Does anyone have insight on how this compares these days to Adobe's suite? Seems pretty competitive, but I'm not sure if you're getting 80% of the features for 30% of the cost or 50% of features for 50% of the cost.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.