Serif's Affinity suite has probably the greatest value for money in the whole software industry. I mean 119 bucks ONE-TIME for three pretty comprehensive graphics apps which are polished and get constant updates is very hard to beat.
For people making their living with graphical work (designers, photographers, etc.) Adobe is probably still the way to go (even if just to keep using the muscle memory). However for the many people who only need something like Photoshop or InDesign a couple of times a year, Affinity is just great.
I have developed new muscles with dedication and effort, I had Adobe logo in front of me all the while, I was falling down and crying with pain but one look at Adobe logo would make me get up and get going with newly found vigor - just to kick Adobe's bucket and to embrace loving comfort of Affinity Suite.
Nah.. it was pretty easy to jump. Life is beautiful.
I used Photoshop and Illustrator for years and years (going back to 1990's) and switched to Affinity about 2 years ago. There's a lot of little details that are different--say, when you grab a resize handle, does aspect ratio stay locked or do you have to hold down shift?--but I found that it wasn't tough to retrain. Most things are where you'd expect. It's certainly not like Gimp or Inkscape, where absolutely everything is different and it feels impossible to get anything done.
In addition to it not being a subscription, I also love this bit from the App Store's Privacy section:
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
After I post this, I'm off to buy the desktop and iPad versions.
I tried to buy a certain type of simple app a couple of weeks ago, and while there were dozens of options available, not one didn't Hoover up everything it could about me.
Really? You need to know my name, location, and track me across apps for a card game? No sale.
Edit: Purchased. Thanks, Affinity. Go stick your head in a pig, Adobe.
Just so you know, that's not true. After all, they need to collect your email to login for the perpetual license. At the very least, this needs a "Data Linked To You - Contact Info" card.
Generally speaking, 'App Privacy' cards are lies. Apple does not check them, you need to do it yourself. Here is the Privacy Policy: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/privacy/
In the EULA (quoted from Affinity Photo 2 for MacOS), you further agree to, among other terms:
> *Consent to Use of Data*
>
> a. 16. You agree that Serif and its affiliates may use any information you give to use as part of product support and other services provided to you, if any, related to Serif Software solely to improve products or to provide customised services or technologies to you and will not disclose this information in a form that personally identifies you.
As an infrequent image editor/designer/publisher I'm just casual enough that there is no way to justify an Adobe subscription (even if I'd want to have one).
Affinity occupy a wonderful niche for people like me in that they provide comprehensive, professional, and bullshit-free software options. It's an incredible value for this day and age and I love using their software. I have zero complaints about the company or their products.
Upgrading when they have a release like this is a no-brainer. Even if I don't really need the upgrade I'm eager to support them for doing such a fine job.
That's not the context of the GP's statement. They're referring to the Universal License being offered by Serif, which provides you a "buy once use anywhere" on all of their supported platforms, not that they support all platforms.
As a Linux user myself and a former (and upcoming again) studio sysadmin, it's disappointing Serif doesn't offer native Linux support. But let's not twist the discussion here.
All supported platforms, as in you don't have to pay a separate license fee to run it on one of the other platforms they support.
Yeah, I'm not happy having to keep a copy of Windows for graphics software either, but that's a different issue. If you only have Linux or some toaster running NetBSD, then it's pretty simple: don't buy it.
Is $100 for a universal suite license even that much of a price hike? Affinity v1 was $50 a pop with no universal license option - as in, you had to buy each platform's port of the app separately. I happen to have one foot in every tech ecosystem and bought all three apps, so I wound up spending more on Affinity v1 than I will on v2's universal license.
And, of course, it's still hella cheap compared to subscription-licensing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign over the seven years of updates you got on Affinity v1.
I actually bought all of v1 on sale... so three $25 apps for both Mac and Windows. Plus the iPad versions of Photo and Designer. So that puts me at around $170? IDK, I forgot how much the iPad versions of v1 cost.
Yes, and I'm one of them. I'm not moaning at them about the price, but I think it's fair to consider what they are actually saying. They are telling users that v1 is now completely unsupported. That means, if you bought v1 last week, you cannot expect any compatibility support moving forward. The bugs that already exist? Those aren't getting taken care of either. People like to point out that they've owned Affinity products for a long time, and therefore have gotten their value out of them. I've owned all of the Affinity products for quite a while, so I've gotten plenty of value from them. I also have a (quite) expensive Adobe subscription. But at the end of the day, Affinity was marketed as the answer to subscription bloat. They aren't the first company to have to walk that back a bit with major version releases. They should have a deprecation plan in place for gradually winding down v1. Stopping all new features but still releasing compatibility and security fixes is incredibly common in software when major versions change. Instead, their answer is to cease all development an support immediately.
$119 perpetual is an insanely good price for three absolutely fantastic applications. What are you smoking?
What's a fair price to you? $10?
On one side you've got people complaining about these anti-consumer software subscriptions from the likes of adobe.
Then on the other side you've got people like yourself that are for some reason complaining that there's still a company offering fantastic software on par with Illustrator for a fantastic perpetual price.
Affinity Designer is £35 right now. That's insane.
They must have PPP enabled, so price depends on the country. I see "regular price" as 169.99$, but now on sale 40off for $99. It really is great value for the money. I hope they stay on this path. I don't mind paying for the upgrades every couple of years.
The poorer countries where the equivalent of $10 is a lot are probably not part of the market anyway, considering that having a computer is a prerequisite to benefitting from this software. Anyone who can save enough for a computer can probably save $119, even if that's not cheap by any means.
