@kina, yes, @buddingphotographer is absolutely right—you don’t have to pay a cent to just downsize/change the resolution of your photo. There are many programs that will allow you to do that. For example, like we’ve been discussing, Preview is already built into your Mac, and it will work to change the resolution of your photo. Don’t get Luminar or Affinity or any other program that costs a decent bit of money if that’s all you need to do!
But if you are looking for a good editor for things besides resizing photos 🙂 , it honestly depends on what you want to do.
I guess what I mean is can you change lighting, make things smoother, adjust color and such on Affinity?
It sounds like what you want to do—besides changing resolution—is give an image that extra “pop”. If that’s all you want to do, then I think Luminar would be best.
If you want to do some heavy editing—like adding someone to a picture who wasn’t there or doing some basic graphic design—I think I’d go with Affinity (or you could start with GIMP, which is free).
I think, generally speaking, everything that Luminar can do, Affinity can do (and a lot more). But if you just want to give an image that extra pop, I’d use Luminar, because Luminar gives that pop way easier (and much better-er) than Affinity does, and it gives you a lot more features to get the effect.
Really what Luminar is is a souped up version of the Apple Photos editing feature. You get the same tools Apple Photos gives you… and a whole, whole, whole lot more tools to enhance your image. [Affinity also gives you the same tools that Apple Photos gives you, but you can’t go back and change your edits after you’ve saved your image (like you can in Photos). That was kind of a deal breaker for me.]
Affinity is a different tool entirely. It’s more of an image builder than an image enhancer—though it does have the capability to enhance images. In fact, before I had Luminar, I was using Affinity to enhance my images. It wasn’t ideal though.
You could try both programs out for free, actually, to find out which fits your needs. Both programs offer a free trial (Luminar gives you 14 days and Affinity gives you 30) on their respective websites—just note that not all of the sample images on the site, like I’ve found in many places, would be lenspiration approved. Proceed carefully.
I hope this has been helpful and not confusing!
@rmadaris—I know you use Luminar (and Affinity?). What say you?
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