I pretty much use Affinity Designer every day since their Windows launch (2017?) . This saved me hundreds of euros or more in comparison to Photoshop. I will 100% buy this!
And if taking 30% wasn't enough of an offense, they are now also stuffing search results of people looking for Affinity products with all kinds of ad crap. I can fully understand why they yanked their products from the Mac App Store and will happily purchase the suite directly from them.
I'm in the same situation. I used the Photography subscription for LR + PS, as I don't care about any other tools (RIP Fireworks). I've been using Adobe Products since 1999. I just feel like supporting them is unethical.
Figma + Procreate replaced Photoshop for me for design/game dev workflows, but I'm still missing the right tools for Photography and image processing.
The OSS LR replacements feel too clunky, CaptureOne is fantastic but a bit pricey. I'll have to bite the bullet eventually and choose between convenience and cost.
Two questions:
1. Is Affinity desktop better than its iPad version?
2. What's your use case for Affinity as a replacement of PS?
C1 really is the only thing that comes close to LR right now. There is a version of CaptureOne that only works with Fujifilm cameras which is about 2/3 of the price of the full license and I believe there is (was?) something like that for other manufacturers too. They also still offer perpetual licenses, so this isn't necessarily an annual cost (I'm on 21). Still pricey of course.
Yeah, totally this - I recently cropped my Adobe CC suite down to just Illy, which i need, and bought Affinity's wares to replace, but it's no contest. Aside from literal decades of muscle memory, there's just too many speedbumps in the way of my normal workflow. So, I've dug out my copy of Photoshop CS2 so I can do all my cleaning up and processing in there.
Once I've found out what the difference between Affinity versions 1 and 2 is, I might yet buy 2 anyway, just to support Serif some more, because I'm frankly fed up of Adobe's practice of unhinged monolithic greed.
I want to support independent, non-rental-scam offerings as well. But Serif's attitude toward fixing bugs in its suite has been pretty bad. And in their presentation of "what's new," they seem to have ignored repeated requests for features that are standard and expected in this type of software.
They're not even complicated requests; stuff like non-printing layers and the ability to resize the selection marquee. I mean... WTF?
Yes, I don't even have very advanced needs but there are surprising omissions or ill thought of workflows throughout the software. I'm the most confused by the "personas" and sometimes feel like I need to go "back" because I need some tool, but I think there are some other strange design decisions too even in fairly basic tools.
Some smart person should publish an e-book, or a web site "Affinity Photo for Photoshop Users."
It should list every Photoshop function, and how to accomplish the same thing on Affinity.
After 20 years of using Photoshop, I'm forever searching the web for equivalent workflows in Affinity. Sometimes it's just the name or icon of a tool is different. Sometimes it's been completely re-thought. And sometimes, a feature is just missing.
Honestly, this is something that Affinity should publish, itself, to encourage people to switch.
I also migrated a few years ago, after having used Photoshop and Illustrator professionally for a long time.
The underlying features are there, but the lack of “flow” is the main source of frustration. A lot of common or frequent actions require needless extra steps, or simple actions require convoluted workarounds.
They would benefit from starting an in-house creative studio, to get constant feedback from professionals using it for daily production. That or just start copying Adobe workflows verbatim, these are already solved problems.
On the other hand, once the previous version stops working, it stops working. With Apple and their constant changes and bad backward portability, you can end up with broken app.
For all of the old Microsoft's faults, they really did an excellent job with backwards compatibility. Now things are a mess and I fear that you are right. It really isn't the developers fault imo. OS really should be more stable.
I've been Photoshop user since, hmm, 2000? Gave up couple of years ago, and spent some time comparing Affinity Designer and Pixelmator Pro. For me personally, Pixelmator won, and it's been my editor of choice:
I actually use Pixelmator Pro vector tools a lot, for illustrating, not photo editing - they are quite basic (comparing to Illustrator) but for my specific needs it's quite enough.
Interesting. I had the opposite outcome. I didn't like how Pixelmator reinvented the wheel as far as interface goes. I felt like Affinity Photo was a much better lateral transition from Photoshop for my needs. I bought both though mostly to support them. I'm glad we have options that aren't Adobe. I just can't abide the idea of licensing software in perpetuity.
Serif's Affinity suite has probably the greatest value for money in the whole software industry. I mean 119 bucks ONE-TIME for three pretty comprehensive graphics apps which are polished and get constant updates is very hard to beat.
