Many times, I've wished that Photoshop would have nodes instead of layers, as it would make some things much simpler. Or that Illustrator and Photoshop would be combined into a single app.
I'm really impressed. Node-based compositing is not a feature that Adobe can easily add to Photoshop, as that would change the core workflow.
This is why I have been using Affinity. Very well done integration of vector and image capabilities. However, their development has slowed significantly in recent years despite having a great product.
I hope that Graphite can be something new and become the blender of 2D image editing. There is nothing really out there right now that has the professional features of paid applications.
Did they comment on why this happened?
They are now working on the most important feature in my opinion for the life of Affinity products. They are finally adding built in scripting support that will also enable development of 3rd part extensions. Hopefully this will bring new life and excitement to Affinity.
The premise sounded nice when I first started using them but I cannot in good conscience recommend either of them to anyone at this point.
However, as I started using it more professionally a few years ago, there are some real problems with long standing bugs in some areas.
My biggest complain at the moment is Art Boards. I use them for almost all my work. Allows me to work much faster when working on a suite of related projects.
However, they are the most broken of all features. Probably half of all the Affinity photo live effects are broken in art boards. Also, not sure which is worse, Affinity or the users. I've opened so many bugs on art boards, to have users push back and say it is not a bug and then Affinity ignores it. They say it is not a bug because most don't use art boards as they never grasp the use case.
This has come up repeatedly in the forums as new users discover it. And yep, the apologists cried and thrashed, issuing one ridiculous excuse after another. Even someone from Affinity.
I wish someone there would teach me about layer blending. I still don’t get it after building high-end compositing software for film.
Just curious, do you have a reference?
I've complained on the forums for years about the bugs and Affinity never responds. As I've been using it for years, I figured out how to work around many bugs, but it is a field of landmines for sure.
It is indeed disappointing as it offers the best workflow for the kind of work I do.
Plus if you've ever interacted on their forums their mods are really pushy and dismissive.
Yes I agree. I argued with them at length about having a real process for handling bugs that is transparent. They have no method of evaluating the need or priority of anything as they rely only on their forum.
Basically somewhat the gist is that some time ago Affinity decided due to a lot of negative complaints they simply will be less transparent about everything so that nobody could complain. The result of course was obvious, all complaints became about the lack of transparency. Which also resulted in many content creators dropping Affinity because they felt the product didn't have a future as no more communication from the company. So there went their free advertising as well. Terrible management decisions for sure.
I remember being excited that Photoshop was going to start to work more like fireworks when they bought it. What a naive dummy I was.
Graphite looks like it could become the jack-of-all-trades app, since its foundation looks very flexible (i.e. the node graph). But, it is in its early development phase and adding necessary features is going to take many years.