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.
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 cannot complete projects in them and I certainly have tried.
Affinity Designer lacks many utilities from illustrator like advanced gradient handling, perspective alignment and repetition automation. Inkscape isn’t that far off from Designer imho.
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.
Affinity Publisher is the weakest of the trio. But then again, so is InDesign. These two aren’t too far off but InDesign has better tools around multi page layout and quickly updating templates references. I don’t know of a good OSS equivalent.
Again, I think these tools are great for people who value the price over the feature set. Most people don’t need more than they offer. But if you’re a professional, the Adobe products are yet unmatched.
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?
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 Indesign (speed, stability, editing of photos/vectors directly inside publisher) but it lacks one main feature and thats scripts api/third party plugins. Until they release that then professional shops simply cant switch because of automation and super specific workflows they need.
> 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 complete deal-breaker. That's like 15 minutes of work per piece foisted back onto me, and like, I just cannot fathom a reason to even have the Layer States feature if you aren't going to use it for this.
Do you know of Scribus, or do you not consider it a good OSS equivalent for InDesign? Last time I've worked with InDesign was around 2011, and it was meh. Scribus is also really realy meh, but gets the job done. I've got an Affinity license and have been using Designer for a bunch of projects - to me it's a toss between that and Scribus for what I do. They are totally different, but I have more experience with Scribus and therefore am much quicker in using that.
Some features are “missing” or don’t work in a similar way. For example, Affinity Designer doesn’t have shape replication tools like Illustrator, manual copy paste is required. You also can’t trace an image to turn it into vector outlines. Just two things off the top of my head that I noticed because I used them extensively in Adobe Illustrator. So if you’re only using a subset of features you’re probably fine, but without testing Affinity’s products for yourself it might be hard to tell if they’re a like for like replacement for you.
It's been a while now but I got Inkscape (free but clunky Illustrator alternative) to do shape replication across a path for me once, and then I copied the result into Affinity Designer. Obviously if you need to do that frequently, it's not gonna work well but I've only had to do that a few times since ditching Adobe.
Or perhaps you are describing something else I am unfamiliar with the terminology.
I've been going back to several tutorials on youtube for doing things affinity - as it seems to have the capabilities I am used to with the old photoimpact, it's just finding where / how is not the same.
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 firat 85%, but just cannot comprehend why they couldn't copy the last 15%.
The keyboard actions alone are maddening. Trying to switch tools, exit a text editing mode, change tool properties, all can be very frustrating to do with the keyboard.
I've replaced Adobe with Affinity and am mostly satisfied, although in the latest versions I've been experiencing bugs with the renderer (eg artifact lines or the canvas being cut off by one pixel) which introduces some difficulties.
The best way is to install it and try using it side by side for your use case.
For general stuff, it's very serviceable and comparable to Adobe.
If there's something very specific it might require confirming if the equivalent features exist in both, and if the procedure is different, what that is. New muscle memory like learning vim, but I know several people who are very happy with it and stick with it. They can always hop on Adobe if they need it here or there.
dagmx|1 year ago
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 cannot complete projects in them and I certainly have tried.
Affinity Designer lacks many utilities from illustrator like advanced gradient handling, perspective alignment and repetition automation. Inkscape isn’t that far off from Designer imho.
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.
Affinity Publisher is the weakest of the trio. But then again, so is InDesign. These two aren’t too far off but InDesign has better tools around multi page layout and quickly updating templates references. I don’t know of a good OSS equivalent.
Again, I think these tools are great for people who value the price over the feature set. Most people don’t need more than they offer. But if you’re a professional, the Adobe products are yet unmatched.
wetpaste|1 year ago
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?
omnimus|1 year ago
Adobe Publisher is close though and in many important ways its way better than Indesign (speed, stability, editing of photos/vectors directly inside publisher) but it lacks one main feature and thats scripts api/third party plugins. Until they release that then professional shops simply cant switch because of automation and super specific workflows they need.
ToucanLoucan|1 year ago
I want to switch but the total lack of any automated export functionality is a complete deal-breaker. That's like 15 minutes of work per piece foisted back onto me, and like, I just cannot fathom a reason to even have the Layer States feature if you aren't going to use it for this.
thunfisch|1 year ago
ntlk|1 year ago
herpdyderp|1 year ago
stevenicr|1 year ago
Or perhaps you are describing something else I am unfamiliar with the terminology.
I've been going back to several tutorials on youtube for doing things affinity - as it seems to have the capabilities I am used to with the old photoimpact, it's just finding where / how is not the same.
S0und|1 year ago
jay_kyburz|1 year ago
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.
robertoandred|1 year ago
bonestamp2|1 year ago
sumnole|1 year ago
j45|1 year ago
For general stuff, it's very serviceable and comparable to Adobe.
If there's something very specific it might require confirming if the equivalent features exist in both, and if the procedure is different, what that is. New muscle memory like learning vim, but I know several people who are very happy with it and stick with it. They can always hop on Adobe if they need it here or there.