Part 2 of 2 — read Part 1 on DaVinci Resolve's new Photo page

I'll be honest — before this week I had no idea what Affinity was. It wasn't on my radar, it hadn't come up on set, and I had no reason to look into it. Then Capture One 16.7.7 dropped on April 16th with native .af file support, DaVinci Resolve announced the same thing the same week, and suddenly Affinity was everywhere in my feeds. So I looked into it.

Here's what's actually going on.

What Affinity is

Affinity Photo is a professional image editing application — a direct alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It does layers, masking, retouching, compositing, and the kind of pixel-level work that Capture One and Lightroom don't touch. It's been around since 2015, built by a UK company called Serif, and has quietly built a serious user base among photographers and designers who wanted out of Adobe's subscription model.

It's widely considered the best Photoshop alternative on the market — and not in a "good enough" way. It's a genuinely capable professional tool. The problem has always been friction between Affinity and the rest of your workflow. Getting files in and out cleanly meant exporting to TIFFs or PSDs, re-importing manually, losing round-trip flexibility. Workable, but messy. That changed this week.

What the .af integration actually does in Capture One — for photographers

Capture One 16.7.7 adds import and export support for .af files, completing a round-trip workflow between the two applications. Capture One

In practical terms: you do your RAW processing, culling, and colour work in Capture One as normal. When an image needs retouching — skin work, compositing, background replacement, anything requiring Photoshop-level tools — you send it to Affinity with one click. Your full edit carries through, including layers, masks, metadata, annotations, and overlays. When you update and save the .af file in Affinity, it comes back into Capture One automatically. Affinity No exporting to TIFF, no relinking, no version management headaches.

This is the workflow photographers have wanted between Capture One and a Photoshop alternative for years. It's now built in.

This feature is currently available on macOS with Apple Silicon only, and requires Affinity 2.3 or later.

What the .af integration does in Davinci — for video editors

DaVinci Resolve's Affinity support is a different workflow serving a different purpose, and it's worth keeping the two separate.

When an Affinity file is imported into the Resolve Media Pool, DaVinci Resolve now decodes it natively. By default it generates a flattened preview, and editors can also split layers directly onto the timeline one level at a time, respecting the groups and structure of the original Affinity document. JayAreTV

When you update and save the .af file in Affinity, DaVinci Resolve refreshes it automatically so your timeline stays in sync — no re-export, no relinking. PetaPixel

This is primarily a video editing workflow — bringing Affinity-designed titles, graphics, and composites into video timelines with live sync. Useful for hybrid creators who do both photo and video work, but it's not the same as the Capture One round-trip. If you're a stills-focused digital tech, the Capture One integration is the relevant one. If you cut video alongside your photography work, both matter.

The Canva angle

There's something worth addressing here. Affinity is now owned by Canva. That certainly raised my eyebrows — Canva is a consumer design platform, the tool people use to make Instagram posts and birthday invitations. So what's going on here? 

This week's announcements were made at Canva Create 2026 — Canva's own conference. Which means Canva orchestrated the whole thing: the .af integration with Capture One, the DaVinci Resolve support, the Affinity update, all announced simultaneously. That's not the move of a company that accidentally acquired a pro tool and isn't sure what to do with it. That looks more like a deliberate, well-resourced push into the professional market — using Affinity as the entry point and building credibility through integrations with applications that professionals already trust.

Whether that plays out well for Affinity's long-term independence is a legitimate question. Pro tool acquisitions by larger consumer companies don't always go well. But right now, the resources Canva brings appear to be accelerating Affinity's development rather than diluting it. The professional photography world should watch this carefully rather than dismiss it based on the Canva association alone.

What this means for the Adobe conversation

For working photographers and digital techs, the workflow is Capture One and Photoshop: the best RAW processor paired with the best retouching tool, working together well enough that switching either one felt like more friction than it was worth.

That's the equation that just changed, I hope. A Capture One and Affinity round-trip now sound like a dream on paper, without the Photoshop subscription, with a retouching tool that professionals are genuinely rating. Affinity is widely considered the best Photoshop alternative on the market Digital Camera World — not a compromise, not a workaround, but a capable professional tool that happens to cost a fraction of what Adobe charges. The question was always whether it integrated cleanly enough to be worth the switch.

This is Part 2 of what we covered with DaVinci Resolve's Photo page. Taken together, the same week produced a free node-based photo editor with Hollywood colour tools, and a seamless round-trip between the strongest non-Adobe applications in the photography stack. That's not coincidence — it's a coordinated signal that the alternative ecosystem is maturing fast.

Where I land on all of this

I'm not ready to adopt either solution — not for live job work anyway. But I'm genuinely interested in where both are heading, and that's not something I'd have said a week ago before I'd heard of Affinity. The one I'm watching most closely is DaVinci Resolve's Photo page. I don't do much retouching anymore, so the Capture One and Affinity round-trip is less immediately relevant to my day-to-day. But I've used DaVinci extensively — film grading, dailies on Netflix productions — and I have real respect for what their node-based colour workflow can do. The idea of bringing that same toolset to still images is genuinely interesting to me, not just as a novelty but as a practical alternative. And frankly, after years of watching both Adobe and Capture One quietly raise prices, tighten licensing, and bet that professionals have nowhere else to go — it's hard not to feel some satisfaction watching serious competition arrive. We deserve better options. It looks like we might finally be getting them.