that Affinity Photo for iPad has been tailored to "harness the explosive power of the iPad’s hardware and touch capabilities." Each tool, panel and control has been completely redesigned and optimized for touch, either with fingertip or Apple Pencil, and all adjustments and effects have been fully hardware-accelerated.

Below is the feature list provided by Serif:

• Optimized for iPad capabilities: multi-touch UI, Metal accelerated, intuitive Apple Pencil support and full iCloud drive integration.
• Complete retouching tools: including dodge, burn, clone, blemish, patch and red eye tools. You’ll also find an incredibly accurate inpainting brush along with full frequency separation capability.
• Non-destructive adjustments: Correct and enhance images with Levels, Curves, Black and White, White Balance, HSL, Shadows and Highlights and over a dozen other adjustments that are previewed instantly and can be edited any time.
• Super accurate selections: Affinity Photo’s selection refinement algorithm is one of the most advanced available, making selections—even down to individual strands of hair—easier than ever before.
• Comprehensive Liquify Workspace: Push your images around with your fingertips or use brushes like turbulence, pinch, punch and twirl in a dedicated liquify persona. Alongside a real-time mesh warp tool, it’s perfect to reshape, sculpt and deform photos.
• Real time effects: Affinity Photo comes with a huge range of high-end filters including lighting, blurs, distortions, tilt-shift, shadows, glows and many more. Full control is given over every aspect of a filter’s properties with incredibly precise controls—all the while seeing a real-time live preview of the result.
• Comprehensive RAW editing: Develop camera RAW files in a dedicated built-in workspace with all the processing adjustments and corrections you need.
• Unsurpassed file compatibility: Unrivalled PSD support plus all the standards including PNG, JPG, TIFF, EPS, PDF, and SVG.
• Work in any colour space: RGB, CMYK, LAB, Greyscale. End-to-end CMYK workflow with ICC colour management, and 32-bit per channel editing
• HDR Merge with tone mapping: allows you to merge multiple exposure brackets together into a single unbounded 32-bit image, with full tone mapping control for incredibly dramatic results.

Affinity Photo for iPad enables you to brush directly on screen for a more fluid retouching experience. For those who have been seeing what the Surface line of products can do, this is an answer in the Apple ecosystem. Apply tools such as dodge, burn, clone, blemish, patch and red eye with even greater precision, using touch control or Apple Pencil. You’ll also find tasks like recolouring, inpainting and selection refinement can be more naturally controlled too.

Serif says that another revolutionary thing about Affinity Photo is the back-end for Windows, Mac and iOS is the same, meaning you can share files across all platforms seamlessly – even including the undo history.

Gratefully, that file compatibility is shared across other Affinity apps, so you can just as easily switch from Affinity Photo to its partner app, Affinity Designer. Serif says that the Designer app is soon to come to iPad as well. 

Serif is offering an introductory price of $20 until June 19 for the iPad app, after which it will go up to $30. Still, at full price, that's not bad for the freedom of mobile editing and the power that this app appears to give you.