The Affinity Photo Manual 2.0: A Step-by-Step New User’s Workbook

The layout of the book is great. I think that memorizing the basics with quizzes is essential to make using the software smooth sailing. I just started the lessons after making sure I memorized the basics in the beginning of the book. I will update review as I go through the material.

After buying both, I still don’t know what the difference is between this author’s APhoto “Manual” and APhoto “Guidebook.” Okay, I actually *do* know the difference–each book has 20 unique activities/”lessons”–but I have no idea why they weren’t combined into a single book. It really feels like a cash grab. I do prefer the “basic skills” section of this book to that of the Guidebook… but I probably couldn’t explain why. As both books are primarily useful as sources of example projects, you’ll likely want to buy both anyway.

Oddly enough, the official Affinity/Serif Workbook (for version 1) is much more of a manual than this Manual (for version 2), which is much more of a workbook.

Whereas the Serif book explains what each piece/tool of the software does and why you would use it, this book is more of a here’s-some-small-projects-that-you-can-perform-with-the-software presentation. So if you’re looking for short, workable things to do to play around with Photo and a little explanation sprinkled here and there, this looks to be a very good option. If, however, you’re like me and wanted more explanation and less “Next, do this,” go with Serif’s version (and then, if you’re looking for more ideas, consider coming back for this one).

To summarize, I feel like the Serif book is the textbook for a class on how to operate Affinity Photo, and this book is a supplementary textbook for a class on photography–if you’ve ever taken a college science class, the former is the book for class instruction, and the latter is the book for lab sessions.

There are a couple of “quizzes” with answers sprinkled around, but they’re of the passive “Did you actually read the assignment” type rather than the active “Create a ____ with ____ and then look at our solution” variety. (Some of the questions are… in my opinion, ridiculous. e.g., “Which persona do you think you’ll use the most often?”)

But the primary reason that I returned the book was the tone of the wording, which just rubbed me the wrong way. Like writing “Finished. This ends the lesson.” or similar at the end of every section. I prefer the more ‘official’-sounding wording used in school textbooks. And for learning material, I need proper grammar and punctuation, nearly flawless editing, and great writing as written by a native English speaker. I’ve returned several books on Swift, Mathematica, and other software because they weren’t written well. This book isn’t as bad as some of them–it definitely seems to be written by a native user of English–but there are enough hiccups for it to throw me off so much that I can’t concentrate.

Also, the book makes a valiant attempt to use italic (actions) and bold (objectives) font to indicate key words and phrases, but it ends up being a bit excessive because “action” and “objective” basically ends up meaning every verb and every key noun. As most of the actions are for interacting with the software (click, type) and most of the objectives are tool and panel names, the wiser option would have been to use the different typefaces for those verbs and nouns only.

In summary…
1. It’s not an instruction manual for Affinity Photo.
2. It’s not nearly as comprehensive as Serif’s own book.
3. If there are version 2-specific functions/operations used here, I couldn’t find them.
but…
4. It has an excellent assortment of activities for common things that beginning users of photo-editing software would want to know how to do (see the list of lessons presented in the write-up; you’ll likely see multiple topics where you go, “Oh, yeah, I’ve tried to learn how to do that using YouTube videos.”)
5. There are lots of color images everywhere, so the paperback book looks really attractive. (I’m not sure about the Kindle version, as eBooks are notorious bad with image sizing and placement.)

Simple steps and easy to understand

Simple and easy to understand

This is a really well-sequenced book of lessons for learning Affinity Photo. I had been a Photoshop user for years and struggled with making the transition to Affinity Photo. This book was able to help me clear the hurdles in learning this software. Highly recommend!

Really easy to understand, written to make it easy for beginners like me to get to grips with some fairly complicated software.

I’m an absolute beginner with Affinity Photo, and this book was exactly what I needed to get started. It walks you through each exercise completely, with highlighted photos for further explanation. The book begins with 10 skills you need to know to get started, and then there are 20 detailed lessons on everything from how to remove objects, how to touch up skin, and lots of special effects. I can’t recommend this book enough. The customer service is outstanding, too.