For people making their living with graphical work (designers, photographers, etc.) Adobe is probably still the way to go (even if just to keep using the muscle memory). However for the many people who only need something like Photoshop or InDesign a couple of times a year, Affinity is just great.
In addition to it not being a subscription, I also love this bit from the App Store's Privacy section:
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
After I post this, I'm off to buy the desktop and iPad versions.
I tried to buy a certain type of simple app a couple of weeks ago, and while there were dozens of options available, not one didn't Hoover up everything it could about me.
Really? You need to know my name, location, and track me across apps for a card game? No sale.
Edit: Purchased. Thanks, Affinity. Go stick your head in a pig, Adobe.
Just so you know, that's not true. After all, they need to collect your email to login for the perpetual license. At the very least, this needs a "Data Linked To You - Contact Info" card.
Generally speaking, 'App Privacy' cards are lies. Apple does not check them, you need to do it yourself. Here is the Privacy Policy: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/privacy/
In the EULA (quoted from Affinity Photo 2 for MacOS), you further agree to, among other terms:
> *Consent to Use of Data*
>
> a. 16. You agree that Serif and its affiliates may use any information you give to use as part of product support and other services provided to you, if any, related to Serif Software solely to improve products or to provide customised services or technologies to you and will not disclose this information in a form that personally identifies you.
$119 perpetual is an insanely good price for three absolutely fantastic applications. What are you smoking?
What's a fair price to you? $10?
On one side you've got people complaining about these anti-consumer software subscriptions from the likes of adobe.
Then on the other side you've got people like yourself that are for some reason complaining that there's still a company offering fantastic software on par with Illustrator for a fantastic perpetual price.
Affinity Designer is £35 right now. That's insane.
The same price gets you Creative Cloud for 2 months. What exactly is the point you think you're making? Because people earn different amounts in different countries is not a revelation to anybody here, nor to Serif.
The poorer countries where the equivalent of $10 is a lot are probably not part of the market anyway, considering that having a computer is a prerequisite to benefitting from this software. Anyone who can save enough for a computer can probably save $119, even if that's not cheap by any means.
If one could sell software there in such a way that only people in that market could buy it at that price, the answer is obvious... software has effectively zero marginal cost per copy.
So if you could practically limit your market at a specified price in such a way that that offer doesn't spread to other markets, then every copy you sell in such places is still beneficial to you.
There are less cynical answers to the question, but you asked cynically.
Well keeping on the cynical train. Parts of the world experiencing desperate poverty often not so coincidentally experience substantial inequality with the folks needing a professional tool not being so different economically from better off areas. If 90% of your market has no problem paying why would you not charge full price?
Next how do you keep Jane in Seattle and Bob in Houston from buying the poor market version? You can't really restrict it by language or locale people use all sorts of languages/settings in different parts of the world. Desktop computers don't have location and people could trivially block the app from having access to location AND network data. You don't want your offline software failing for lack of phoning home.
An argument could be made that Jane and Bob could well pirate it too but friction matters. Lots of folks can figure out how to pirate but fewer of them will actually do it if they have to visit the skeevier corners of the net, risk malware, and feel like a criminal instead of clicking on a different locale on your website and feel like they are cleverly getting a good deal. One weird trick to make a substantial portion of your revenue go away.
I would say that compared to software like Adobe that costs $600 a year or $3000 over a 5 year horizon it's already very inclusive.
How about a non-cynical answer. Software does not have effectively zero marginal cost per copy. It does have zero manufacturing cost per copy, however support is quite an expensive on-going cost. When you have a presence in multiple markets, you need localized support for different languages, and that is even more expensive. When you have different costs in different markets, you encourage users in more expensive markets to try and game the system, to minimize their costs. This sets up a potentially adversarial relationship with your users, and is mostly non-productive.
In the end this is a professional software suite, and running a business has some fixed costs. By comparison, Adobe's suite would cost much more per year.
They must have PPP enabled, so price depends on the country. I see "regular price" as 169.99$, but now on sale 40off for $99. It really is great value for the money. I hope they stay on this path. I don't mind paying for the upgrades every couple of years.
These are pro level apps. Honestly can't think of a single bundle of 3 pro level apps that you can license on Windows, iPad and Mac for anywhere near that price.