The same price gets you Creative Cloud for 2 months. What exactly is the point you think you're making? Because people earn different amounts in different countries is not a revelation to anybody here, nor to Serif.
If one could sell software there in such a way that only people in that market could buy it at that price, the answer is obvious... software has effectively zero marginal cost per copy.
So if you could practically limit your market at a specified price in such a way that that offer doesn't spread to other markets, then every copy you sell in such places is still beneficial to you.
There are less cynical answers to the question, but you asked cynically.
How about a non-cynical answer. Software does not have effectively zero marginal cost per copy. It does have zero manufacturing cost per copy, however support is quite an expensive on-going cost. When you have a presence in multiple markets, you need localized support for different languages, and that is even more expensive. When you have different costs in different markets, you encourage users in more expensive markets to try and game the system, to minimize their costs. This sets up a potentially adversarial relationship with your users, and is mostly non-productive.
In the end this is a professional software suite, and running a business has some fixed costs. By comparison, Adobe's suite would cost much more per year.
Well keeping on the cynical train. Parts of the world experiencing desperate poverty often not so coincidentally experience substantial inequality with the folks needing a professional tool not being so different economically from better off areas. If 90% of your market has no problem paying why would you not charge full price?
Next how do you keep Jane in Seattle and Bob in Houston from buying the poor market version? You can't really restrict it by language or locale people use all sorts of languages/settings in different parts of the world. Desktop computers don't have location and people could trivially block the app from having access to location AND network data. You don't want your offline software failing for lack of phoning home.
An argument could be made that Jane and Bob could well pirate it too but friction matters. Lots of folks can figure out how to pirate but fewer of them will actually do it if they have to visit the skeevier corners of the net, risk malware, and feel like a criminal instead of clicking on a different locale on your website and feel like they are cleverly getting a good deal. One weird trick to make a substantial portion of your revenue go away.
I would say that compared to software like Adobe that costs $600 a year or $3000 over a 5 year horizon it's already very inclusive.
These are pro level apps. Honestly can't think of a single bundle of 3 pro level apps that you can license on Windows, iPad and Mac for anywhere near that price.
I bought all 3 apps at 50% discount earlier this year. I paid 9,900 yen for it. The new universal license cost 15,800 yen. That's 50% price increase for me. I don't need apps for other platforms.
I can afford it, and I will probably buy it. But I can't help but compared to what I paid not even a year ago.
I just bought photo a month ago at $50 and was annoyed at first that suddenly I have to pay more if I want the latest version, but then at $100 and I get a universal license to all three products, I’m still way ahead of having an Adobe subscription.
Open source software like Gimp and Linux are free and can be run on your $50 single board computer instead of paying $500 for a laptop that requires a $139 OS license and a $119 software license for Affinity.
While it's certainly nice that those options exist, they are also entirely unsuitable for any kind of professional work. I assume the target user you're thinking of is looking to do some occasional, light-weight editing. And even this user will be frustrated with the irritating UI and workflow of software like (and in particular) The Gimp.
For me, it's close to unusable — and I am someone whose first computer was a TI44/4A. I'm a die-hard terminal shell user. Even Adobe Illustrator didn't really click for me. The Affinity suite made immediate sense.
That value costs money. A parent poster posited someone for whom ~$100 was a lot of money. You speak of professional work. I don't think the intersection of these two groups exist. Casual users with no money can use krita gimp darktable and be reasonable satisfied. Demanding professionals even in poorer parts of the world can use the wages earned to easily pay $100.
I'd love to switch to Affinity from Adobe Illustrator, but there's one feature I just can't live without:
In illustrator you can make a dashed line that nicely lines up with the corners of a square (putting one dash in each corner). Nothing else seems to handle this case. [1]
I use Illustrator to make stitching patterns and lining up the corners in this way is absolutely essential, otherwise the stitches come out looking lopsided.
But Illustrator is ruined by a glaring omission that people have been complaining about for years (if not decades): There's no way to select only the objects that are totally within the selection marquee. Every other vector art application offers this critical selection mode (Affinity Designer defaults to it, I think).
I consider Illustrator unusable as a result. It's also essentially abandonware.
Yeah, totally this - I recently cropped my Adobe CC suite down to just Illy, which i need, and bought Affinity's wares to replace, but it's no contest. Aside from literal decades of muscle memory, there's just too many speedbumps in the way of my normal workflow. So, I've dug out my copy of Photoshop CS2 so I can do all my cleaning up and processing in there.
Once I've found out what the difference between Affinity versions 1 and 2 is, I might yet buy 2 anyway, just to support Serif some more, because I'm frankly fed up of Adobe's practice of unhinged monolithic greed.
I want to support independent, non-rental-scam offerings as well. But Serif's attitude toward fixing bugs in its suite has been pretty bad. And in their presentation of "what's new," they seem to have ignored repeated requests for features that are standard and expected in this type of software.
They're not even complicated requests; stuff like non-printing layers and the ability to resize the selection marquee. I mean... WTF?
Yes, I don't even have very advanced needs but there are surprising omissions or ill thought of workflows throughout the software. I'm the most confused by the "personas" and sometimes feel like I need to go "back" because I need some tool, but I think there are some other strange design decisions too even in fairly basic tools.
Some smart person should publish an e-book, or a web site "Affinity Photo for Photoshop Users."
