Update: June 2017 – Updated to include V1.5 shortcuts and PC version shortcuts.

Affinity Photo is award winning photo editing software available as a one time purchase, rather than the subscription model offered by Adobe if you want to use Photoshop. Not only does it have power that rivals Photoshop, but it’s also able to work with PSD files, so you need not worry about collaborating with people who use the Adobe suite.

A Simple List Format!

As with most editing programs, there’s a good selection of keyboard shortcuts that can really help to speed up your workflow. The makers of Affinity Photo offer a shortcut guide on their website, but it’s in the form of a confusing keyboard overlay that, in my opinion, is totally unintuitive and takes forever to find the thing you’re looking for. I really think that the wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented here just for the sake of fancy graphics and I saw a lot of comments to the same effect on the Affinity forum, so I’ve compiled this simple tabulated list of Affinity Photo keyboard shortcuts that you can easily search. Please bookmark this page, or download the whole thing as a PDF that can be printed and kept at your desk or stored on your phone for easy reference.

GET THE PDF EBOOK VERSION FOR FREE

I’ve created an easy-reference PDF that you can store on your smartphone, laptop or tablet and always have it to hand.  I know what it’s like with shortcuts… we remember the basic ones pretty easily, but after periods of inactivity with specific software we forget a few of the other ones.  No need to remember where to look on the internet though with this handy guide!

Keyboard symbol guide

A note about using Alt on the Mac: It’s actually quite unusual to use the Alt command on the Mac, but it is used by Affinity Photo. There is no dedicated Alt key on the Mac, so you have to hold down the fn key and then press the Option (⌥) key. In the list of shortcuts, I will simply write Alt instead of fn + ⌥ because Mac keyboards have Alt marked on the top of the Option key in superscript to indicate this already.

Affinity Photo Shortcuts

Editing shortcuts

Vector graphic shortcuts

File shortcuts

Tools shortcuts

Edit shortcuts

Layer operations shortcuts

Brush Shortcuts

Text shortcuts

View shortcuts

Pixel selection/Mask shortcuts

Workspace shortcuts

Adjustment and Filter shortcuts

Liquify Persona shortcuts

Misc shortcuts

Spot any mistakes?

In the past, some shortcuts have been changed by the Affinity guys during updates, and they’ve also made it incredibly hard to track all of these down. I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to make this as accurate as possible, but there’s always the chance that a couple of mistakes have crept in, particularly possible in the PC list. If you find a mistake, please leave a comment below so that I can find a solution and correct it.