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).
Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
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 end…
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.
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#103Adobe 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…
> 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 somet…
I'm a hobbyist photographer and my dad's a professional. This is the first time I've ever heard of these files, so what do people use them for and why are they deal-breakers? As far as I've seen them work, professional photographers spend nearly all of their time in Lightroom, it's pretty rare to see someone reach for Photoshop.
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#104I'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.
> 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.
A free option for tracing is:
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 somet…
I'm a hobbyist photographer and my dad's a professional. This is the first time I've ever heard of these files, so what do people use them for and why are they deal-breakers? As far as I've seen them work, professional photographers spend nearly all of their time in Lightroom, it's pretty rare to see someone reach for Photoshop.
Do you shoot RAW? If you're not seeing them (AFAIK Lightroom uses them too) then you're either not shooting RAW, or you're probably not loading/postprocessing your camera's RAW files (CR2, ARW, etc.) directly -- perhaps you're converting them to DNGs first. The XMP files hold all the postprocessing information for those files, since Photoshop/Lightroom don't alter RAW files in-place.
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-...
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 somet…
I'm a hobbyist photographer and my dad's a professional. This is the first time I've ever heard of these files, so what do people use them for and why are they deal-breakers? As far as I've seen them work, professional photographers spend nearly all of their time in Lightroom, it's pretty rare to see someone reach for Photoshop.
You can google it, but it's putting EXIF data modifications and additions into an external XML file. It's a way to avoid modifying the master file directly.
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#107I would buy it just because it’s not Adobe.
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 exp…
I have never gone to their website (singular) before and I figured all this out by simply looking at the page for a few seconds. These objections seem ridiculous to me.
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#109I'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.
I just wish the Affinity apps weren’t so slow. Ever action lags and waits for the app to catch up, not to mention how long it takes for the app to start up.
Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months
#110Does 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.
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 fi…
The keyboard actions alone are maddening. Trying to switch tools, exit a text editing mode, change tool properties, all can be very frustrating to do with the keyboard.