[HN Gopher] Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free...
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Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
Author : Tomte
Score : 144 points
Date : 2024-07-08 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| ochronus wrote:
| That's a clever move, kudos!
| AquinasCoder wrote:
| 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.
| ntlk wrote:
| Some features are "missing" or don't work in a similar way. For
| example, Affinity Designer doesn't have shape replication tools
| like Illustrator, manual copy paste is required. You also can't
| trace an image to turn it into vector outlines. Just two things
| off the top of my head that I noticed because I used them
| extensively in Adobe Illustrator. So if you're only using a
| subset of features you're probably fine, but without testing
| Affinity's products for yourself it might be hard to tell if
| they're a like for like replacement for you.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| It's been a while now but I got Inkscape (free but clunky
| Illustrator alternative) to do shape replication across a
| path for me once, and then I copied the result into Affinity
| Designer. Obviously if you need to do that frequently, it's
| not gonna work well but I've only had to do that a few times
| since ditching Adobe.
| Tagbert wrote:
| I've also used Inkscape to do the image tracing and export
| to SVG. I don't like Inkscape for other purposes but it is
| useful for that.
| stevenicr wrote:
| I am thinking I have seen tutorials on tracing to vector,
| like maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=480dGcU6ce4&pp=ygU
| VYWZmaW5pd...
|
| 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.
| jwagenet wrote:
| I think they are talking about the Image Trace feature,
| which mostly traces automatically (but requires some hand
| holding).
| dagmx wrote:
| It truly depends what you do and need.
|
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| Yeah there are so many walls like that which I hit. I
| always go to their forum, find that it's been asked a lot
| and with no resolution. Which is fine, I get it that they
| are newer and don't have the resources.
|
| 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.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| In our last game I had to dig pretty deep into Kritas
| scripting. I was making automated changes and exporting
| thousands of frames of animation.
|
| 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.
| lastdong wrote:
| Also the lack of a plugin sdk, scriptable actions: hope
| basic automation comes soon. Discussing using AI was taboo,
| some vocal users misunderstood and missed that AI is a
| powerful tool for automatic masking, image segmentation,
| etc (and that can be ran locally), so all the smart stuff
| only lives in Adobe.
| thunfisch wrote:
| Do you know of Scribus, or do you not consider it a good OSS
| equivalent for InDesign? Last time I've worked with InDesign
| was around 2011, and it was meh. Scribus is also really realy
| meh, but gets the job done. I've got an Affinity license and
| have been using Designer for a bunch of projects - to me it's
| a toss between that and Scribus for what I do. They are
| totally different, but I have more experience with Scribus
| and therefore am much quicker in using that.
| omnimus wrote:
| Scribus is unfortunately pretty bad and also almost dead.
| Its maybe interesting if you want to layout embeded LaTeX
| but the ux will make you hate yourself.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| My wife has been using it for years. Hates it. She
| upgraded a while back in the hope that the latest version
| was better, but it sucked. First, it did a one way
| upgrade in the file format, and every doc she printed
| from 1.6 looked like trash on her printer (no other
| settings changed). After messing with various settings
| for hours she downgraded to 1.5.x, restored her old
| configuration and and files from backups. Old version
| prints as expected. It also does totally weird and broken
| stuff, like the other day she was creating an A4 sheet
| with 6 cards on it. 5 were copy/pastes of the first one,
| with minor changes. When she printed it, only 3 of them
| actually printed even though they're visible onscreen.
| She printed to a PDF... Same thing. She created a new doc
| and copy/pasted all 6 into it and printed... they all
| printed fine. Like WTF is even going on there?
| omnimus wrote:
| Long time ago ive tried to help the project but really
| its just too complex of a problem for the few people that
| maintain it. At same time its dense C++ codebase that
| only experienced programmers will be able to contribite
| to. And those programmers often dont value UX/Design much
| so it becomes huge rift between bunch of designers unable
| to do anything themselves and few annoyed programmers.
