A message from the Affinity team

Affinity Photo is the recent invention that came to us in 2014 on the other hand Adobe Photoshop first launched to the market in 1980. Affinity Photo is part of the Affinity Suit that comes with three packages: Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and, Affinity Publisher. Well, thanks to Affinity Photo’s Macro feature, you can do exactly that! Macros are the Affinity Photo equivalent to Photoshop Actions – which performs the same function, allowing you to automate your image editing. In this tutorial, I’ll show you everything you need to know to create macros inside of Affinity Photo to speed up your workflow.

• From the Affinity Photo menu, select Preferences. From the Edit menu, select Preferences. Select the Photoshop Plugins tab. Under the Plugin Search Folders box, click Add, then navigate to the parent folder that contains the.plugin file. For example, this could be in a Photoshop folder such as /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS6/Plug-ins.
• Faster, smoother and more powerful than ever, Affinity Photo continues to push the boundaries of professional photo editing software. With a huge toolset specifically engineered for creative and photography professionals, it has everything you need to edit and retouch images, create full-blown, multi-layered compositions or beautiful raster.

As a way to lend support to the creative community during these difficult times, we’re once again offering a 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite, for anyone who wants to use them (even those who have previously completed a free trial). We’re also bringing back the 50% discount for those who would prefer to buy and keep the apps, including our iPad versions.

Affinity Photo Photoshop Ui

In other news…

our apps are fully optimized for the next generation of Mac

Ready to go on Apple’s Big Sur and primed to deliver superfast performance on Macs with M1 chips, recent updates to the macOS versions of our apps mean huge performance gains.

There's a couple of tricks to using Photoshop plugins with Affinity Photo:

Check the Allow Unknown Plugins setting

Not all plugins are compatible with Affinity Photo, so it has a setting to prevent it loading “Unknown” (ie untested) Photoshop plugins. If you want to try and use your Photoshop plugins with Affinity Photo anyway, you'll first need to change this setting. Go into your “Edit -> Preferences” menu, click on the Photoshop Plugins icon, and make sure there is a tick next to “Allow ‘Unknown’ Plugins To Be Used”.

After ticking that setting, close & restart Affinity Photo. Any Photoshop plugins installed in Affinity Photo's plugins folder should now appear in your Filters menu.

Run the plugin's installer

Most modern Photoshop plugins come with an installer program that automatically finds all the graphics programs on your computer and installs the plugin for you. It's best to try the installer program first and let it do all the hard work for you.

Adding extra plugins folders to Affinity Photo

If you have plugins already installed on your computer that aren't appearing in Affinity, you can add the folders where those plugins are installed into Affinity's preferences. Just click on “Add” under Plugin Search Folders in the Affinity Preferences -> Photoshop Plugins menu. When you restart Affinity Photo, it will then also look in those folders for plugins.

Finding your Affinity Photo plugins folder

Affinity Photo Vs Photoshop Elements

Older plugins won't automatically find Affinity Photo, and some plugins don't have an installer. For those plugins, if you can't add their folder to Affinity's settings, you'll need to manually copy their .8BF plug-in files into your Affinity Photo plug-ins folder. Note: this is generally not recommended!

On Affinity Photo 1 for Windows, you'll find the Affinity Photo plugins folder here:

And on macOS, the Affinity Photo Photoshop plugin folder is:

After you've copied the 8BF / Plugin files into that folder, try restarting Affinity Photo. You should now find your plugins listed at the end of the Filters menu.

Still having problems?

• What to do if the Photoshop plugin doesn't show in the Filter menu.
• How to fix when the plugin is greyed out in the menu.