It should list every Photoshop function, and how to accomplish the same thing on Affinity.
After 20 years of using Photoshop, I'm forever searching the web for equivalent workflows in Affinity. Sometimes it's just the name or icon of a tool is different. Sometimes it's been completely re-thought. And sometimes, a feature is just missing.
Honestly, this is something that Affinity should publish, itself, to encourage people to switch.
I'm in the same situation. I used the Photography subscription for LR + PS, as I don't care about any other tools (RIP Fireworks). I've been using Adobe Products since 1999. I just feel like supporting them is unethical.
Figma + Procreate replaced Photoshop for me for design/game dev workflows, but I'm still missing the right tools for Photography and image processing.
The OSS LR replacements feel too clunky, CaptureOne is fantastic but a bit pricey. I'll have to bite the bullet eventually and choose between convenience and cost.
Two questions:
1. Is Affinity desktop better than its iPad version?
2. What's your use case for Affinity as a replacement of PS?
C1 really is the only thing that comes close to LR right now. There is a version of CaptureOne that only works with Fujifilm cameras which is about 2/3 of the price of the full license and I believe there is (was?) something like that for other manufacturers too. They also still offer perpetual licenses, so this isn't necessarily an annual cost (I'm on 21). Still pricey of course.
I also migrated a few years ago, after having used Photoshop and Illustrator professionally for a long time.
The underlying features are there, but the lack of “flow” is the main source of frustration. A lot of common or frequent actions require needless extra steps, or simple actions require convoluted workarounds.
They would benefit from starting an in-house creative studio, to get constant feedback from professionals using it for daily production. That or just start copying Adobe workflows verbatim, these are already solved problems.
- Illustrator (for making PDF maps from OSM data).
- Lightroom.
It'll take a bit of work to move my workflow to Affinity, but I think I've got a solid plan for that. (No, Affinity Designer does not open AIs properly... It does funky things with lines.)
But, I can't find a solid replacement for Lightroom. All I need is basic DAM (digital asset management) and crop/rotate/color. Can any of you suggest a GOOD alternative? Something that can import my library from Lightroom Classic would be ideal, but I can work around it if not. I'm very much willing to pay, and would prefer well-supported closed-source to OSS.
> (No, Affinity Designer does not open AIs properly... It does funky things with lines.)
I hope you'll report that! They seem to be pretty on top of fixing interop issues.
> Can any of you suggest a GOOD alternative?
If you need traditional DAM you'll want to look elsewhere, but if you're macOS-based I finally landed on Apple Photos with its extensions ecosystem (which includes software from Affinity, ON1, etc.). It also works great with RAW Power¹ — by Nik Bhatt, who previously led Aperture and iPhoto development at Apple — which is itself looking more and more like a complete Lightroom replacement.
AI is a closed proprietary format that is not published. What Affinity had said in the past is that they don’t read AI but do read the PDF portion of Illustrator files
I know folks are going to recommend RawTherapee and Darktable, and those are some admirable projects, but I also know that a lot of long-time Lightroom users bounce off of them. I'd still encourage you to give them a try, but also if you're willing to catalog what things are missing and provide feedback to those teams. Even better if you're willing and able to help make the change you want to see in OSS, but additional reinforcement on the things that are misses currently in their offerings will help strengthen those projects.
I've been using digiKam in a similar way, where Affinity Photo is where I do manipulation, and digiKam for organization. It's been working well enough, though, I am very much an amateur hobbyist.
Not a chance if you need it for professional editing. No clone tools, no camera profiles, probably lack of lens correction profiles as well. UI is prehistoric. RawTherapee is little bit less nerdy than darktable but still not suitable for serious photography work.
Huh? It has all that. UI is optimized for hardware controllers and customization, and I think if you value workflow and features you can tolerate your dog barking at your app. I personally observed darktable being used in a mid-to-large studio along with C1. I think the weakness of darktable in production is mainly speed and highlight restoration, not anything of what you said. And possibly its filmic module which confuses a lot of people. (subjective, many swear by it; you can use classic curves instead)
RawTherapee being less nerdy is also bizarre to hear, since it exposes much more technical details at once, without offering a definite workflow.
My problem with RT is that the ordering of its operations (an absolutely crucial thing) is not specified anywhere. It's just an explosion of sliders, more or less arbitrarily grouped into categories. Same goes for ART, the somewhat streamlined fork of RT. In contrast, DT offers a sane and documented pipeline, which reasonably follows the pipeline known from the video world, with its separation into scene-relative and output-relative parts based on physics and perception, adjusted for photography needs.
Strict terminology based on fundamental principles, strict reasoning and control over the pipeline, rooted in the video world. Perhaps that's why it looks somewhat foreign to you, it's a bit unlike most other photography tools which need to be marketed and typically offer "magic" with little reproducibility from one software to another. Like the saturation slider which is not actual saturation known from the color theory, at least in Lightroom and C1. Hence the endless bickering between photographers who don't understand fundamentals of color perception and fight over what software gives a better look.
Regarding the UI, maybe I'm different from the most but I honestly don't care how it looks, as long as it delivers and is usable. A professional tool is a truck, not a luxury car; it's alright to have it a bit dirty. I remember the days of Softimage 3D; when I've seen it the first time in 2000, it looked terribly ancient to me. But it was one of the most powerful CGI toolkits at the time.