| omnimus wrote:
| Its a but funny that you say Indesign is the weakest of the
| three considering that in professional setting its Indesign
| (and After Effects) that keeps people with Adobe. Its the
| most complex one and the only irreplaceable one. Everything
| that ever gets printed is done with Indesign. Every book,
| poster, cover, billboard, business card...
|
| 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| I'll be pedantic and say it really depends on which
| "professional setting" as to which programs keep people
| with Adobe. But I assume you mean in the print world.
|
| 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.
| omnimus wrote:
| Yeah because Adobe doesnt care since they know print
| industry has no other choice. Indesign has been basically
| only getting worse since CS6/the subscription. The only
| useful feature in last 15 years has been pdf
| comments/corrections.
|
| 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.
| wetpaste wrote:
| Coming from the world of audio software I've always wondered
| why it seemed like Adobe has such a stranglehold on visual
| work and nothing really catches up to photoshop or
| illustrator. In audio there are several big DAWs (digital
| audio workstations) that I would classify as popular and
| competent enough for serious work, each of which has artists
| or producers that have built successful careers around. Yes
| there are endless wars about what is better but more or less
| can do the same things and most experienced people say,
| choose one, learn it, decide what works for you. I feel like
| with photoshop it's always like "oh it's missing critical
| feature x, y, and z compared to photoshop so it's a
| dealbreaker". The closest analogy I could think of is pro-
| tools being a popular "de-facto" standard in many pro
| recording studios, but most hobbyists don't use pro-tools and
| agree that it's popular in pro studios mostly due to
| tradition.
|
| 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?
| dagmx wrote:
| Audio has a few things going for it.
|
| 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.
| S0und wrote:
| I'm a hobbyist who has used PS for 20 something years now. My
| issue with Affinity Photo is that you can use 85% of your PS
| knowledge and workflow, everything is the same but that last
| 15% is awfully, unlogically different and will drive you mad.
| That last 15% feels like it was made by people who do not
| understand why PS does things the way it does. Meanwhile my
| statement cannot be true, because Affinity nailed the firat
| 85%, but just cannot comprehend why they couldn't copy the last
| 15%.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| This is my experience too. After buying Affinity licenses, I
| don't want to pay Adobe their monthly rake too, but I do.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| That's the true cost of Photoshop. It's not the subscription.
| It's the time you spent learning how to do everything.
|
| 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.
| sumnole wrote:
| I've replaced Adobe with Affinity and am mostly satisfied,
| although in the latest versions I've been experiencing bugs
| with the renderer (eg artifact lines or the canvas being cut
| off by one pixel) which introduces some difficulties.
| j45 wrote:
| The best way is to install it and try using it side by side for
| your use case.
|
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| First time I've realised that affinity is made by the same people
| who did serif photoplus.
|
| How does affinity compare to lightroom?
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > How does affinity compare to lightroom
|
| It doesn't. They have Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign
| alternatives.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Affinity doesn't have a comparable program to Lightroom.
|
| 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.
| delfinom wrote:
| Affinity 2.4 supposedly added more support for RAW including
| some Fuji cameras.
| lukasgraf wrote:
| The big issue with Affinity Photo is that it doesn't support
| non-destructive editing / a non-linear workflow like
| Lightroom does.
|
| 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.
| omnimus wrote:
| I think you are mixing cataloging software with photo
| editing one. Photoshop/Photo only editing. DigiKam mostly
| catalogue. Lightroom is pretty good at both. I know few pro
| photographers who switched to Capture One because of better
| editing capabilities an the software apparently got a lot
| better but they already introduced subscription model and
| while you can still buy lifetime - who knows how long it
| will be there.
| lukasgraf wrote:
| I am, intentionally so ;-) Because this mix is where
| Lightroom excels, and competing products just fall short.
|
| 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.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| For alternatives to Lightroom, check out AfterShot, Darktable,
| and RAWTherapee. I personally use and require RAWTherapee, as
| AfterShot won't work for the stuff that comes from my Sigma
| cameras and I like its power features of the former.
| treprinum wrote:
| How is the plugin compatibility? Can I use CS6 or CC plugins in
| Affinity?
