Any opinions on how this works out as a Photoshop replacement for those of us that don't care for subscription based software?
Hi Joe,
Affinity Photo is an excellent photo-editor, depending a bit on which features you use the most. Many of its features are even better implemented than those of Photoshop, but is is still recent software, not as mature as Photoshop. That means that there may be occasional issues, mainly with the user interface, and some features could be further improved. Speed can also be improved some, although part of that is due to the architecture that uses floating point calculations that are more accurate, and it can render its Raw conversions as 32-bit / channel images which allows a lot of tonemapping without losing quality, but that consumes more memory.
But overall it's a worthy opponent/replacement, also because it allows many photoshop plugins to be used. It is also flexible in its use for (web/press) publishing purposes, or just photo-retouch, or using a mix of raster and vector based image content.
It's hard to find something better for its price, although Photoline is also powerful.
Cheers,
Bart