I bought all 3 apps at 50% discount earlier this year. I paid 9,900 yen for it. The new universal license cost 15,800 yen. That's 50% price increase for me. I don't need apps for other platforms.
I can afford it, and I will probably buy it. But I can't help but compared to what I paid not even a year ago.
I just bought photo a month ago at $50 and was annoyed at first that suddenly I have to pay more if I want the latest version, but then at $100 and I get a universal license to all three products, I’m still way ahead of having an Adobe subscription.
Open source software like Gimp and Linux are free and can be run on your $50 single board computer instead of paying $500 for a laptop that requires a $139 OS license and a $119 software license for Affinity.
While it's certainly nice that those options exist, they are also entirely unsuitable for any kind of professional work. I assume the target user you're thinking of is looking to do some occasional, light-weight editing. And even this user will be frustrated with the irritating UI and workflow of software like (and in particular) The Gimp.
For me, it's close to unusable — and I am someone whose first computer was a TI44/4A. I'm a die-hard terminal shell user. Even Adobe Illustrator didn't really click for me. The Affinity suite made immediate sense.
That value costs money. A parent poster posited someone for whom ~$100 was a lot of money. You speak of professional work. I don't think the intersection of these two groups exist. Casual users with no money can use krita gimp darktable and be reasonable satisfied. Demanding professionals even in poorer parts of the world can use the wages earned to easily pay $100.
Is $100 for a universal suite license even that much of a price hike? Affinity v1 was $50 a pop with no universal license option - as in, you had to buy each platform's port of the app separately. I happen to have one foot in every tech ecosystem and bought all three apps, so I wound up spending more on Affinity v1 than I will on v2's universal license.
And, of course, it's still hella cheap compared to subscription-licensing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign over the seven years of updates you got on Affinity v1.
I actually bought all of v1 on sale... so three $25 apps for both Mac and Windows. Plus the iPad versions of Photo and Designer. So that puts me at around $170? IDK, I forgot how much the iPad versions of v1 cost.
Yes, and I'm one of them. I'm not moaning at them about the price, but I think it's fair to consider what they are actually saying. They are telling users that v1 is now completely unsupported. That means, if you bought v1 last week, you cannot expect any compatibility support moving forward. The bugs that already exist? Those aren't getting taken care of either. People like to point out that they've owned Affinity products for a long time, and therefore have gotten their value out of them. I've owned all of the Affinity products for quite a while, so I've gotten plenty of value from them. I also have a (quite) expensive Adobe subscription. But at the end of the day, Affinity was marketed as the answer to subscription bloat. They aren't the first company to have to walk that back a bit with major version releases. They should have a deprecation plan in place for gradually winding down v1. Stopping all new features but still releasing compatibility and security fixes is incredibly common in software when major versions change. Instead, their answer is to cease all development an support immediately.
I have developed new muscles with dedication and effort, I had Adobe logo in front of me all the while, I was falling down and crying with pain but one look at Adobe logo would make me get up and get going with newly found vigor - just to kick Adobe's bucket and to embrace loving comfort of Affinity Suite.
Nah.. it was pretty easy to jump. Life is beautiful.
I used Photoshop and Illustrator for years and years (going back to 1990's) and switched to Affinity about 2 years ago. There's a lot of little details that are different--say, when you grab a resize handle, does aspect ratio stay locked or do you have to hold down shift?--but I found that it wasn't tough to retrain. Most things are where you'd expect. It's certainly not like Gimp or Inkscape, where absolutely everything is different and it feels impossible to get anything done.
That's not the context of the GP's statement. They're referring to the Universal License being offered by Serif, which provides you a "buy once use anywhere" on all of their supported platforms, not that they support all platforms.
As a Linux user myself and a former (and upcoming again) studio sysadmin, it's disappointing Serif doesn't offer native Linux support. But let's not twist the discussion here.
All supported platforms, as in you don't have to pay a separate license fee to run it on one of the other platforms they support.
Yeah, I'm not happy having to keep a copy of Windows for graphics software either, but that's a different issue. If you only have Linux or some toaster running NetBSD, then it's pretty simple: don't buy it.
As an infrequent image editor/designer/publisher I'm just casual enough that there is no way to justify an Adobe subscription (even if I'd want to have one).
Affinity occupy a wonderful niche for people like me in that they provide comprehensive, professional, and bullshit-free software options. It's an incredible value for this day and age and I love using their software. I have zero complaints about the company or their products.