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| Yes, mostly. That is, if a Photoshop plugin is _well-behaved_
| and doesn 't make use of undocumented aspects, it's pretty much
| going to work.
|
| https://peterthenaturephotographer.com/process/affinity-phot...
|
| https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=page...
| hananova wrote:
| "It depends." Some work, some do not. Just try.
| omnimus wrote:
| If you mean Photoshop>Photo plugins. Affinity doesnt otherwise
| have any third party plugins or scripting. Unfortunately.
| chasil wrote:
| This is just for the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps.
|
| When will some organization agree to support Gimp, Inkscape, and
| Libreoffice Writer in the same capacity?
|
| I would already prefer the free apps.
| curiousigor wrote:
| While I'd love to use free tools, these really don't compare to
| the paid tools like the Affinity suite or Figma for example.
|
| 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).
| chasil wrote:
| At least for inkscape, I do see it in the RHEL appstream
| repo.
|
| A RHEL workstation license will provide basic OS support for
| it; if you crash it, they might wrangle with the project for
| you.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > This discount, alongside the six-month free trial, is
| potentially geared at soothing concerns that Affinity would
| change its pricing model after being acquired by Canva earlier
| this year.
|
| 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.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I really hope not. Its also the reason why I purchased their
| software.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| For what it's worth, the current version and version one were
| both designed in a way that they could be switched to a
| subscription model.
|
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Are you referring to some sort of asset marketplace with in-
| app purchases, or something like that? If so, I've never used
| it. I can say that you don't need to be logged in to use
| Affinity Photo, Designer, or Publisher: I don't even have an
| Affinity account, let alone do I need to log in to use the
| software. My recollection of buying their products is: you
| pay them over the web, they send an email with an activation
| code, you paste the code into the app, and that's it.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| And you're on version 2?
|
| 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).
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, 2.5.something. I'm currently signed out, and can
| use the app (Publisher is the one I just tested) just
| fine. If I go to my Account page, it tells me I'm signed
| out, and it has a little message noting that I don't need
| to be logged in in order to _use_ my purchases. I 've
| never bought anything through their store, so I have
| never encountered any login gate.
|
| Anyway, they're currently very lenient, but my guess is
| that that'll go away before long.
| nullindividual wrote:
| If you go to My Account within an Affinity app, yes you can
| see the store there.
|
| It says underneath "You do not need to remain online or
| signed in to use your purchases", referring to in-app store
| purchases.
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| They have actually committed _not_ to switch to a subscription
| model. Why do you think this is them doing that?
|
| > 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Paranoid imaginings are not facts.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official release: https://affinity.serif.com/en-
| us/press/newsroom/try-affinity...
|
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906031)
| kmfrk wrote:
| They did a similar trial during covid which was what got me to
| try them out. Love their tools, except some of the magic tools
| aren't available in Designer and require Photo, which can be
| annoying for people who prefer just one.
|
| Some excellent official tutorials, too:
|
| https://youtu.be/6wfeMGwcF0c
| omnimus wrote:
| If you buy the pack of all three then through publisher you can
| instantly switch between them basically making it one software.
| That alone is so much ahead of Adobe.
| Tagbert wrote:
| True, though one of the strengths of Affinity is that their
| files work in both Photo and Designer. You can open in each app
| and use a tool and then switch back.
| rlad wrote:
| I bought Affinity and have tried to use it but really don't find
| it anything like equivalent to the Adobe products unfortunately.
|
| 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.
