By the looks of things it has many features that looks to rival Photoshop, but does it without the bloat and without any legacy cruft (and without the cost, considering their special at only 39 USD).
Good news for professionals and painters alike (finally, there’s a good alternative to Photoshop). Bad news for Adobe as this has potential to draw away legions of users. It’s also bad news for The GIMP (why anyone would use it on non-Linux systems now is beyond me (unless of course their choices are powered by ideology rather than what works best).
Now I’ve already heard of Photoline being an alternative, but I’ve heard reports that the devs. aren’t as welcoming to advice on things like usability as our resident user has claimed (that being on Modo’s forum), but it seems like the feedback is universally positive for Affinity (and as such I myself might finally have a reason to leave ye-olde PSP7 behind for good).
Check it out and enjoy the fact that one does not have to join the Creative Cloud if they want a modern solution
Picked up Affinity Designer a few weeks ago to replace Illustrator and hopefully all of the Adobe subscription rubbish. This is really looking awesome for artists.
Not entirely so: one of the major complaints (for almost two years now) from a large group of Affinity users is that the GUI colour is fixed to DARK ONLY. It is not possible to switch to a light interface. As one photographer pointed out on the Affinity forum: a dark GUI is terrible for photo adjustments.
In fact the devs of PhotoLine are very open to suggestions and are very quick in solving bugs. They just ignore complains that are not constructive - if you keep saying that the PhotoLine’s UI is bad and don’t tell them what and how could be improved noone will care.
As for Affinity Photo - I tested the beta and I quite like the UI (except for the modules) and those non destructive filters. I was very dissapointed by the HDRI merge - it gave me worse shadows that editing just one photo in LightRoom. The default HDRI presets are just terrible. I also experienced some crashes with OpenEXR files, but it was in the Beta and I didn’t have time to report it. I guess I will buy the Affinity Photo even if I won’t be using it just to support them. Competition is good but for now I guess Afinity Photo can’t replace PhotoLine in my workflow.
I bought Designer and Photo and those are so far astonishing and catered to my needs.
With all those tutorials from Serif, their quick developers and more importantly their active and helpful user base,
it has been proven time after time that the Affinity line is useful and catered towards professionals.
I think if you’re interested in painting you’d be better off getting in to Krita (https://krita.org/en/) being opensource it will only get better and better (It’s already awesome).
These smaller commercial players are always a risk. It only takes one fat cheque from Adobe and they own it
According to their blog, Affinity Photo as a software is less than two years from its initial launch at the moment (Photoline has been around far longer in comparison).
For that short of a period, their progress is looking pretty impressive (so the argument on giving it time should be valid).
Yeah, I am using Krita at the moment, but find a lot of photo editing capabilities lacking. Also the non-destructive filters in Affinity Photo seems like a godsend!
And yes I also used Gimp, but that was even worse.
That’s because Krita is being developed as a painting program and not a photo-editing/post-pro program.
You can read about it on their site when they decided to drop the generalist aspect in favor of specialization (a major reason being the low amount of resources that defines the majority of FOSS projects).
Note; I’m not defending Krita’s photo tools, but there’s a clear reason why they aren’t very good.
Very impressive! Out of the box, I already felt 90% comfortable using it. Most of the keyboard shortcuts are identical to photoshop, and many of the tools function the same.
The haze removal filter is some kind of devil magic, the inpainting seems just as effective as PS, it imports and exports .psd pretty seamlessly, even on complex layer stacks. The undo history is cavernous, with a fun slider to see all the changes over time (great for showing your boss/clients all the tiny tweaks that go into an image). Plus you can save all the undo history when you save the file, a feature I had never even considered, but is really cool.
For the price of 2 months of a PS subscription, you can own Affinity Photo forever. Totally worth it.
No, it is not. Our visual system cannot absolutely distinguish luminosity and adjusts to the overall lighting conditions. In general it is best to colour correct in a neutral/slightly lighter grey than neutral environment. It also depends on the job: if the final images are displayed in a light room with light-grey backgrounds, photos graded in a dark grey/black GUI will turn out to be too dark. Vice versa for movies that will be shown in a dark film theater.
In any case, the GUI colours MUST be adjustable. And many users cannot physically deal with a dark/black GUI, which may cause migraines.
It’s relative - a matter of perspective. You seem to own a car (gas), have a place to live, have an internet connection, and a computer to call your own. Compared to a large part of the Earth’s population living on this planet you have it good.
