Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
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Is Photoshop better than Photo? Yes, but not by much.
Is Illustrator better than Design? Yes, but not by much.
Is there an annoying learning curve? Yes, but not by much.
I've put the investment into becoming proficient in Affinity and there's no looking back for me. Adobe's pricing, feature roadmap, and general performance are not even close to being worth 10x the price. If Adobe's suite was 2x, I probably wouldn't have switched, but at this point they're just squeezing small creators like myself.
And tbh now that I'm proficient with the Affinity UX, I doubt I'd switch back. It's really good!
And in some ways, Affinity's tools can even be superior (performance, ui smoothness, and even how vector art works). If you're living with a pirated version of CS5 or 6, it's worth coming in from the cold and trying Affinity.
Adobe’s customer support is also extremely poor. They ask you for detailed OS info when not only does Creative Cloud scrape that but so does their ad network.
Everyone keeps repeating this meme every 2 months or so on HN and I have to keep coming back to point out that Affinity's lack of support for Photoshop's generated XMP sidecar files is on its own a dealbreaker for photographers that have those files.
(Then as soon as I say this everyone here jumps to Affinity's defense. I'm not trying to attack Affinity or something. I'm just pointing out the reality users face is very different from the meme that goes around on HN. Defending Affinity all day long won't solve the problems users face.)
Note: Even if Photoshop/Lightroom did embed these in the RAW files, the problem of actually loading the embedded information would still be there for Affinity. So the point here isn't the file separation; the point is Affinity doesn't understand the postprocessing Photoshop has already done on the photo.
The feature has been requested a lot; see for example https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/113871-use... and https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/45772-can-...
You're very confused, catalog vs. XMP (or classic vs. modern) is entirely irrelevant. Heck, the catalog is objectively worse. You're switching software and want to still be able to use the post-processing you've applied to your photos. Which Affinity can't do. It's irrelevant where or how that information was stored.
Seriously? You don't feel it's ridiculous to say this when just above I posted links to people begging for this feature on the forums since at least 2017?
> You can hate on one application or another
I'm not hating on it - if I hated Affinity I wouldn't even be wasting my time to point it out. I love Affinity and want it to succeed, hence all this.
First, thanks for acknowledging that it's not "just me". That kind of nonsensical hyperbole doesn't help the discussion.
Second: You have no idea if it's a minority of the market that actually wants this. The majority of users obviously use Adobe, that should tell you more than how many people are voicing their opinions in a forum. Not every user goes out of their way to re-request a feature that's already been requested years ago.
> doesn't mean it's a deal-breaker for other users.
Nobody said it's a deal breaker for "other users".
> Clearly the company behind the product agrees, otherwise they would've implemented it.
Because there's no other possible reason we could fathom as to why they wouldn't have implemented this already, right?
Again: nobody said it was "universal", but again: it's not about me, either. It's ridiculous that you're still insisting it's just me when you literally see other people complaining about it. You clearly aren't interested in having a reasonable conversation so there's no point in continuing to engage.
It is also possible to stack and combine masks, an idea which is pure science fiction for a PS user. color selection masks can also update if the colors of the rgb component is changed.
HIGHLY recommend giving Affinity a shot, I've edited thousands of images with Photo and I can't imagine using anything else now.
Unluckily, Affinity Designer still has no tool for tracing images (a functionality that would be really helpful for the tasks that I use Affinity Designer for). :-(
UPDATE: Also halftone effects for fillings require quite some hacks in Affinity Designer.
Hige part of Adobe dominance (with pros especially) is the inertia to switch because of the workflows baked into muscle memory. Often the wierd quirks and inconsistencies became the standard. And adobe has many because all three softwares were developed by different companies.
At the time there was no Linux support which made me sad. I have no idea if that has changed.
I know the win version now works pretty well on linux with wine. But the process to set this up is not yet automated (like 20min) and is being worked on. So i was too lazy to properly try it.
Where did you get the information about it being worked on?
$100 or so for the full suite. Great for the few times a year you need to use a tool. Even though I'm more on the tech side, I spent enough time in photoshop/etc around web development at one point that it's handy to have.