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| Affinity has really sophisticated colour editing controls.
|
| 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.
| theobr wrote:
| I've been using Affinity's suite exclusively for about 4 years
| now and I haven't looked back once. Briefly tried Photoshop again
| for the generative AI stuff and it was slow, unreliable and
| crashed multiple times.
|
| HIGHLY recommend giving Affinity a shot, I've edited thousands of
| images with Photo and I can't imagine using anything else now.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| I confirm, best soft ever!
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I've been using Affinity's suite exclusively for about 4
| years now and I haven't looked back once.
|
| 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.
| nikkwong wrote:
| It also has no curvature tool, which is a huge deal breaker
| for many vector artists. I have been making a stink about
| this online across many platforms for years but the team has
| shown no intention to adopt it.
| Tagbert wrote:
| I just use Inkscape for tracing and then export to SVG. I
| can't use Inkscape for anything else but it does provide that
| function.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Seconded, there are many ways in which Designer and Publisher
| are actually superior as well (beyond actually feeling
| respected as a customer).
| omnimus wrote:
| Agreed people talk about features Affinity dont have but
| there are also many things that Adobe doesnt have or does so
| much worse.
|
| 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.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I agree they are great software, and I own an old Affinity
| Design license, but unfortunately not long after I decided to
| ditch Photoshop, I also decided I needed to ditch windows.
|
| At the time there was no Linux support which made me sad. I
| have no idea if that has changed.
| omnimus wrote:
| I am in same place. I keep Mac laptop for graphics because of
| this.
|
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Neither does Adobe
| datavirtue wrote:
| I did not know about Affinity. I just signed up and was
| downloading files in less than a minute. In two minutes I was
| sitting in front of Photo 2, ready to work.
| starik36 wrote:
| Does Affinity suite include generative AI at all?
| Tagbert wrote:
| Not that I'm aware of. I hope that their new relationship
| with Canva gives them the resources to add AI for some
| features. that might be a 3.0 version.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| This has heightened my concerns, not allayed them. They have said
| perpetual licenses will always be an option but 1) I don't trust
| corporate promises and 2) they could easily just price that out
| of reach to push people onto a subscription model. A six-month
| trial is a not a "try us" timeline, it is "make us indispensable"
| timeline. That's a big up front loss of revenue for them which I
| only see them making back if they go for a higher-pressure
| pricing model.
| j45 wrote:
| I know some people who bought the last time they had a 50% off
| sale recently.
|
| $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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Your concerns for what? They're not going to send people to
| your house to uninstall the software.
| Springtime wrote:
| To play along, activation is still a potential issue.
| Affinity v1 suite had offline activation so one can always
| activate on any new system/install, while v2 (for its non-
| volume license at least), which since brought along an
| optional subscription model, switched to online activation.
|
| 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.
| ezfe wrote:
| The whole point of single purchase, that people here ask for
| all the time, is that you pay once and get a product.
|
| 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.
| dinglestepup wrote:
| There is more to this argument. Adobe made themselves an
| industry standard with a perpetual license - pay once, own
| forever. Once they transitioned to a subscription model with
| a strict cancellation policy, it became the only option.
|
| 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.
| normaldist wrote:
| They've had some sort of free trial period as long as I've
| followed them.
| mythz wrote:
| Not a heavy graphic design user so would never consider an Adobe
| subscription, switched to Affinity for its low cost perpetual
| pricing which has been a great substitute for my needs, though
| still use Paint .NET for small edits.
|
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| I bought the Affinity suite during 2020 when I was exploring some
| hobbyist graphic design stuff. I still use it frequently.
|
| 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?
| rubslopes wrote:
| Occam' razor: Adobe users are generally very rooted in the
| Adobe ecosystem. Changing is costly. A generous trial period
| might make some of them try Affinity.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| Hoping that somebody takes on Sketchup, Autocad etc with a
| similar approach to licensing. Subscriptions suck for tools you
| use occasionally.
|
| (Sketchup used to be like that until it was purchased by Tre-
| something).
