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I have been moving to the Affinity Suite and never have I missed anything from Adobe. I love to work in it and I don’t have to pay per month.

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I've attempted this transition a few times, and keep failing. It's not so much that the apps are inferior than that my habits with Adobe are so ingrained. It's very hard to force myself to keep using Affinity long enough to get used to it, when I have the corresponding Adobe app right there and I know I can get my task done in a fraction of the time. Logically I know that this is short-term thinking, and the investment in switching would be worth it. But in the moment when I need to get something done, it's tough.

You probably fall in the advanced or expert category, and what I did is simply do a few key elements from things I was able to do easily in PS and practice it in Affinity (for instance certain layer actions or layouts)

A few months in Affinity and you already are saving money, if that’s important to you.

I'm in your camp, but still have paid-for copies of the Affinity Suite because despite once been a total PS and AI - and by extension Adobe itself - fanboy and having used them since the mid-nineties, I now absolutely loathe Adobe and its subscription model.

Unfortunately for me, Illustrator (which along with Firefox is the software open all day long, every day) is too muscle-memoried. I've had it set up to my perfection for a decade or more, and it feels like it'd take about the same again to veer the fuckwit supertanker that is my brain towards Affinityland.

That's odd. I've found the keyboard shortcuts and tools to be similar enough (v and a being the most used) and annoying UX things, like every nudge of the cursor keys adds an undo step, have been done properly instead.

I am in your camp, too. My muscle-memory investment in the Adobe product line, especially Photoshop, Illustrator and After-Effects, is approaching 30 years old — more than half my life — and that really locks me in for professional, get-it-done-now, reasons.

How does Affinity Photo compare to LightRoom? I've tried everything from Luminar, to CaptureOne and nothing really works quite as well as LightRoom for various reasons.

I love all the Affinity products so far but the RAW part of Affinity Photo is where the suite falls a bit short in my opinion.

Things I miss most when compared to Lightroom are:

- the ability to quickly create circular and gradient masks and apply a set of setting to them

- Edits are not saved into a .xmp file like Lightroom does. Once you developed your image and closed the Raw editor, there is no way to apply the exact same settings again if you want to tweak something later.

I think a Lightroom competitor was on their list (but for a while now, hope it arrives soon!)

Apple used to have Aperture, and until they stopped development, it was miles beyond LR for the core "RAW library" workflow. I hate that Apple killed it.

It has a special workspace for editing RAW and can do most things Lightroom does. However it isn’t a streamlined experience, so I usually use one program to star and sort in directories and Photo to do the final edits. Darktable is what I use for sorting.

I don’t think there is a competitor that matches both editing and DAM capabilities of LR.

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