This would cost more in a month or two on a subscription.
I don't anticipate the current version licensing being revoked.
Future versions might add a subscription, but my feeling is if the TAM for them is all of Adobe's subscription clients, there's probably a lot more customers they can absorb.
Looking at Adobe multiple versions have phased out online activation support over the years, with a not uncommon complaint being trouble installing and using purchases subsequently. As with anything tied to server checks one has to trust it will either continue working or workarounds be provided.
IIRC Clip Studio Paint switched their activation method in the last few years as well.
Nothing that is happening changes that contract. If they go against their perpetual license promise, your existing one will still be valid "perpetually."
That's the whole trade: monthly or annual subscriptions give you the flexibility to react to changes to the product. One time payments don't get changes so no need to react.
Saying that designers could have just continued using Photoshop CS on a 2006 MacBook doesn't reflect the reality of hardware updates and the changes in the industry-wide design trends.
The cost of not just learning but becoming a professional user of a specific set of tools is very high. Then later as time goes by being forced to either abandon these tools or to accept a different pricing model is - to many people - unfair and unethical.
Or perhaps you are describing something else I am unfamiliar with the terminology.
I've been going back to several tutorials on youtube for doing things affinity - as it seems to have the capabilities I am used to with the old photoimpact, it's just finding where / how is not the same.
IMHO, as someone who professionally uses the Adobe products and has licenses to all the Affinity suite, none of the apps compare favorably to the Adobe equivalents other than price and a superior iPad version.
They’re all great apps though but they definitely exist in the tier below adobe’s offerings. Which may be fine for most folks but hasn’t been for me, because I literally cannot complete projects in them and I certainly have tried.
Affinity Designer lacks many utilities from illustrator like advanced gradient handling, perspective alignment and repetition automation. Inkscape isn’t that far off from Designer imho.
Affinity Photo is fine as a photo editing tool but it falls apart for more advanced edits where you need to use brushes and advanced masking tools. Again, perspective tools and more granular referencing tools are just missing or broken. It is a significant step up from Gimp though but I would personally push people to Krita instead.
Affinity Publisher is the weakest of the trio. But then again, so is InDesign. These two aren’t too far off but InDesign has better tools around multi page layout and quickly updating templates references. I don’t know of a good OSS equivalent.
Again, I think these tools are great for people who value the price over the feature set. Most people don’t need more than they offer. But if you’re a professional, the Adobe products are yet unmatched.
I want to switch but the total lack of any automated export functionality is a complete deal-breaker. That's like 15 minutes of work per piece foisted back onto me, and like, I just cannot fathom a reason to even have the Layer States feature if you aren't going to use it for this.
But in the amount of time I've now wasted trying to do the thing, I just paid for my Adobe license for the month for the relevant app.
It's a little janky but got the job done.
Keep an eye out for Wild Bastards on Steam. Every frame of the character animation was run through Krita.
Adobe Publisher is close though and in many important ways its way better than Indesign (speed, stability, editing of photos/vectors directly inside publisher) but it lacks one main feature and thats scripts api/third party plugins. Until they release that then professional shops simply cant switch because of automation and super specific workflows they need.
Personally though, InDesign is (to me) simultaneously both the strongest product in its category, but also the weakest in terms of feature/development compared to the other headlining Adobe product.
Whats worst is that each version makes it more unstable and crashes with indesign can be costly. I know several design studios that keep old macs to do work in CS6 because of that.
At the same time its more often than not their fault. 80% dont need scripting or advanced indesign features but they are lazy/old to learn anything new. Unfortunately this will drag Indesign probably forever since you need to collaborate.
I'm surprised there aren't at least a handful of adobe competitors that carved a niche and are significantly popular because they made some key workflows faster, more intuitive, or more powerful.
Maybe this difference is because of ubiquitous plugin formats like VST that translate across different DAWs?
1. It's significantly more standardized and straightforward for data interpretation. MIDI is standard (and OSC sort of fizzled), and audio clips (wav, aiff, whatever) are also very standard. You don't have the issues of color science, and you have a much smaller range of transformations that can be done to an audio clip.