Upgrading when they have a release like this is a no-brainer. Even if I don't really need the upgrade I'm eager to support them for doing such a fine job.
I didn't intend to create another opportunity for jpeg-xl partisanship, but well, it happened.
> Yes. One can barely argue AVIF is better than JPEG XL on the Web.
One can very persuasively argue that AVIF is better on the web; for 99,999% cases used in the wild it will be better. Yes, some marginal cases are better handled by another formats, it is nothing unheard of.
> For authoring, JPEG XL win hands down.
For authoring, .psd, .afphoto or whatever is the native format of the used app will be used.
I did too. I had v1 licenses for Photo and Designer on my Windows laptop and on iPad. I've recently switched my daily driver to Mac, and was planning to get Mac licenses for those, but was holding out for a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. This was a no-brainer for me.
(I'm not a professional user of these... but I find them super useful during game jams or while putting together ideas for web things.)
- Designer and Photo keep asking me to download and install a new version manually every time I open it, rather than just taking care of their own updates.
- Pasting if there's no document open doesn't work. You have to do 'new from clipboard'.
> Designer and Photo keep asking me to download and install a new version manually every time I open it, rather than just taking care of their own updates.
It's super annoying to upgrade, too. If they added an auto updater I would instantly buy v2. But right now I don't really see a reason yet.
I had shifted to Affinity photo from Photoshop few years ago. I need to use it once in a while so Affinity photo does the job for me. It has its own quirks but I can live with them. There is still no real alternative for Lightroom unfortunately for bulk RAW photo processing.
Last time I tried to completely switch to Capture One, there were major features missing. I currently use both because there are things that Capture One does a lot better than Lightroom (eg. skin tones, tethered shooting)
The biggest one for me is the fact that you can't manually remove chromatic aberration. If your lens is not in their database with a profile, you can't do it at all. The database is also very small; if you are using anything old or with no electronic, it's likely not gonna be there.
There was talk of them working on a DAM solution a few years ago, sadly this never materialized. I would love to be able to move on from Adobe completely, but I still haven’t find the right replacement for Lightroom..
It was not very clear about the Universal License, but if you purchase it, using your Account you activate also iPad versions for free. So for $99 you get all 3 apps for macOS, Windows and iPad, that is really cool deal!
This works precisely because Adobe's terms are so exortionary that they don't want to risk testing their validity in court by suing you... Well played!
The best thing about Affinity is that Adobe noticed and I've been on "first year only" Creative Cloud promo €30/mo for a couple of years now, all it takes is a mention on chat whenever the promo is about to end.
Spent £116 through the App Store on version 1 of this software not long ago and now I can't upgrade, but instead, have to buy it all again at a "discount". Downloading my versions means looking through the purchase history too.
I suspect this move away from the App Store is probably because the App Store _still_ doesn't have a reasonable way to do upgrade pricing. Affinity v3 (whenever that comes out) would be able to offer specific upgrade pricing because they've left the App Store.
Similar situation(bought Designer V1 about a year ago, directly from them) but I'm not angry. It makes complete sense from their perspective and makes sense for me too.
I completely agree that continued work needs to be payed and I don't expect to buy a software once and receive updates for it forever. If I was using it in a professional capacity all the time, I would have preferred a cheaper monthly subscription but because I'm using it mostly now and then, pay for the V1 and use it forever and pay again if I would like the newer version works very well for me.
Hmm, I bought it about…a couple weeks ago? And they sent me an email with two discount codes: a free copy of Affinity Photo 2, and a heavy discount on the all-apps-all-platforms license.
Depending on what "not long ago" means, that's pretty unfortunate timing. You should reach out to them. They've been pushing updates and features for V1 for a long time and have an established track record for being a company that isn't nickel-and-diming people. The line does have to be drawn somewhere though. Long term users have known this was coming, but I can see how the short/mid term user might feel pinched.
Is anyone using Affinity for cartography? I’m currently using ArcGIS —> Illustrator workflow but am curious if a QGIS —> Affinity workflow is feasible.
So, I've been using Illustrator for years with an OSM -> Illustrator workflow where I start with OSM XML, feed it to osm2ai.pl, and then wholly style it by hand. It's... fine... but Illustrator's cost is getting to me.