Regarding the defaults, they are easily changed once and are used afterwards, provided you understand the fundamentals. However I've never needed to do so once I understood how it functions under the hood. The defaults look fine to me.
I'm not a professional photographer though, and despite DT being light years ahead of everyone in several areas I find it lacking in others, which prevents me from using it on a constant basis.
DT has a clone tool. It's part of the retouch tool.[1]
Which is very powerful and allows way more than just cloning. It is also non-destructive, like anything in DT.
DT has camera profiles, new cameras get added regularly.
You can also create them yourself if you have access to a color checker using a built-in tool.[2]
DT has tons of lens correction profiles. Basically anything you find in lensfun.
If your lens is missing, lensfun has a service where you send images and they send you the calibration data back and add it to to their database.[3]
I shoot (often exotic) manual glass most of the time.
If someone tells me DT is lacking in this regard it's a good indicator for me they have no clue what they are talking about or never used the app seriously.
UI: it could see improvement in terms of parameter exposure (no novice/simple mode) and ranges (some sliders go from 0..1, others from 0..100%) but otherwise?
What in the UI is prehistoric?
The catalog part of DT is also great. i.e. when your catalog is on a slow network or cloud drive DT can automatically cache RAWs locally and send back the XMPs with the edits only.
Caveat: I regularly get paid for photography work (it's not fulltime but give I worked professionally in blockbuster VFX for two decades I think I qualify).
I do all my processing in DT. If I have to do compositing work beyond that I export to Fusion.
I'll substantiate regarding UI: On a Mac it has no items in the menu bar. The default cursor is changed to a low-resolution raster image instead of the default OS cursor. The image metadata pop-ups keep appearing even though darktable is in the background and I'm typing in a textbox in my browser. Something's really off with the UI toolkit they rely on.
I agree with the GP that the UI makes it practically unusable. Prehistoric, and I'd be surprised if this can be used by anyone as-is. I'd take a look at the features, but while it's importing my catalog I can't open any subfolders to look at images already imported. Once I click open my top-level Pictures folder, it closes it again after half a second.
To be fair, this was using Darktable 3.6 (I had to open /Applications/darktable.app/Contents/info.plist to check as there is no About menu). Updating to the current latest 4.0.1.1_arm64 at least the metadata popup issue is mostly, but not 100%, fixed, and I could navigate through my catalog.
Adding: Even though my Fujifilm X-T4 is listed as supported on https://www.darktable.org/resources/camera-support/, and the preview images in grid mode appear, opening a single image displays two visually overlapping error messages about not being able to open the raw file. (One message is about switching to lighttable, the other about not being able to read white balance info. The image is not displayed.)
Your post is full of great information but didn't need the heading. Odds are really good that the poster you are replying to isn't actually lying. Instead they just aren't as familiar with DT as you are. You could have imparted the same information beginning with an opening that educated the user instead of insisting they were lying and a demand for proof.
Firstly calling someone a liar basically shuts down all discussion in most cases and secondly after you have provided the proof you needn't demand it of them. You can instead wait for them to absorb the data you have provided.
Example:
> Darktable in fact has the features you mentioned and more. I enjoy using it for professional work myself so let me tell you a little bit about the features that make it competitive.
This would refute the position without directly engaging in negativity which is more likely to be read especially by poster but I think we are all a bit tired of people calling each other liars on the internet at this point.
Shutting down the discussion should be the priority when one participant is just confidently asserting misinformation. Their motivations for doing so are not of interest.
I cannot find anything like heal tool or camera profiles (ie Fujifilm Provia, Canon Natural, etc.). Which brings me to prehistoric UI... There is tons of useless features, that are really pointless for serious workflow, but those most necessary things are missing or are hidden in obsolete UI. You really need to spend many hours by tweaking UI to get what is really needed and then find out, that it is not working correctly. I was not be able to get on DT from RAF same result as from LR. Ever.
Lens corrections are there and database has most used lenses.
After using Adobe stuff for many years, my stubbornness, with regards to subscriptions and cloud things, led me to buy the various bits of desktop Affinity software. I think they were only about £30 a piece, which isn't bad, but you really aren't buying Photoshop or Illustrator. Designer is a bit of a kludge, and V1 did seem like a work-in-progress. I was hoping a knife tool would be added before we got to V2.
There are techniques I'd been using for a long time, complicated little tasks with, on the face of it, simple results, that I wasn't able to reproduce in AD without a lot of thinking and farting around. For better or worse, this pushed me to change things up and explore other methods, and now I've learnt how to achieve things with programming, whether that's Processing or little things for Blender.
I know people operating businesses who've just stuck with an old computer running an old non-subscription version of the Adobe software they depend on. They don't really need anything from modern versions (some have been doing things since the '70s, adding computers to the mix in the '90s, and their techniques have not really changed all that much), and its Affinity kinda-equivalent is missing some little thing.
For me, just looking at the changes, V2 isn't terribly compelling. There are things I was doing ages ago in Illustrator that don't seem to be in Designer v2, like vector pattern swatches. Once you really get going with it, the absence of features or rough edges (see post in this thread about dashed borders) will leave you frustrated.
All that said, good on them for creating this affordable software, with no subscription.
Illustrator is the undefeated champ, and I've loved it deeply since 1987. You're right that nothing can replace it at the high-end. For that audience, a $20/month subscription for Illustrator or an all-apps subscription is a given.
