I bought Affinity Photo and Designer. So far, am very satisfied with them.
With the horrible Adobe subscription model, can’t wait to switch. Still bound by the yearly contract and canceling it is going to cost 50% of the remaining and terminate immediately. It sucks.
I would recommend getting affinity now and not waiting. As awesome as it is, there will still be some pain when switching, especially if you are a power user. Some features are different enough that it will really slow you down until you get up to speed on it.
If you are on a deadline and suddenly being new to affinity causes you to miss your goals that can be bad.
So I would suggest getting it now while you have access to Photoshop. That way, while you are learning affinity, you still have Photoshop to fall back on in a pinch.
I own and switch my complete department to use Affinity Designer and Photo and the students love it.
Some canceled their subscription - for them it was still cheaper. Only two die hard Adobe fans remained with Adobe.
Beginner students who just started in the major I ask to learn Gravit Designer which is a Freehand clone and they learn
pretty fast the concepts of layouting grid and typography before they will go into my adv presentation class where we will
use Affinity then.
I don’t know what level you teach but from my college days the emphasis was very much on preparing for a professional job. How do you deal with the fact that most employers will be looking for Adobe skills?
Here is my thing about this. I hear this argument all the time. To me a great teacher/course will teach you the concepts, why you are doing something and how to get the same results using whatever tool is put in front of you. You either want someone who only knows Photoshop and nothing else or you want someone who you can sit in front of a computer and will churn out something if you give them a manual and a few hours to learn it. The concepts aren’t rocket science and sure shortcuts and specific features can be a hurdle but just like programming you learn the concepts then moving to another language/environment is more about learning about the specifics or api or what have you.
I’m in the music industry. There are people who swear by specific DAWs (ProTools, Logic, Cubase, Ableton, etc.) I have and can use all those apps, I’m DAW agnostic and actively seek out new ones to learn because the only thing I want holding me back from doing what I need is personal preference not an albatross around my neck preventing from growing or learning other things because that’s what everyone else uses.
I bought Affinity Photo and Designer for a web dev course I was taking and while they asked for Photoshop and illustrator specifically I was able to follow along with no issues since the concepts being used were very similar.
The biggest hurdle is format exchange and while not perfect Affinity supports PSDs just fine for the most part.
I feel the same way about Blender though I think Blender sometimes buries the concepts a bit behind process and technical knowledge barrier.
Quick question to anyone that owns this,… does the license allow me to install on multiple machines? (My desktop and laptop)
Thanks.
Thanks, that answered it. Just tried the demo and I think I will pick this up later tonight.
Affinity Photo and Designer are apparently great for Drawing/Painting purposes too…
I also like how easy it is for me with Affinity Photo and a couple steps to obliterate specular lights from images.
(old comparison video)
Hopefully the developers are improving the macro function further and adding an API to it,
so we could add or create our own program bridges and plugins.
A feature which I really like from Affinity Photo/Designer is, you can save out Files with an history of up to 8192 Steps.
Lets see what the 1.6 Update will bring feature and improvement wise. :eyebrowlift:
I really want to use Affinity, but the lack of a universal sticky key (shift in Photoshop) for straight vertical/horizontal and 45 degree lines keeps me from making a switch. The Pixel Tool has this feature to a certain extent (no 45 degree constraint), but not the Paint Brush Tool for some reason.
Hopefully they will implement this feature fully in the near future. Until then, I’ll keep watching things progress from the sidelines.
You can make a feature request at the forum:
https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/forum/6-feature-requests/
I bought it this week, having much fun with it.
I thought about doing that, but the feature has already been brought up several times over the last two years in that forum, which makes me a bit disheartened, as there is a lot to like about the applications overall. I can understand that most users probably wouldn’t regard it as a critical feature though.
For the being, you could make usage of Lazynezumi within Affinity Photo/Designer to draw lines vertically/horizontally and in 45 degrees.
http://lazynezumi.com/
Thanks for the suggestion. That tool has really come a long way since it was first published. Unfortunately, I only have a mac computer.
2 years is quite a long time, they could have achieved even more. However, they have several products to improve if we talk about excuses.
Rigth now it can be easely beat by advantages of https://macphun.com/luminar despite it’s a mac photo editor. Sometimes its better to improve the main option and only afterwards move further to different OS version.