I gave QGIS -> Affinity a cursory look the other day and had no problem taking my results from an Overpass query and exporting it from QGIS as SVG and bringing it into Affinity. So, that gave me a ton of hope.
The opening of Illustrator files in Affinity Designer kinda sucks (my dashed paths for trails come in as tons of different objects, like it's actually only bringing in the PDF preview) but if I start anew on some of the maps I think it'll be fine.
I just bought the 2.0 package mentioned here and the next map I do I'll be doing in Affinity Designer to see how it goes. Fingers crossed!
A while back I thought about making my maps in QGIS, but found the stuff for styling the map just... lacking. It was a LOT easier to do what I wanted in Illustrator. But there was still the problem of getting the bare vectors into there for styling.
Holy grail for me would be some sort of OSM -> Affinity where I can define groups based on OSM tags.
Has anyone switched to Affinity Designer from Illustrator for vector work (logos, svg, icons, etc) and liked it? I've been avoiding paying for Illustrator given the extreme monthly cost for my use-case, but found Inkspace and other alternatives pretty lacking. I pay for Photoshop since I'm so comfortable with it, but can't justify the extra $$$ to add Illustrator given I'd use it a handful of times a month max.
> Has anyone switched to Affinity Designer from Illustrator for vector work (logos, svg, icons, etc) and liked it?
I found v1 frustrating. They’ve been touting their “precision” from the get go, but in my experience it was anything but precise. And I mean going into the transform panel, inserting exact values by hand, and then the software moves it 0.1 points to the right.
Making separate shapes then connecting them was also a fool’s errand. When it works at all, it often leaves two connected points in the same location, as opposed to merging them. Even if you insert their locations manually and exactly. I’ve wasted many many hours due to their imprecision.
With all that out of the way, I’m trialing v2 and am cautiously optimistic. I haven’t been able to trigger any of the bugs so far. Doesn’t mean they’re not there, but maybe they’re fixed.
Wondering if they’ve added WEBP export (I don’t see it in the release notes).
I’ve been prodding Affinity on their forums with a feature request over the past few years, but other forum-dwellers get weirdly hostile over it… like, yeah, I wish JPEG-2000 had made it too, but it didn’t, and WEBP is here today and it works, should our graphics apps not live in the present?
A single licence for all apps on all platforms at a reasonable price? Sweet.
Previously I’ve only been using Affinity on Mac. Now I’ll be able to see how it performs on Windows as well.
I wonder though if they fixed the crop tool. The rectangle wouldn’t stay within photo borders, i.e. any “constrain proportion” setting would be useless, and trying to align the crop with one of the borders was very mundane, pushing me to do all my cropping in ACDSee.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadEdit: Got it, have to download it from the purchase history (which was 2014), not the offical now-gone link.
Neither way seems ideal though. I've seen some devs create a bundle as a way to do upgrade prices, but that's not perfect either.
I have to admit that even with some experience, Affinity doesn't get close to Photoshop in terms of shortcuts and ease of use ("getting in the flow").
Sometimes I even resort to using photopea web, rather than open affinity.
That said, I really appreciate their pricing model and hope they stick to their guns.
Figma + Procreate replaced Photoshop for me for design/game dev workflows, but I'm still missing the right tools for Photography and image processing.
The OSS LR replacements feel too clunky, CaptureOne is fantastic but a bit pricey. I'll have to bite the bullet eventually and choose between convenience and cost.
Two questions:
1. Is Affinity desktop better than its iPad version?
2. What's your use case for Affinity as a replacement of PS?
THERE IS NO ESCAPE.
Edit: I just remembered I'm a cheap bastard and I'm not paying for Figma yet. yay?
Once I've found out what the difference between Affinity versions 1 and 2 is, I might yet buy 2 anyway, just to support Serif some more, because I'm frankly fed up of Adobe's practice of unhinged monolithic greed.
They're not even complicated requests; stuff like non-printing layers and the ability to resize the selection marquee. I mean... WTF?
It should list every Photoshop function, and how to accomplish the same thing on Affinity.
After 20 years of using Photoshop, I'm forever searching the web for equivalent workflows in Affinity. Sometimes it's just the name or icon of a tool is different. Sometimes it's been completely re-thought. And sometimes, a feature is just missing.
Honestly, this is something that Affinity should publish, itself, to encourage people to switch.
A combination of these usually gets the job done.
Adobe products are boycotted in my work setup. I'm voting with my wallet!