Still, this Affinity upgrade is an insta-upgrade for me. On a practical level, I'm lucky enough to be able to "vote with my dollars" to support small developers and non-subscription software. From a creative perspective, sometimes it's helpful (or just fun!) to work with different tools.
I bought Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer in May of this year, less than 6 months ago. Some companies that offer perpetual licenses would simply give me the upgrade to the next version for free since it came out within a year, and basically all of them would offer an upgrade discount that isn't simply a launch sale, into perpetuity.
The price is good for decent software but it's kind of discouraging me from wanting to upgrade, when their goal should be the exact opposite of that.
This was one thing that annoyed me about Affinity as well, no AVIF or WEBP support. There are a number of threads on their forums asking for it, but Serif staff stopped responding to those a while ago.
Longtime GIMP user, never spent much time on any alternatives.
This hit all my checkboxes:
- No arbitration clause in the ToS
- Rest of the ToS, PP is a breath of fresh air (comparatively speaking.)
- One-time payment, not subscription based
- License across all platforms is surprising and good, and is what made this an instant purchase.
It's nice to know I'll have Affinity 2 forever, even if Adobe (god forbid) purchases Affinity.
The good news here is that Adobe suite is not really threatened by Affinity products, as they're ahead in terms of features and enterprise presence.
They acquired Figma because Figma was quickly becoming the go-to collaborative UI design tool in the workplace, something Adobe did not have with AdobeXD. If they were to try to acquire another company in this space, it would likely be Canva, rather than a comparatively small player like Serif.
Consumers/the free market told Adobe to fuck off, but Adobe ignored them and forced their way in by buying the competition. This is something they've consistently done throughout their history, and it doesn't seem like there's anything consumers can do about it.
FreeHand is probably the most high profile, if not well known nowadays, since it led to a lawsuit brought by pissed off ex-FreeHand customers (which ultimately ended in a shitty settlement).
This license, and alternatively the JetBrains licenses, are awesome. I will always try to support them!
Being given the freedom to install this on whatever computers I own, regardless of OS*, for one very reasonable fee, is amazing compared to the standard guard of “only one OS and only x computers”, or worse, “subscription based and you lose it all if you stop subscribing”.
I’ve been living in Linux using GIMP for what I’ve needed, but I’m definitely buying and supporting this for when I need a little more than GIMP.
On the other hand, once the previous version stops working, it stops working. With Apple and their constant changes and bad backward portability, you can end up with broken app.
For all of the old Microsoft's faults, they really did an excellent job with backwards compatibility. Now things are a mess and I fear that you are right. It really isn't the developers fault imo. OS really should be more stable.
It was not very clear about the Universal License, but if you purchase it, using your Account you activate also iPad versions for free. So for $99 you get all 3 apps for macOS, Windows and iPad, that is really cool deal!
I did too. I had v1 licenses for Photo and Designer on my Windows laptop and on iPad. I've recently switched my daily driver to Mac, and was planning to get Mac licenses for those, but was holding out for a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. This was a no-brainer for me.
(I'm not a professional user of these... but I find them super useful during game jams or while putting together ideas for web things.)
I've been Photoshop user since, hmm, 2000? Gave up couple of years ago, and spent some time comparing Affinity Designer and Pixelmator Pro. For me personally, Pixelmator won, and it's been my editor of choice:
I actually use Pixelmator Pro vector tools a lot, for illustrating, not photo editing - they are quite basic (comparing to Illustrator) but for my specific needs it's quite enough.
Interesting. I had the opposite outcome. I didn't like how Pixelmator reinvented the wheel as far as interface goes. I felt like Affinity Photo was a much better lateral transition from Photoshop for my needs. I bought both though mostly to support them. I'm glad we have options that aren't Adobe. I just can't abide the idea of licensing software in perpetuity.
It looks like there are only two big bugs keeping it from running in Wine, etc., a flickering issue and the fact that they're using a deprecated Windows API call to save to disk. However, they also seem to show no interest in making it work. They'll still have to update that call eventually, though.
They really should fix it. The fact that they're selling software and not subscriptions (unlike the competition) means that if they get one version running well on Wine, they could take as long as they wanted to get any later version running. Linux users will just be a year or two behind everyone else, but they'd be grateful.
Supposedly they're a relatively small team. According to another comment (I don't use it personally), they're missing a lot of features Adobe has had for decades, so they would probably understandably prioritize porting to Linux under even that.
I sympathize with them completely. The effort needed to port it to Linux most likely won't be worth the small user base (and the even smaller percentage of Linux users that'll use proprietary software)
This works precisely because Adobe's terms are so exortionary that they don't want to risk testing their validity in court by suing you... Well played!
It's great to see Serif finally offering a paid upgrade for the Affinity suite. Serif is a tiny company, and their size versus the incredible ambition of their products has resulted in some often frustratingly slow development ever since the first release of Affinity Designer back in 2014.
Even in the long-awaited V2, there are still popular features Adobe Illustrator had twenty years ago that Affinity has yet to offer an alternative to, such as vector pattern brushes, auto-trace, and even shape blends, something Illustrator has had for closer to 30 years. I really hope the infusion of cash from this new release allows them to staff up and further realize the potential of this excellent alternative to the Adobe hegemony.
