After several months in public beta, Affinity Photo has reached public release and is now available for purchase on the Mac App Store with a special 20% discount until July 23rd.

Affinity Photo is a new photo-editing app for the Mac by the creators of the 2015 Apple Design Award winner app, Affinity Designer. Though it provides a complete solution for editing photos in one application, it’s clearly intended more as a competitor to Adobe Photoshop than to Lightroom.

I’ve only taken a brief look at it so far, but there appears to be plenty to love about Affinity Photo. Ostensibly aimed at professional users, I’d say it strikes a nice balance somewhere between the simplicity of Pixelmator and the power of Photoshop, and it’s sure to win the hearts of many photo enthusiasts around the world.

I still don’t know if it will be a suitable replacement for Lightroom / Photoshop for me, but then again, my needs are far from mainstream. Not many people use their photo-editing app to do color negative film processing these days, so I can definitely understand the omission.

That said, this may be a great opportunity to learn how to process my negative film scans by manually inverting each individual color channel, as opposed to relying on a Photoshop plugin like ColorPerfect.

Then, of course, there’s the small detail that, being a native Mac app built from the ground up with modern technology, there’s a pretty good chance Affinity Photo will run laps around Lightroom and Photoshop in the performance department. And though it’s still working like a champ, my aging iMac clearly needs all the help it can get at this point.

In any case, I’ll be putting Affinity Photo through its paces shortly, so be sure to stay tuned for a more in-depth take on it.