Adobe Photoshop vs Affinity Photo/Designer

Adobe Photoshop is a subscription-based raster editor that is the industry standard for custom fiction covers, offering extensive features, plugins, and integration with other Adobe tools, but costs about $20.99 per month. Affinity Photo/Designer provides a one-time purchase alternative to both Photoshop and Illustrator, with comparable core capabilities for cover design, though it has a smaller community and fewer third-party resources. For self-published authors, the key difference is ongoing cost versus upfront payment, with Affinity being the budget-friendly option. Functionally, both can produce professional covers, but Photoshop has more advanced features like AI tools and extensive tutorials.