I can’t recommend Affinity enough. It’s well worth the spend. It really shines as a complete set of integrated tools, even on an old iPad! That’s what Adobe is up against, IMO. The brushes could use some work, but if you’re looking for missing features, I suggest taking a look at Vectornator[^1], which has Auto-trace and brushes at a reasonable price. (no affiliation)
When I couldn't get my copy of Adobe CS3 (from 2007) to install on a new Mac (64-bit only), I bought Designer and Photo from Affinity. Up until 2015, I made my living as designer, and was intimately familiar with Adobe's tools.
Unlike everything else available (mostly open source), I slid right into Affinity's workflow without a hitch. Compared to CS3, this was actually quite the upgrade in terms of functionality. I suspect that might not be the case for people using the latest versions.
If I were still designing with these tools day-in and day-out, I might have a different view on Affinity's offerings. But, for my light usage, they tick every box.
I pretty much use Affinity Designer every day since their Windows launch (2017?) . This saved me hundreds of euros or more in comparison to Photoshop. I will 100% buy this!
I was preparing myself for disappointment because I expected the new version to be accompanied by subscription pricing, but this is an incredible value.
I only casually mess around with the ipad version at the moment, but I'm tempted to purchase the whole suite because it's such a friendly deal.
I didn't intend to create another opportunity for jpeg-xl partisanship, but well, it happened.
> Yes. One can barely argue AVIF is better than JPEG XL on the Web.
One can very persuasively argue that AVIF is better on the web; for 99,999% cases used in the wild it will be better. Yes, some marginal cases are better handled by another formats, it is nothing unheard of.
> For authoring, JPEG XL win hands down.
For authoring, .psd, .afphoto or whatever is the native format of the used app will be used.
I had shifted to Affinity photo from Photoshop few years ago. I need to use it once in a while so Affinity photo does the job for me. It has its own quirks but I can live with them. There is still no real alternative for Lightroom unfortunately for bulk RAW photo processing.
There was talk of them working on a DAM solution a few years ago, sadly this never materialized. I would love to be able to move on from Adobe completely, but I still haven’t find the right replacement for Lightroom..
Last time I tried to completely switch to Capture One, there were major features missing. I currently use both because there are things that Capture One does a lot better than Lightroom (eg. skin tones, tethered shooting)
The biggest one for me is the fact that you can't manually remove chromatic aberration. If your lens is not in their database with a profile, you can't do it at all. The database is also very small; if you are using anything old or with no electronic, it's likely not gonna be there.
And if taking 30% wasn't enough of an offense, they are now also stuffing search results of people looking for Affinity products with all kinds of ad crap. I can fully understand why they yanked their products from the Mac App Store and will happily purchase the suite directly from them.
I don't know why Photoshop doesn't have built in masking tools like they now have. I shouldn't have to use an extension so (easily) make luminosity or color masks.
Just 4h ago I went to affinitys website because I wanted to download photos for my work laptop and I got a page "we're working on something big. stay tuned".
And now I'm seing this. I'm hyped.
Edit: Looks like there's no discount if you already own a license which is a bummer considering they advertised with selling you a lifetime license.
If you bought a lifetime license to the previous version, you can still use the previous version. (That's most commonly what "lifetime" license means... it's called that in contrast to a "subscription" where you can't keep using it if you stop paying.)
Usually people who offer upgrades for life will use those words.
I bought photos and designer for Windows and iPad. My daily driver is now a Mac, and I was hoping for a cyber Monday type sale to pick up a Mac version. This seems good to me, and the sale feels like a nice upgrade discount.
It's life time for that version. You can continue using your old version forever. I paid my $40 or $60 whatever 3 years ago and have gotten way more than $40 of value out of it.
I'm about to happily plunk down money again because the price is right, it's a perpetual license, and it's a solid product.
I just wish they'd release a DAM, because that's the one item I need right now.
I have used Affinity products for years so this was a no-brainer buy. It is a pity though that V2 products can't be activated offline; they require you to login with your account to activate.
Spent £116 through the App Store on version 1 of this software not long ago and now I can't upgrade, but instead, have to buy it all again at a "discount". Downloading my versions means looking through the purchase history too.
Similar situation(bought Designer V1 about a year ago, directly from them) but I'm not angry. It makes complete sense from their perspective and makes sense for me too.
I completely agree that continued work needs to be payed and I don't expect to buy a software once and receive updates for it forever. If I was using it in a professional capacity all the time, I would have preferred a cheaper monthly subscription but because I'm using it mostly now and then, pay for the V1 and use it forever and pay again if I would like the newer version works very well for me.
I suspect this move away from the App Store is probably because the App Store _still_ doesn't have a reasonable way to do upgrade pricing. Affinity v3 (whenever that comes out) would be able to offer specific upgrade pricing because they've left the App Store.
Hmm, I bought it about…a couple weeks ago? And they sent me an email with two discount codes: a free copy of Affinity Photo 2, and a heavy discount on the all-apps-all-platforms license.
Depending on what "not long ago" means, that's pretty unfortunate timing. You should reach out to them. They've been pushing updates and features for V1 for a long time and have an established track record for being a company that isn't nickel-and-diming people. The line does have to be drawn somewhere though. Long term users have known this was coming, but I can see how the short/mid term user might feel pinched.
Warning: To buy the bundle, you apparently need to have an affinity id/registration. At least I can't figure out how to buy it in the mac app store.
