Filip Novotny At the end of last year, the British studio Serif surprised creative professionals with its application Affinity Designer, which had ambitions to compete with the unshakable ruler of vectors called Adobe Illustrator. Today Serif added one more app to Designer – Affinity Photo takes aim at Photoshop for a change and offers advanced raster photo editing. It is available in public free beta as of today.
According to the developers, Affinity Photo is aimed specifically at professionals, especially photographers and designers who need to work in a raster environment. Serif promises high application performance as well as (considering the price) advanced features such as support for RAW format, CMYK color model, LAB process, ICC profiles and 16-bit depth. At the same time, support for import and export of the PSD format should not be missing.
Affinity's growing suite of applications could celebrate success mainly due to the fact that its functionality does not require monthly payments, which are a necessity with market leader Adobe and its Creative Cloud suite. Instead of regular fees, the Serif studio opted for a one-time payment, which for Affinity Designer is 49,99 euros (approx. 1400 CZK). The price for the new addition in the form of Affinity Photo has not yet been set by the developers, but it will probably be at the same level.
In the future, the Affinity series should be supplemented by a third application, Publisher, after Designer and Photo. It will focus on DTP and, if we stick to Adobe comparisons, it could compete with the popular InDesign. In this field too, Adobe is the de facto standard – due to the retreat of competitor QuarkXpress – so any other option will be welcome news.
You can beta version of the new Affinity Photo download on the Serif website.
Jáblíčkář is currently testing the application and will soon bring a closer look at its functions.
I tried to edit photos in Afinity for printing under the profile (e.g. FOGRA39, SC PAPER, etc.), to no avail. Color management tragic. If he fixes this, I have no objection, because otherwise he looked great.
If it's like Designer, I'll still wait for the next version. Although they are well developed, Designer lacks a lot of otherwise useless functions and settings. Unfortunately, a person doesn't find out when he starts clicking for a while, but when he starts to create something seriously. The photo will definitely be no different.
I bought it and after verifying on the Serif forum that this and that is not "yet" implemented, I had to postpone it, and I don't use it.
I'm glad that some serious competition is coming for adobe. The designer does not yet have Illustrator, but I believe that they will catch up, because the prices of Adobe, as a monopoly, seem very excessive to me.
Anyway, Designer is noticeably faster on my mac than illustrator.
I was very excited about Affinity Designer at first, but as I started working more in it, I found a lot of features that I know from Photoshop that I miss there. So photoshop definitely didn't replace me. But on the other hand, it's a great alternative to Illustrator for me. Since I only work with curves occasionally, the basic functions are enough for me, and for those, Affinity is far better than the confusing Illustrator.
Overall, I think Affinity Designer is a good alternative to Illustrator. And this new Affinity Photo seems like a great photo editing program. But not so much for another bitmap graphic. For some purposes, such as web design, which is done in photoshop, it seems to me that there is no alternative from Affinity. Rather, both programs are an alternative to Photoshop. So I thought it would be perfect if the same document could be edited in both programs at the same time. As it is now possible to switch between bitmap and vector mode in the designer, so that the vector mode would be A. Designer and the bitmap A. Photo.
Affd is in truth a pruser. Where can you simply switch the units to pixel, pt, etc.? Don't worry about inches. Text on a curve? Even by mistake. Export of individual object to vector? Even by mistake. And so I could go on and on. It is bad. That's currently better than iDraw.
The text on the curves is very easy. After clicking on the text, it is immediately visible in the main panel. Affinity doesn't seem like a badass to me. On the contrary, it seems to me that Affinity has a lot of things better thought out and done more modernly than Adobe.
I think Affinity is on the right track. But for Adobe to be an alternative, it will take some time.
(But what really doesn't work is compatibility with PSD files, especially text layers.)
well, I meant to place on a curve, not convert :) Anyway, the function that one would expect there and they are not there is a joke. And the promised updates somehow stopped.
Maybe it would be enough to turn the program on...
You have options for choosing units not only when creating a document, but also when working with it:
When creating a document: http://2i.cz/a6f2a78d5e
When working with it: http://2i.cz/b7e3b69c4f
You can easily convert text to curves with one button:
http://2i.cz/95c194be6d
And likewise the curve object..
http://2i.cz/6d491c36e5
On the other hand, you can't put text on a curve, the creation of a transition or an eyedropper are also designed quite conservatively.
It has it's bugs but once they iron out the little things it will be better than Ai.
See below. I meant to place the text on the curve. The reason for this is the absence of object export to svg. Otherwise, yes. Yes, I like them too, but I've been waiting for half a year for the promised ficura, which I was promised on their forum, that they would be ready soon :) The adobacky CC is a mess, I'm looking for alternatives.
I'm in the same situation - the only reason I can't move away from Adobe products is the problem with exporting to PSD.
But I thought exporting to SVG already "worked" - I had a problem with exporting to EPS, which sometimes exports really weird stuff. :/
well, some developer from Serif promised me that he would add exports of individual objects to the vector as soon as you see them. then, as far as I know, it is only possible to save the page as a whole. and then only bitmaps can be cut. Even against InkScape, which is free, Affinity looks like a poor relative :) there are not enough things to be asked to the end.