Instead, their answer is to cease all development an support immediately. Stopping all new features but still releasing compatibility and security fixes is incredibly common in software when major versions change. They should have a deprecation plan in place for gradually winding down v1. They aren't the first company to have to walk that back a bit with major version releases. But at the end of the day, Affinity was marketed as the answer to subscription bloat. I also have a (quite) expensive Adobe subscription. I've owned all of the Affinity products for quite a while, so I've gotten plenty of value from them. People like to point out that they've owned Affinity products for a long time, and therefore have gotten their value out of them. The bugs that already exist? Those aren't getting taken care of either. That means, if you bought v1 last week, you cannot expect any compatibility support moving forward. They are telling users that v1 is now completely unsupported. I'm not moaning at them about the price, but I think it's fair to consider what they are actually saying.

But I think Affinity is still not there yet IMO.Yes, and I'm one of them. I like how it allows to pack channels right in layer stack, easily do dynamic mask stacks and use 'erase' blend mode to input into alpha where in Photoshop it requires a hell of a groups clipping inside another group and so on. It works much speedier with gpu support and has a few true advantages/conveniences over Psh. Gradients it Affinity makes noisy normal map except it's layer FX gradient and while contrary to Photoshop you can make a live filter effect of turning depth to normal map it works properly only in 32 bit mode.Īffinity has a lot of potential and if devs would want it could be much more flexible. ĭisplace aka direction wrap or slope blur ( my most used thing in SD ) works in Photoshop almost same way and in Affinity it's totally wrong. I still prefer Photoshop to edit photogrammetry scans for example. Content ware move tool in Phtoshop is also a bit superior to Affinity patch tool. Could be done in Affinity too but in Photoshop you can force copy/pasting parts rotating and flipping randomly while in Affinity it often makes visibly repeating fragments. Since Sampler killed content aware fill Photoshop is place to do it. Somehow still more artist friendly and responsive for important subtle depth/height touches here a there.Įver switchable 'pattern preview' working on top of your smart objects composition let you get perfectly tilable result any time. You can easily recreate the whole Quixel mixer material mixing process in Photoshop minus real time preview although. With a bit of java scripting you can automate the whole workflow, do final channel packing from layer compositions. You can do action/script that could make one click 'height blend' masks stack and keep normal,roughness, depth 'channels' inside switchable smart objects and layer compositions. Photoshop still could be used in modern texturing pipline as a texture mixer / compositor. If you photobash 150 layers, probably stick with PS. For smaller projects that are not too heavy, they are absolutely capable and suitable, been doing that for over a year now. So yeah, if you plan on using Affinity Software, have a look at Designer and Photo, right now they should be up for sale for about 25 bucks each which is a no brainer. I really wished, the idiot that I am, that I had bought CS6 when I had the chance.Īnd I dislike Adobes strategy of subscriptions and the lack of good updates, if anything, they chance hotkeys and behavior and make Photoshop more unstable then before, at least for all of our agency where I work, with mixed Windows and Mac systems. On the other hand, Photoshop is nothing but a shadow to what is was once. They still have a few little problems in the UI here and there and Photo is not yet as robust as Photoshop. I think the 2.0 release of Affinity will tell us more about the future, should come in a few months. On a Mac I've heard good things about all Affinity apps. I throw around a lot of images and data in these programs, and Photo is not as robust as PS right now under Windows.

I'm using Affinity Designer paired with Inkscape (for occasional tracing) instead of Illustrator and I have only touched Illustrator at work in the last months, but not at my personal projects.

Affinity has great software and it is capable of most things. I am trying to stay away from Adobe for months now.

Affinity photo free trial terms