All the apps are "free" with in-app purchase. I did the in-app bundle purchase for Designer 2. Now it won't let me apply that to Photo 2, without "activating" (requires registration with serif) or re-buying. Purchasing the bundle again asks for authentication which I didn't complete because I don't want to get charged twice. I was hoping it would recognize my previous purchase and just be a pass-through. I suppose because it's an in-app purchase, it will happily purchase as many times as I click. (As opposed to straight-up app purchases, which you can only do once per apple id.)
"Restore purchase" link is completely unresponsive.
One of the selling points of app store is that I don't give any info to the developer. So even though I could (and always do) use a one-time generated email address, they can still link that to my apple id. bah.
If I had known this in advance I would have paid the extra $20 to buy each individually, rather than the bundle. So maybe this will help a scant few others.
The mac app store can have bundles, so either serif chose not to create such bundle, or the app store simply didn't show that to me. Indeed search doesn't find any of these apps at all. I had to follow a deep link I got from I don't know where. That part also is very mysterious. I believe https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/serif-labs/id536107177 to be the link to all serif apps on the app store.
Thank god it looks like they finally fixed the slider UI on iPad. Previously the slider for something like a a stroke size appeared radially which was awkward. Worse, it didn’t actually function radially. You could not drag the slider around the circle. Instead dragging to the right increased the value and dragging left decreased the value; also dragging up increased the value and dragging down decreased the value. Both axis operated at the same time so if you dragged right but also down slightly, some of the dragging would cancel itself out. The only way to get it to work properly was to drag diagonally between the bottom left of the screen to the top right. Now it appears the sliders just go up and down like every other UI on the planet.
It does not appear that they have added free form and mesh gradients or gradients along a path. I really really don’t like Adobe, but it’s all the little long tail features that makes it hard for me to switch away.
I wonder if they fixed the defect that repeatedly and incrementally blurs your images in Photo when you merge layers. I mean... how can you use a product that degrades your images continually as you work with your compositions?
Does Photo finally have a "transform selection" option, which lets you resize the selection marquee? Yes, it was released without a way to adjust the selection... and has stayed that way for years.
Does Photo finally have a crop tool that actually crops the image?
Does Designer finally have a function to trim the canvas to the objects on it?
Do the apps finally have a "do not print" option on layers?
It doesn't appear that Serif has fixed profound UI defects that have hobbled the suite from the beginning...
The gradient-fill dialog hasn't been revised at all; it is still baffling and dysfunctional, and lacks any way to control gradient angle: https://i.imgur.com/OUh5Ase.png And there's only one color well.
The eyedropper's functionality is still backward... or I should say eyedroppers', because they're all over the place. You can have three or four on the screen at once. Why?
You still can't set things to be the same size by selecting them all and then entering dimensions in the transform panel. It irritatingly resizes THE SELECTION BOX around the objects to the size you enter, mashing the objects to unintended sizes within it. WTF?
This is not looking good. Historically they've had a smug, shitty attitude toward defects and sure enough, they persist for years.
Wondering if they’ve added WEBP export (I don’t see it in the release notes).
I’ve been prodding Affinity on their forums with a feature request over the past few years, but other forum-dwellers get weirdly hostile over it… like, yeah, I wish JPEG-2000 had made it too, but it didn’t, and WEBP is here today and it works, should our graphics apps not live in the present?
Is my understanding correct that Affinity Photo doesn't have any photo management capability? If you want to edit a series of images similarly, do you create a custom preset that you then apply to the other images and just reopen the editor for every image?
- Designer and Photo keep asking me to download and install a new version manually every time I open it, rather than just taking care of their own updates.
- Pasting if there's no document open doesn't work. You have to do 'new from clipboard'.
> Designer and Photo keep asking me to download and install a new version manually every time I open it, rather than just taking care of their own updates.
It's super annoying to upgrade, too. If they added an auto updater I would instantly buy v2. But right now I don't really see a reason yet.
They undoubtedly have the most friendly business model, but as some commenters noted, it isn't a drop-in replacement and Adobe's workflow is still (sadly) unmatched.
However there's another problem: Adobe is still the industry standard. Employers are looking for Adobe on resumes, they provide employees with Adobe products and they expect a certain compatibility between their employees (i.e. Alice and Bob can work on the same files).
Learning the Affinity suite might actually hurt your career as long as this is the case. As a career decision it is still a better move to put your time into Adobe.
The best thing about Affinity is that Adobe noticed and I've been on "first year only" Creative Cloud promo €30/mo for a couple of years now, all it takes is a mention on chat whenever the promo is about to end.
I bought Affinity Photo. The keyboard shortcuts don't work unless "focus" is on the image, I think. So often, they don't, and you have to click on the image to make them work. This rather defeats the purpose of shortcuts.
Using the keyboard shortcut to select a tool, also changes which subtool is selected. This is infuriating, and a magnificently stupid UI design.
I really wanted to like Affinity Photo, and I certainly use it as a photo editor, but every time I do I just wish I'd paid for Photoshop instead. It's pretty bad.
I migrated from Adobe to Affinity years ago and have absolutely loved it. In particular the abiilty to use both vector and raster graphics in Designer is a game changer.
$99 for the universal license is an amazing deal. Well done Serif!
Is there any improvement on how Affinity Publisher 2 handles multi column layout? This was one of the neat things that InDesign finally imported from Ventura Publisher etc. who did this in the early 90s: You can have a paragraph style span columns. Without that, the interaction of sections and columns often gets rather tedious.
