affinity.serif[.]com/en-us/press/newsroom/try-affinity-designer-photo-and-publisher-free-for-six-months/
Serif has been around a very long time -- I remember their image editing and publishing apps from the days of Win95. In the old days they published a lot of cut down single purpose stuff, like greeting card software based on parts of its desktop publishing app. In March of this year they were bought by Canva [canva(.)com], and now in a move to hopefully get new customers, they've made their suite of apps free to use for 180 days. They're also offering 1/2 off pricing [ affinity.serif(.)com/en-us/affinity-pricing/ ]
This evening I took a quick look at Affinity Photo 2... spending a lot of time restoring and editing old photos from film, I've become dependent on AI for noise removal, a bit of sharpening, and occasionally removing part of a person intruding at the edge of a photo. Affinity Photo 2 doesn't seems to have much to offer in that respect, though I could have missed it, since the GUI layout is quite different from all the other software I've used. Because of that if I were in the market, and based on Affinity Photo 2's regular price, I'd probably go with ON1's latest when/if it's on sale -- it's both more familiar and includes some of the AI features I use daily. But for the sale price of $35, it beats ON1 and give PaintShop Pro a run for its money.
Affinity Photo 2 is serious photo editing software. It includes most everything available in Photoshop, minus the AI and Camera RAW module, and the controls for adjustments like Levels and Curves *might* even be a bit more advanced than what Adobe gives you [I'd have to dig into them quite a bit more to be certain]. When you start Affinity Photo 2 it opens a window with several tutorials you can watch to help with figuring things out, though I was able to muddle around and figure out enough to use the software on my own.
Affinity Photo 2 is big, at a little over 1GB installed. You have your choice of msi or msix installers -- I chose msi. Besides the app's folder you get a folder in ProgramData & Users\ [UserName]\ AppData\ Roaming\, and a copy of the msi installation file is added to Windows\ Installer\. The registry gets an uninstall key, while quite a few file name extensions for image files are associated with Affinity Photo 2 as their default.
It's been so long since I worked with vector graphics and desktop publishing that I don't feel I could give a fair opinion of the other 2 Affinity apps -- sorry.