You can view the background in Refine Edge as white or black, or, as seen here, as transparency. Here you can brush over tricky areas such as hair, and the background will be removed from within the strands. Just like Photoshop, Photo has a Refine Edge dialog. The Quick Selection tool makes a speedy job of the initial selection – just drag it over the object you want to select it automatically. Photo works with ‘personas’, which are separate editing environments you’ll want the Selections persona to reveal its toolset. The first task is to select the figure, to remove her from the background. If you don’t know what all the buttons and icons are for, holding the question mark icon at the bottom right pops up explanatory labels. Photo can open images from your camera roll, of course, as well as images from iCloud and Dropbox. This walkthrough can do no more than scratch the surface of this vast, supremely capable app, but it should give you an idea of what to expect. If you have an Apple Pencil, all the better. That said, it does have hefty overhead requirements: it will work on an iPad Pro or the very latest iPads, but nothing more than a year or so old.

The iPad version provides far more power and sophistication than we’re used to seeing in a mobile application, and is very much like using the desktop version. Now the people behind it have launched a mobile version, Affinity Photo for iPad. It has proved to be a fully-fledged image editor that rivals (and in many areas outdoes) Photoshop, with a price tag of only $49. In the two years since its launch, Affinity Photo has taken the world by storm.

Affinity photo ipad pro