AP1 was a lot closer to the PageMaker style of things. (I don't have a use case for vector graphics, and my limited bitmap needs are more than served by Pixelmator, Gimp, ImageMagick and Paint Shop Pro 7 via wine)
I've bought the whole Affinity suite (v1) on Mac, Windows, and iPadOS over the course of the past couple of years, and I'm happy to pay $100 to support further development and get access to v2 of all of it at once!
I only use Affinity software casually every now and then, but it's a lifesaver when I do need it. Paying $100 every several years for a new major version is absolutely a worthwhile cost, and it's especially nice that it's not required (cough Adobe)
Has anyone switched to Affinity Designer from Illustrator for vector work (logos, svg, icons, etc) and liked it? I've been avoiding paying for Illustrator given the extreme monthly cost for my use-case, but found Inkspace and other alternatives pretty lacking. I pay for Photoshop since I'm so comfortable with it, but can't justify the extra $$$ to add Illustrator given I'd use it a handful of times a month max.
> Has anyone switched to Affinity Designer from Illustrator for vector work (logos, svg, icons, etc) and liked it?
I found v1 frustrating. They’ve been touting their “precision” from the get go, but in my experience it was anything but precise. And I mean going into the transform panel, inserting exact values by hand, and then the software moves it 0.1 points to the right.
Making separate shapes then connecting them was also a fool’s errand. When it works at all, it often leaves two connected points in the same location, as opposed to merging them. Even if you insert their locations manually and exactly. I’ve wasted many many hours due to their imprecision.
With all that out of the way, I’m trialing v2 and am cautiously optimistic. I haven’t been able to trigger any of the bugs so far. Doesn’t mean they’re not there, but maybe they’re fixed.
Is anyone using Affinity for cartography? I’m currently using ArcGIS —> Illustrator workflow but am curious if a QGIS —> Affinity workflow is feasible.
So, I've been using Illustrator for years with an OSM -> Illustrator workflow where I start with OSM XML, feed it to osm2ai.pl, and then wholly style it by hand. It's... fine... but Illustrator's cost is getting to me.
I gave QGIS -> Affinity a cursory look the other day and had no problem taking my results from an Overpass query and exporting it from QGIS as SVG and bringing it into Affinity. So, that gave me a ton of hope.
The opening of Illustrator files in Affinity Designer kinda sucks (my dashed paths for trails come in as tons of different objects, like it's actually only bringing in the PDF preview) but if I start anew on some of the maps I think it'll be fine.
I just bought the 2.0 package mentioned here and the next map I do I'll be doing in Affinity Designer to see how it goes. Fingers crossed!
A while back I thought about making my maps in QGIS, but found the stuff for styling the map just... lacking. It was a LOT easier to do what I wanted in Illustrator. But there was still the problem of getting the bare vectors into there for styling.
Holy grail for me would be some sort of OSM -> Affinity where I can define groups based on OSM tags.
A single licence for all apps on all platforms at a reasonable price? Sweet.
Previously I’ve only been using Affinity on Mac. Now I’ll be able to see how it performs on Windows as well.
I wonder though if they fixed the crop tool. The rectangle wouldn’t stay within photo borders, i.e. any “constrain proportion” setting would be useless, and trying to align the crop with one of the borders was very mundane, pushing me to do all my cropping in ACDSee.
Last time I used Affinity Photo years ago it was well behind Photoshop especially in RAW editing.
Has it come to somewhere comparable? I really want to go Affinity instead of paying Adobe every month but I want something at least capable as Photoshop and Camera Raw. I heavily do astrophotography/night photo editing and Affinity was just not good enough. But it was years ago.
Any recommendations from anyone who used both recently?
I don't want to renew my (annual) subscription for Lightroom and Photoshop when it's up; ideally I would like to move this workflow Linux (it's one of the few things keeping me on macOS). Are there Linux alternatives besides Darktable and Gimp and are they really able to compete with the Adobe (or Affinity) offerings?
When Adobe switched to the subscription only a lot of people looked
at ways to move on.
This created a plethora of "replacement" applications and suits.
I have tried most of them.
Affinity is a great alternative that has in my opinion stood the test best.
They are remarkably good and not weighed down with all sorts of gimmicks and
fluff.
I've been wishing for a long time that they would charge more money -- so as to fund development of more features. Hopefully this is that! I'm optimistic but only slightly, since the banner feature is "completely redesigned UI".
I was so convinced that they would have moved to a subscription model out of pure fear that it took me ages to even convince myself it was a one time payment even though it was on giant letters on the page
It's great Serif added the shape builder tool to Affinity. It's one of the most useful tools in Illustrator. Now that Affinity has it, I don't see any reason to keep using Illustrator.
I'm very tempted to get Affinity 2 for that price but lately I've found that most Mac apps tend to release major versions weirdly often and in that case there's not a lot of difference between having yearly subscription and paying to update once a year.
The difference would be the ability to stop paying at any point and keep the software you bought. I thought that was the whole point of buying software outright as opposed to subscriptions. Not paying developers less for ongoing development.
It includes licenses for all supported platforms. No, it doesn't support the Nintendo Switch, Android, Linux and many others, but calling it a lie because of that is a bit much.
> IIRC a long time ago they actually promised a Linux version
Did they actually "promise" it or just didn't outright reject it from the start?
For people making their living with graphical work (designers, photographers, etc.) Adobe is probably still the way to go (even if just to keep using the muscle memory). However for the many people who only need something like Photoshop or InDesign a couple of times a year, Affinity is just great.