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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

Adobe is not just Photoshop and Illustrator; Affinity is still subpar, and Adobe products are moving fast ahead.

Photoshop and Illustrator are surely a vast majority of Adobe product usage. What would be #3? Premiere? Lightroom?

Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1

Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.

Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.

I think they are serious competitor and probably that's why they were able to have payday and sell the product.

Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.

Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have complaints for Adobe products too, but usually missing features aren’t one of them. (Except if your product is named Captivate or was recently changed from a legacy app to a modern Electron app (or something), then I have a lot of missing features to suggest.)

Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.

Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.

I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)

Are you sure this is not just learning inertia? Because frames in Affinity work more like css object-fit and are "live". In Indesign you have to "recalculate" fit/fill every time with action. I would argue if you didn't know Indesign way the Affinity way is superior.

Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.

Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.

I think Davinci is great. What are you missing?

FCP X’s simple timeline which chains clips together making edits easy, though some would call this an anti-feature.

After Effects simplicity compared to the hellscape that can be node-based VG work. I mean, the programmer in me loves nodes, I even used MaxMSP frequently… and Origami. But the simplicity of After Effects is really nice and it has like every plugin in existence.

Don’t get me wrong, I use DaVinci with the quick editor and have considered buying other gear to make it work better, but… it’s really kinda a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-color-grading app. There’s a lot still to wish for.

Resolve is so much better than Premiere. Resolve doesn’t crash half the time

Good point. And I should clarify, I’m not a filmmaker and mostly edit screen recordings and home movies. For that, I find that Resolve and Final Cut Pro work equally well and equally poorly. There’s a lot of room in video editing for further innovation, particularly if A.I. or automation can help simplify repetitive tasks. Premiere isn’t the best example of Adobe’s video tools - that title probably belongs to After Effects, an app inexplicably unique in its ease of editing and producing motion video graphics. No need to deal with translating your ideas into Nodes to get it working in Resolve. No need to try to fit within the limitations of titles and effects in FCP, etc. After Effects is Premiere’s killer app.

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