2. A lot of infrastructure is standardized. From hardware interaction, to key mapping, but also things like plugins (Audio Units, VSTs, RTAS/AAX). It's so much simpler to go between apps.
3. A lot of audio workflows are treated as procedural and non-destructive.
Compare this to images:
1. Color science is horrific. Even Adobe often get it wrong (Krita was actually the best for a long time). D
2. Plugins are very application specific. So biggest marketshare often wins.
3. The range of transformations people want to do is massive. Each of them need very bespoke workflows, and due to the lack of standardized plugins, they're rarely shared.
4. A lot of image workflows are destructive by nature. A lot of image plugins as well are destructive.
5. Document interchange still sucks. For raster, you'll be plagued by color science issues. For vector, you'll be plagued by nobody implementing SVG the same.
6. Hardware APIs also vary wildly. For a long time, you had to target every vendor of pen you wanted to support for example.
I think a large part of it is due to the industries behind it. Video and Audio need to scale massively within a single project, across a lot of hardware devices, and production houses. The data is massive in comparison. Issues cost a lot.
Images are smaller in scale. An issue can be fixed very cheaply.
The Video and Audio industries fixed this by putting effort into standardization, education and interoperability. Images never had that attention.
That's why I support Krita, If I'm going to pay that cost, I want to invest it in software that is by the people, for the people.
For general stuff, it's very serviceable and comparable to Adobe.
If there's something very specific it might require confirming if the equivalent features exist in both, and if the procedure is different, what that is. New muscle memory like learning vim, but I know several people who are very happy with it and stick with it. They can always hop on Adobe if they need it here or there.
(Sketchup used to be like that until it was purchased by Tre-something).
E.g. my wife using youtube tutorials to teach herself digital drafting to plan our kitchen remodel (with actual dimensions).
Some excellent official tutorials, too:
For mac. Plus points for linux support. Even more plus points if it can easily share the library between different devices.
Even better that RAW processing for my Fuji cameras is better on C1 than Lightroom.
I wonder what the goal is for making it free. Now that they're owned by Canva, are they slowly opening the door toward a freemium SaaS business model?
Is there a file browser with tagging, colors, flags, etc.. Or am I expected to manually open every RAW file as I go and use something else to manage them?
I did some test edits to a RAW file, closed it, and now looking at it again the history is blank and it seems to have reverted the changes. It looks like I have to destructively save the changes to the RAW file directly?
FWIW they have a non-destructive editor function via the Develop Persona toolkit, it's not something that opens up by default. There are docs available on their site how to use it properly. I do think it's a miss to not bring that more forward, when opening a RAW, hopefully they'll see this feedback.
I wouldn't call photoshop much of a photo editor as it was never very good at it either with the RAW workflow, more of a generalized drawing/editing tool I guess?
Likelihood of them fixing bugs that have been outstanding for 6 years during a 6 month trial? Zero.
That's to say that if you try it and don't encounter any of the bugs—great. But if you try it and do encounter the bugs—they're generally unlikely to ever be fixed. In my experience as a user from day one.
Most of the functionality is there but it does a few things differently to Photoshop, fortunately there's a lot of resources in their docs, forums and YouTube videos to learn how it's done in Affinity.
When will some organization agree to support Gimp, Inkscape, and Libreoffice Writer in the same capacity?
I would already prefer the free apps.
Especially in a professional setting as a designer, the tools I use are chosen to make my life easier and enable me to work more efficient, and these really don't yet. From what I see, they aren't build for this setting in mind and cannot keep up with paid tools that have significantly more of a financial backing.
The one open-source outlier for me is PenPot, but even they aren't there yet in my opinion, at least not for my needs (and preferences).
A RHEL workstation license will provide basic OS support for it; if you crash it, they might wrangle with the project for you.
This doesn't sooth my concerns. Why should it, when it's literally them switching to a subscription model. Nothing in the article says otherwise. Do we believe they'll build the infrastructure to support a SaaS, then turn it all off after this 6-month trial? It's not just for fun, they're clearly going to make it the primary way of paying for their products.