| vvpan wrote:
| I know the workflow is quiet different but Rhino is popular,
| for example, with architecture crowd and their licenses are
| perpetual.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| True, albeit the associated cost is firmly not in the
| "occasional use hobbyist" category.
|
| E.g. my wife using youtube tutorials to teach herself digital
| drafting to plan our kitchen remodel (with actual
| dimensions).
| Tagbert wrote:
| Yes, I would love to have a 3D CAD problem for modeling a
| new deck or a raise garden bed but most of the tools are
| just way out of budget for that.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Extremely unfortunate that the article is littered with countless
| links, but none of them lead to the actual product page. Sure, I
| can guess what it is or look it up on search, but if you do a
| marketing stint, surely you'd want to link to the actual thing
| you're talking about.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Incorrect; the very first link ('the offer') takes you to
| Affinity's website. This choice makes sense since the offer
| applies to all 3 of their products, which you can investigate
| further from the top menu. I don't see how it could be easier.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Yeah no, the first link takes me to a random press release on
| their corporate website. Unless I already know that this
| corporate press release site is also the site where the
| product info is, I won't know to look for it -- many modern
| products have the corporate entity and the actual product
| separate. It would literally be easier to use feeling lucky
| on Google. It's deeply wishful thinking that anyone would go
| and explore the website for your corporate entity just
| because you're trying to sell something.
| Saris wrote:
| I'm a little confused about Affinity Photo, the name implies it's
| supposed to be an equivalent to Lightroom, but the program
| functions more like Photoshop.
|
| 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?
| parl_match wrote:
| Affinity's suite isn't as "complete" as Adobe's. Much smaller
| company with much smaller product suite. They don't have
| cataloguing or photo management equivalent. But as for ND RAW
| editing.... yeah. I've been using Affinity for a while, and
| they have it, but it's not very obvious.
|
| 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.
| nox101 wrote:
| Why do you think the name implies it's similar to Lightroom
| instead of Photoshop? I'd expect a product named Affinity Light
| to be similar to Lightroom.
| Saris wrote:
| Not sure to be honest, I guess they talk about it as a photo
| editing suite, I mean their tagline is "The photo editor
| you've been dreaming of" which makes me think of it as an
| alternative to Lightroom.
|
| 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?
| Tagbert wrote:
| It is definitely more like Photoshop than Lightroom. You'll
| need to look elsewhere if you need file management.
| parl_match wrote:
| Adobe vs Affinity:
|
| 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.
| choppaface wrote:
| Is Adobe only 10x more expensive? Adobe is subscription-only so
| it seems to be only 10x for the first 5 years and then it's
| indefinitely more expensive.
|
| 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.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I use Designer almost daily and I'm stunned by how good it is.
| I have zero interest in ever going back to Illustrator. I'm
| sure there's pro requirements that only Illustrator has but
| I've not encountered them. For the price it's simply amazing.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Is Photoshop better than Photo? Yes, but not by much.
|
| 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.)
| grumple wrote:
| Just a week after I paid for the suite! But it's been useful for
| my (very much non-artist) purposes so far, though like all photo
| editing software I've ever touched, it has a TON of features and
| is pretty overwhelming.
| zyberzero wrote:
| I have been looking for Affinity Photo for a while - but can
| someone recommend a good alternative to lightroom? Perhaps
| something that integrate with Affinity reasonable well?
|
| For mac. Plus points for linux support. Even more plus points if
| it can easily share the library between different devices.
| piva00 wrote:
| I've moved to Capture One years ago and have been extremely
| happy with it.
|
| Even better that RAW processing for my Fuji cameras is better
| on C1 than Lightroom.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Didnt know about this, and I have started to loathe Adobe due to
| their licensing model. I will check Photo out!
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| I loved the Affinity Suite, but it's such a shame that Linux
| isn't supported or that it isn't provided in a Wine-friendly
| distributable (a regular installer executable rather than a
| Windows App Store package).
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