for people who only need affinity's feature set, it's perfect alternative. but it isn't putting a dent into adobe's revenue.
i'm not sure why you care to continue to slam adobe. if affinity's products and sales model suit you, why care what adobe does?
Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft.
I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription.
Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.
> but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists.
Even experienced ones! Affinity Designer et al. are fantastic! The workbooks they publish (advanced user guides) free video tutorials are great as well. And they have a much nicer community than Adobe -- much more clueful and helpful.
In no way should my comment (that Adobe is better) be taken as even a hint of negativity towards Affinity.
They fill different needs, or should I say, a different spectrum of needs.
My main complaint is all the people griping about Adobe's subscription model. Who cares??? If Affinity is so good, use that instead! If you find you need the much richer feature set of Illustrator, guess what -- pony up. I personally wish that Affinity would either charge more or move to subscription. $50/yr really? I would love to pay $50/yr to see the most infuriatingly simple yet absent features get implemented. Especially now since I've been forced to Catalina and can no longer use my CS6 products. But that's not where we are, and doesn't give me grounds to complain that a product I want is expensive.
> Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption
and self-driving cars are right around the corner ...
I don't even use the Affinity software, but I've bought them, purely because I want Adobe to have competition.
from a software standpoint, I could probably get away with Illy CS2 - the 'features' added since then have been .. mostly irrelevant. But if I don't have a subscription, I can't open client files.
- ed: numerous typos
But it’s such a product of a bureaucracy, built by people who never use it, and who awkwardly interface with the people who do.
Oh crikey - I forgot about the workarounds to achieve transparent gradients back in the old days! And we not that long ago got the ability to [finally] open PDFs with more than one page, which is - well, the fact that it didn't happen a decade or more ago - telling.
It’s currently half off, so you can grab it for 25!
Clip Studio's a special case. For certain uses, such as cartooning/comicing, it is WAY better than anything Photoshop can offer. I've got that as well and look forward to digging into it further, but even with extremely basic familiarity the tools for building panels/folders and speech bubbles in Clip Studio (or pretty much anything for a cartoonist/manga artist, especially if you're targeting black and white printed output) are so far beyond Adobe stuff it's quite silly.
I daresay there are parallels for UI people with Figma/Sketch or what have you. I can speak to the Clip Studio situation (and I'm also happy with Affinity Photo for what it specializes in).
That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp.
Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software.
If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
They aren't. Just look in this thread for many many examples. One thing I didn't see mentioned was scripts.
If they were, Adobe would be scrambling.
There isn't this grey line where one tool can do the same things but in some different way. There is a sharp line where the cheap tool can't do it at all. You're comparing excel to google sheets.
UX enrages aside, the only thing not to like about illustrator is the cost. I also hate that you can't get a nice car for under $50k. That doesn't make the $50k and up cars an object of hate.
Then I learned Blender and nothing comes close for speed and efficiency, except maybe Vim.