I bought all the Affinity apps (multiple versions) because I was specifically trying to escape Adobe Creative Cloud. Their software may not be as good as Adobe's, but Affinity's business model provided enough value on its own. I'm making some assumptions here, but come on, we know how this story usually plays out. Unless I'm wrong, I think this is probably a bad idea for users like me.
When you make purchases from their store they’re available within the app based on your account, if you sign out you’ll lose access to them.
I know with V1 you could manually download your assets, I’m not sure what the status is for V2 on that.
I share your scepticism since the Canva acquisition.
Maybe I’m wrong, my upgrade path was I just signed into my account through the app and it validated my version and downloaded all my assets (from the asset store).
Anyway, they're currently very lenient, but my guess is that that'll go away before long.
It says underneath "You do not need to remain online or signed in to use your purchases", referring to in-app store purchases.
> Do we believe they'll build the infrastructure to support a SaaS, then turn it all off after this 6-month trial?
It's not a SaaS? It's a series of apps with trial keys that expire. Just like the normal 15 day trial or the pandemic-era three-month trial. Once the key expires, the trial expires.
So did Adobe, with Lightroom.
Affinity are saying they won't switch everyone to subscriptions, that perpetual licensing will always be an option, and they don't yet have a subscription model.
How does affinity compare to lightroom?
It doesn't. They have Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign alternatives.
Affinity Photo does have a development mode, but it’s single file focused and more akin to Photoshop’s raw import tool than an app like Lightroom or Bridge.
I think RAW support is much lower than Adobe supports as well, at least with Fuji I’ve had issues and only a few programs handle Fuji compressed RAW.
One of Affinity’s strengths is a single compatible file format between all of their apps, but it does lack anything like library support.
It's not exactly a fair comparison, since AP directly competes with Photoshop, not Lightroom, but that was what made it an immediate non-starter for me when it comes to photography.
Affinity Photo starts you in a "Develop Persona" when you open a RAW file, and allows you to develop your RAW file. Before you can use any of the common editing tools, you need to leave that persona by committing your changes. You need to make a choice to bake these RAW adjustments into a "RAW layer (embedded)", "RAW layer (linked)" or a "Pixel layer". It's not very obvious what these are and how they work.
Most of the common editing tools then work destructively. Once you use them, you can't go back and change any of the RAW adjustments. There are some very limited tools available that can work non-destructively, but again, it's not very obvious which ones those are. And use of the wrong tool can immediately turn a "RAW layer" into a "Pixel layer" without warning.
It's all very confusing, to be honest. It may be a case of the RTFM, but I did so when I tried this a couple months ago, and came to the conclusion that AP simply isn't capable of a non-destructive editing workflow yet, except for a few very basic cases.
But the bundle price was worth it for me for Designer and Publisher alone. So I hope in due time they'll launch a fourth product to compete with Lightroom, on photo cataloging, culling and a non-destructive workflow.
The current commercial alternatives for Lightroom unfortunately are still lacking, last time I looked at them (Capture One, DxO Photo Lab). And the open source ones (darktable, digiKam) are ... not good. I'm keeping my eye on "Ansel" though (darktable fork by an ex-dev, anger-driven development), the author's rants sum up very wrong what's wrong with darktable, and why its community is so dysfunctional.
As an enthusiast or professional photographer you really need both, preferrably in the same application, or at least in tightly integrated applications.
I started with Lightroom 1 beta3, and while it was dog slow, the speedup in workflow to cull and edit thousands of photos after a shoot was revolutionary at the time. In the beginning it only supported global edits, which was enough anyway for 95% of photos. But you could sync and apply these edits in bulk to other photos, and get through hundreds of them quickly.
Capture One certainly is the closest. But switching costs are huge. My catalog contains tens of thousands of images, professionals will have hundreds of thousands. If I'm to switch, I need to be certain that every single Lightroom edit is, in principle, supported too, and will be converted faithfully on import.
