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Comment by rpastuszak | Hacker News Reader

I don't care much about the Adobe bullshit any more, but after having used Photoshop for almost 20 years, I switched to Affinity last year and I cannot recommend it enough!

I use Procreate, Affinity and Figma and all of these tools are cheaper, easier to use, and still support my (often more advanced) use-cases.

Same with Lightroom vs. Capture One.

PS. If you fell for the same "annual but paid monthly subscription" scam with an early cancellation fee, try changing your payment method to PayPal, and then use it to block the payments.

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I don't care much about the Adobe bullshit any more, but after having used Photoshop for almost 20 years, I switched to Affinity last year and I cannot recommend it enough!

Coincidentally, I just finished a session with Affinity Photo 2 before reading your comment.

I, too, recommend Affinity Photo as a Photoshop replacement for many people. It's probably good enough for 80% of people out there.

I switched to Affinity because I don't do subscription software. But I'm still up to speed with Photoshop because I have to use it at work.

Photoshop is still better than Affinity in a lot of ways, and for all the confusion in its interface, it's still more polished than Affinity.

One of my biggest problems with Affinity Photo is that it can't save files in the background, which wastes a lot of time when you're working with multiple large images.

Worse, though, is that Affinity Photo is just buggy. Affinity Photo 2 is better, but many bugs persist. Things like images loading, but simply not rendering on screen. Or selecting a tool, but the tool has no effect, and you have to quit the program and restart for it to work again.

Unfortunately, Affinity's official forum is not what it should be. I'll be polite and call responses from official Affinity people "brusque." Also, be very gentle in your criticism and reporting of bugs, because they're quick to delete even minor complaints. More than once I've been following a discussion where someone is having the same problem as I am, and I get an e-mail notification containing another person's response. By the time I get to the actual forum, it's all been deleted by the admins. Not a good look.

Affinity’s forum community is truly bizarre. I posted a feature request for WebP support some years back; for a couple years later, people would regularly reply to chime in that I was an idiot for thinking I needed it.

(It’s now available in v2)

Don't pay attention to overexcited forum trolls - they are literally everywhere, however it is rare for them to have any actual wisdom or even the basic sense of reality.

All Affinity software (AFAIK) these days makes extensive use of 3D graphics hardware. The problems you're experiencing may be due to insufficient systems memory, or perhaps insufficient video memory. The reason I'm suggesting this is because I have a very old Intel CPU in my system (6-core) 5820K and I'm pretty sure some of the CPU pins are bent because I only see 50-75% of the physical memory that's actually inside the system--and even with that, I never experience any of the problems you described. FWIW, I also upgraded my graphics card to an RTX 3090 with 24Gb of VRAM, when they were clearing out their inventories to make room for the 40x0 series at the end of last year--and I did it predominantly because the GTX 980ti I had been using until then "only" came with 6Gb of VRAM, which was reduced to less than 5Gb by Windows' window manager and was responsible for frequent hiccups and crashes involving 3D software.

> Photoshop is still better than Affinity in a lot of ways, and for all the confusion in its interface, it's still more polished than Affinity.

I'd say it's much more similar to the pre- or early Creative Suite (not Creative Cloud) versions. (I'm using AP2)

Well, Figma is now part of Adobe, I recommend Penpot as an open source alternative, although it's not as good as Figma yet.

It's still under antitrust investigation iirc.

Affinity is amazing. It's like the old Photoshop you remember, before it became totally over-bloated.

TBH, Affinity is slowly adapting Adobe's practices. They have released second generation of every their app and these apps don't have any significant changes. They just wanted to get some money from their users second time.

Affinity was accepting and incorporating so much feedback from users like myself after releasing version 1 of their software suite--which were subsequently added to incremental versions that were free of charge, up to v1.8X IIRC--that I for one was amazed they were actually still able to make a living at all--the software was (is) too high quality to be selling permanent licenses for such a low price. It's also worth mentioning that at least during the first iteration of their range of products, they frequently had substantial sales that allowed you to buy all their software for what seemed like a pittance.

Still, v2 is an improvement. While I cannot pinpoint the exact improvements (there are quite a few of them), my sessions with Affinity v2 are more productive than they used to be with v1. I do not complain on v1, I was quite happy with it, but I am even happier with v2.

One aspect gives a red flag though: they implemented internet activation in v2 as opposed to a prior simple licensing model based on license keys. So maybe one day they will start to force "cloud" junk upon the throats of their customers, and at that point I will probably just leave.

This is very helpful. I haven't heard of Affinity before but I am really excited to try it, especially given the one-time cost model. Seems like Affinity + Capture One could be a great non-subscription pairing for photo work.

Any thoughts on Affinity vs. Pixelmator Pro? I got a Pixelmator license maybe 8 years ago and this is the first I've heard of Affinity.

Not OP, but my opinion:

Affinity Designer is a very good vector editing app. Switched to it from Inkscape due to performance and UI issues. To me, it's more convenient to use than vector things in Pixelmator Pro.

For photo editing, I don't like Affinity Photo. It seems powerful, but too much for me to learn, so I use Pixelmator Pro for simple photo editing (although I can never remember where the tool I need is). Maybe it's better for pros, though.

For quick pixel editing/cropping I use Acorn — it's fast and the UI is not overloaded.

+1 for Acorn, my image editing need are pretty light and Acorn does everything I need.

Affinity is closer to a Photoshop clone.

I've been using Pixelmator Pro a little recently, and I turn to it now for its AI features. Cutting a subject out of its background? It makes the "Magnetic lasso" feel like MS Paintbrush. I had to design a heavily 'shopped Christmas card recently, and those features cut down my work by a lot.

I own both Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro. I find the UI using Pixelmator to be more user friendly. This could be because I come from many years of using Photoshop and I found the way Affinity deals with layers and effects to be counterintuitive to me.

That being said, both products are solid and likely a matter of personal preference or specific feature needs.

Both are great. I prefer Pixelmator's polished macOS UX, but Affinity is more feature complete.

-- hobbyist experience

Caputre One is even worse in term of price and updates.

Agreed! Have been a happy Affinity user since 2016.

At least on iPad, capture one is far behind.

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