The underlying features are there, but the lack of “flow” is the main source of frustration. A lot of common or frequent actions require needless extra steps, or simple actions require convoluted workarounds.
They would benefit from starting an in-house creative studio, to get constant feedback from professionals using it for daily production. That or just start copying Adobe workflows verbatim, these are already solved problems.
Good product and good business model.
(Please let it not happen!)
https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/
For people making their living with graphical work (designers, photographers, etc.) Adobe is probably still the way to go (even if just to keep using the muscle memory). However for the many people who only need something like Photoshop or InDesign a couple of times a year, Affinity is just great.
I tried to buy a certain type of simple app a couple of weeks ago, and while there were dozens of options available, not one didn't Hoover up everything it could about me.
Really? You need to know my name, location, and track me across apps for a card game? No sale.
Edit: Purchased. Thanks, Affinity. Go stick your head in a pig, Adobe.
Generally speaking, 'App Privacy' cards are lies. Apple does not check them, you need to do it yourself. Here is the Privacy Policy: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/privacy/
In the EULA (quoted from Affinity Photo 2 for MacOS), you further agree to, among other terms:
> *Consent to Use of Data* > > a. 16. You agree that Serif and its affiliates may use any information you give to use as part of product support and other services provided to you, if any, related to Serif Software solely to improve products or to provide customised services or technologies to you and will not disclose this information in a form that personally identifies you.
On one side you've got people complaining about these anti-consumer software subscriptions from the likes of adobe. Then on the other side you've got people like yourself that are for some reason complaining that there's still a company offering fantastic software on par with Illustrator for a fantastic perpetual price.
Affinity Designer is £35 right now. That's insane.
The mind boggles.
These are not selfie correction software.
So if you could practically limit your market at a specified price in such a way that that offer doesn't spread to other markets, then every copy you sell in such places is still beneficial to you.
There are less cynical answers to the question, but you asked cynically.
Next how do you keep Jane in Seattle and Bob in Houston from buying the poor market version? You can't really restrict it by language or locale people use all sorts of languages/settings in different parts of the world. Desktop computers don't have location and people could trivially block the app from having access to location AND network data. You don't want your offline software failing for lack of phoning home.
An argument could be made that Jane and Bob could well pirate it too but friction matters. Lots of folks can figure out how to pirate but fewer of them will actually do it if they have to visit the skeevier corners of the net, risk malware, and feel like a criminal instead of clicking on a different locale on your website and feel like they are cleverly getting a good deal. One weird trick to make a substantial portion of your revenue go away.
I would say that compared to software like Adobe that costs $600 a year or $3000 over a 5 year horizon it's already very inclusive.
In the end this is a professional software suite, and running a business has some fixed costs. By comparison, Adobe's suite would cost much more per year.
I get that people can’t because they have to earn a living, but so do software developers.
I can afford it, and I will probably buy it. But I can't help but compared to what I paid not even a year ago.
For me, it's close to unusable — and I am someone whose first computer was a TI44/4A. I'm a die-hard terminal shell user. Even Adobe Illustrator didn't really click for me. The Affinity suite made immediate sense.
There's value in usability.
That value costs money. A parent poster posited someone for whom ~$100 was a lot of money. You speak of professional work. I don't think the intersection of these two groups exist. Casual users with no money can use krita gimp darktable and be reasonable satisfied. Demanding professionals even in poorer parts of the world can use the wages earned to easily pay $100.
And, of course, it's still hella cheap compared to subscription-licensing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign over the seven years of updates you got on Affinity v1.
You just reminded me of it.
Nah.. it was pretty easy to jump. Life is beautiful.
As a Linux user myself and a former (and upcoming again) studio sysadmin, it's disappointing Serif doesn't offer native Linux support. But let's not twist the discussion here.
Yeah, I'm not happy having to keep a copy of Windows for graphics software either, but that's a different issue. If you only have Linux or some toaster running NetBSD, then it's pretty simple: don't buy it.
As an infrequent image editor/designer/publisher I'm just casual enough that there is no way to justify an Adobe subscription (even if I'd want to have one).
Affinity occupy a wonderful niche for people like me in that they provide comprehensive, professional, and bullshit-free software options. It's an incredible value for this day and age and I love using their software. I have zero complaints about the company or their products.
Upgrading when they have a release like this is a no-brainer. Even if I don't really need the upgrade I'm eager to support them for doing such a fine job.