And their pricing is weird. In the beginning they required you to pick a RAW edition - you could have support for Canon, or Nikon, but not both. That's gone now, and as you say, I think it has come a long way. But their perpetual license now is nowhere competitive in price with the Adobe Photography Plan ($9.99/mo, infamous "Annual paid monthly", for LR+PS). The $300 for Capture One is for one major version, for the price of 2.5 years of Photoshop and Lightroom.
The manuals for Affinity products are pretty good, and I agree on the price being worth it for the quality and usefulness of the software.
For me Publisher fits a good niche. Since V2 I use Designer for planning woodworking projects and it’s quite competent for that task (they’re simpler 2D plans and diagrams to track my cutting sheets).
One more Lightroom alternative for you to consider would be RawPower, which actually does a great job handling different raw formats. I know the devs have a new app but I haven’t tried it.
Maybe not as feature-rich as some of the heavy hitters, but it looks to be very focused in both its feature set and its UI. And it seems to hit that sweet spot where it does both cataloging and RAW processing competently.
This is the most promising alternative I've seen so far for what I'm yearning for, so thanks again!
Genuine question, how do you find DxO PhotoLab lacking when compared to LR?
I'm an old-time LR user and due to Adobe's licensing shenanigans exploring alternatives. I am having a pretty good time with trial version of DxO PhotoLab7. So far I haven't come across something that I could do in LR (as a hobbyist) that I can't achieve in PhotoLab7. And, I'm loving the built-in DeNoising algorithm in PL7.
It's mostly their "no catalog" approach that irks me. From what I understand they use a model that doesn't use a catalog, and requires you to import photos, but instead allow you to point it at any filesystem location, and work on those photos.
Fair enough, but for me the question then immediately becomes how and where the data that I generate in PL7 is stored and managed - and I was struggling to find any comprehensive information on this.
If it doesn't have a catalog, where does it store edits I make to my photos? Does it actually modify and write down some information in RAW files (that would be a non-starter for me)? Does it litter the filesystem with XMP sidecar files next to the originals? How does it keep (and repair) associations between original RAWs and their edits/metadata if they get moved on the file system outside of PL7?
It allows to search/filter photos by metadata attributes "across your whole computer" (according to their tutorial video on organization). So it must keep some index somewhere, otherwise that would be dog slow. So how and when does that index get updated? Do I get any control over when that happens, any UI feedback when its happening and I'm potentially working with outdated metadata, etc..?
LR's catalog approach has some drawbacks, but from an engineering standpoint, it seems to me that's the much simpler and robust approach to implement this. The LR catalog is a simple SQLite DB, and backup is trivial: Backup my originals and the catalog, done. Follow the simple rule "Don't modify originals behind LR's back" and you'll be good. (Or be prepared to do it in a very systematic way, and fix references in LR afterwards).
The catalog approach definitely has its limitations and issues, but I find it very easy to reason about. No surprises. PL7's approach seems to require much more magic behind the scenes, which makes me quite uncomfortable.
In terms of denoising, I have to agree - the DxO stuff is miles ahead in terms of quality for some algorithms, and denoising is one of them. I use NikCollection (as a PS plugin) for those 1 out of a 1000 photos that deserve some serious editing.
For color correction of photographs, PhotoPea does a much better job than Affinity I feel.
After wasting 15 or 30 minutes trying to get Affinity to work for a photo touchup and color correction, I give up and use PhotoPea.
For example you can apply adjustment layers and then use a blend curve (not just blend ranges) to moderate it. So if you want warmer shadows, it's as easy as using a colour temperature adjustment to warm up your image and then adjusting the curve so that it doesn't apply where you don't want it.
And you have cross-model curves: you can apply Lab curves to RGB model images without converting.
It has a Capture-One-style HSL wheel. It supports LUTs (and LUT inference!)
I can think of some things Photoshop does that Affinity Photo does not, but I've been using it nine years now for my photography and web work (along with Designer). I think for almost every normal Photoshop user[0] there's no reason not to use Affinity Photo instead.
[0] Unless you're particularly wedded to Lightroom, for which there is no Affinity alternative.
https://peterthenaturephotographer.com/process/affinity-phot...
https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=page...