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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Nah.. it was pretty easy to jump. Life is beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
You just reminded me of it.
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.
[1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/145760-how...
I consider Illustrator unusable as a result. It's also essentially abandonware.
Deleted Comment
I have to admit that even with some experience, Affinity doesn't get close to Photoshop in terms of shortcuts and ease of use ("getting in the flow").
Sometimes I even resort to using photopea web, rather than open affinity.
That said, I really appreciate their pricing model and hope they stick to their guns.
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.
They're not even complicated requests; stuff like non-printing layers and the ability to resize the selection marquee. I mean... WTF?
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.
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?
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.
Good product and good business model.
(Please let it not happen!)
A combination of these usually gets the job done.
Adobe products are boycotted in my work setup. I'm voting with my wallet!
- 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.
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.
¹ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/raw-power-for-macos/index.ht...
Check out digikam. I'm using it as DAM only and Affinity Photo for RAW development and image manipulation (but digikam can handle that as well).
I'm stuck on LR 5 myself as I'm too lazy to move my library.
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.
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.
Before that, I'm confident that Aldus Freehand kicked Illustrator's ass.
Strange price model where existing customers do not get an upgrade discount.
I'm an existing customer, and I look at it as 40% off for existing customers to upgrade, and also 40% off for people upgrading from Adobe.
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 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.
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.
/end-lossely-related-rant
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.
* sans Linux in this case, sadly