I’m trying out the new free Affinity Studio, but so far I’m not impressed.

Auto-generated description: A bowl of stir-fried tofu with carrots, Brussels sprouts, and green beans, garnished with black sesame seeds.

The blurry wooden-like fix at the top left is Apple Photos doing its best to hide a piece of paper towel I had in the original photo. To be fair, this is a big chunk of the photo, and this goes beyond “repair”: it requires AI generation. I do have the tools for that elsewhere, which I might be able to integrate (Affinity now offers AI integration, available as a subscription through Canva, for about the same price as Adobe’s Photoshop. No thanks).

The food at the center of the plate looks highly processed, because it is. While Affinity lets me smart-select the food, I need to learn how to blur the mask a bit and merge it more effectively with the background. Still, the exposure adjustment layer in Affinity feels like the dial on it is broken, incapable of soft touches.