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

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

#71

Post by parl_match »

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.

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

#72

Post by karaterobot »

data-ottawa wrote: post #27
karaterobot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

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.

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

#73

Post by anigbrowl »

karaterobot wrote: post #11

> 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 o…

Paranoid imaginings are not facts.

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

#74

Post by parl_match »

Saris wrote: post #69

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…

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.

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

#75

Post by datavirtue »

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 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.

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

#76

Post by nox101 »

Saris wrote: post #69

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…

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.

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

#77

Post by starik36 »

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.

Does Affinity suite include generative AI at all?

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

#78

Post by choppaface »

parl_match wrote: post #71

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…

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.

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

#79

Post by wetpaste »

dagmx wrote: post #10
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.

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 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?

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

#80

Post by normaldist »

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…

They've had some sort of free trial period as long as I've followed them.
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