Google / Chromium developers, please take note!
That said, unfortunately AVIF is not a substitute for JPEG XL...
1. AVIF has an order of magnitude slower saving / encoding speed vs JPEG XL.
2. AVIF in "lossless" mode tends to be bigger than PNG- and it isn't truly lossless, just best effort (based on the AV1 video format).
3. JPEG XL supports orders of magnitude higher resolution, bit depth, and is an actual replacement for lossless PNG.
For authoring, JPEG XL win hands down.
> Yes. One can barely argue AVIF is better than JPEG XL on the Web.
One can very persuasively argue that AVIF is better on the web; for 99,999% cases used in the wild it will be better. Yes, some marginal cases are better handled by another formats, it is nothing unheard of.
> For authoring, JPEG XL win hands down.
For authoring, .psd, .afphoto or whatever is the native format of the used app will be used.
Hopefully the performance in isometric grid mode is better in v2. My only issue with v1.
(I'm not a professional user of these... but I find them super useful during game jams or while putting together ideas for web things.)
- Designer and Photo keep asking me to download and install a new version manually every time I open it, rather than just taking care of their own updates.
- Pasting if there's no document open doesn't work. You have to do 'new from clipboard'.
It's super annoying to upgrade, too. If they added an auto updater I would instantly buy v2. But right now I don't really see a reason yet.
The biggest one for me is the fact that you can't manually remove chromatic aberration. If your lens is not in their database with a profile, you can't do it at all. The database is also very small; if you are using anything old or with no electronic, it's likely not gonna be there.
1. change your payment method to PayPal
2. cancel your payments in PayPal
3. add Adobe to your spam/archive filter
[^1] The "pay monthly" (small print: annual) subscription we all love and cherish
https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/15903262690314649...
Not happy with that - would advise against it.
Edit to add link from another comment: https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/15903262690314649...
Serif actually said that this is specifically what happened
I completely agree that continued work needs to be payed and I don't expect to buy a software once and receive updates for it forever. If I was using it in a professional capacity all the time, I would have preferred a cheaper monthly subscription but because I'm using it mostly now and then, pay for the V1 and use it forever and pay again if I would like the newer version works very well for me.
I gave QGIS -> Affinity a cursory look the other day and had no problem taking my results from an Overpass query and exporting it from QGIS as SVG and bringing it into Affinity. So, that gave me a ton of hope.
The opening of Illustrator files in Affinity Designer kinda sucks (my dashed paths for trails come in as tons of different objects, like it's actually only bringing in the PDF preview) but if I start anew on some of the maps I think it'll be fine.
I just bought the 2.0 package mentioned here and the next map I do I'll be doing in Affinity Designer to see how it goes. Fingers crossed!
I'm starting a new project this week and will test out the QGIS -> Affinity workflow and write up any findings.
A while back I thought about making my maps in QGIS, but found the stuff for styling the map just... lacking. It was a LOT easier to do what I wanted in Illustrator. But there was still the problem of getting the bare vectors into there for styling.
Holy grail for me would be some sort of OSM -> Affinity where I can define groups based on OSM tags.
I found v1 frustrating. They’ve been touting their “precision” from the get go, but in my experience it was anything but precise. And I mean going into the transform panel, inserting exact values by hand, and then the software moves it 0.1 points to the right.
Making separate shapes then connecting them was also a fool’s errand. When it works at all, it often leaves two connected points in the same location, as opposed to merging them. Even if you insert their locations manually and exactly. I’ve wasted many many hours due to their imprecision.
With all that out of the way, I’m trialing v2 and am cautiously optimistic. I haven’t been able to trigger any of the bugs so far. Doesn’t mean they’re not there, but maybe they’re fixed.
I’ve been prodding Affinity on their forums with a feature request over the past few years, but other forum-dwellers get weirdly hostile over it… like, yeah, I wish JPEG-2000 had made it too, but it didn’t, and WEBP is here today and it works, should our graphics apps not live in the present?
Previously I’ve only been using Affinity on Mac. Now I’ll be able to see how it performs on Windows as well.
I wonder though if they fixed the crop tool. The rectangle wouldn’t stay within photo borders, i.e. any “constrain proportion” setting would be useless, and trying to align the crop with one of the borders was very mundane, pushing me to do all my cropping in ACDSee.