Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months • Hacker News Board

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#51

Post by jay_kyburz » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:04 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #12

dagmx wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

> 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 comp…

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#52

Post by omnimus » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #42

omnimus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Inde…

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.

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#53

Post by rchaud » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:07 PM UTC

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?

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#54

Post by carlosjobim » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:08 PM UTC

Arn_Thor wrote: post #35

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 th…

Your concerns for what? They're not going to send people to your house to uninstall the software.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#55

Post by jay_kyburz » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

S0und wrote: post #13

AquinasCoder wrote: post #3

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.

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…

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#56

Post by lukasgraf » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

data-ottawa wrote: post #7

RobotToaster wrote: post #4

First time I've realised that affinity is made by the same people who did serif photoplus. How does affinity compare to lightroom?

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…

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#57

Post by omnimus » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

raffraffraff wrote: post #50

omnimus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 v…

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#58

Post by nullindividual » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:15 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #22

data-ottawa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Can…

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 c…

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#59

Post by omnimus » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #45

theobr wrote: post #28

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.

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.

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.

Re: Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

#60

Post by lastdong » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #12

dagmx wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

> 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 comp…

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.