Affinity?

[Evan]

Has anyone used any of Affinity products? If so, thoughts on it as a replacement for Photoshop and/or Illustrator?

Affinity – Professional Creative Software

From the smoothest, fastest photo editing and graphic design software to the most powerful publishing software, Affinity apps are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with creative technology.

affinity.serif.com

 

[Adam]

Affinity Designer has totally replaced Illustrator for me. The only features I miss are auto-tracing (but I've replaced this with another app) and currently perspective skew is missing from Designer. Definitely recommend giving it a trial! If you know Illustrator, you'll know most of Designer right away. I still keep Photoshop around. I don't begrudge it as much since I can get it for like £12/m on the Photography plan rather than the £30 or so of the other apps.

Photoshop for raster, Affinity Designer for vector and Figma for web design/prototyping is my general design stack.

 

[Evan]

I'm currently using Inkscape for vector stuff and am overall happy with it. Mainly looking at a Photoshop replacement, though I'm not opposed to changing to Affinity for vector tools as well.

 

[Adam]

I'm currently using Inkscape for vector stuff and am overall happy with it. Mainly looking at a Photoshop replacement, though I'm not opposed to changing to Affinity for vector tools as well.

Oh blimey. I could not get to grips with Inkscape at all. I think it has compatibility problems on Mac. Do you do much vector work? I always saw it as like what MS Paint is to Photoshop.

I was not too impressed with the Photo offering and my agency work requires working with a lot of PSDs which although it tried to be compatible with, was not perfect. This was a year or so ago though!

 

[Evan]

Inkscape 1.0 just released and it's pretty neat. More polished tracing tool, xray mode, new mockup tools, etc. Plus I'm always happy to see a program natively support dark mode :)

Brief rundown of latest features (skip to 2m mark):

As for how often I work with vectors, professionally not a ton. I'll create the occasional icon to use for a website, but typically try to grab one from Fontawesome or similar source. I'm more interested at doing it as a hobby. I do admittedly much prefer the Adobe layout though in PS, Illustrator, etc. Inkscape has a 'cheaper' look to it, bu it gets the job done.

 

[robcsaszar]

Affinity Designer has totally replaced Illustrator for me. The only features I miss are auto-tracing (but I've replaced this with another app) and currently perspective skew is missing from Designer. Definitely recommend giving it a trial! If you know Illustrator, you'll know most of Designer right away. I still keep Photoshop around. I don't begrudge it as much since I can get it for like £12/m on the Photography plan rather than the £30 or so of the other apps.

Photoshop for raster, Affinity Designer for vector and Figma for web design/prototyping is my general design stack.

Same here. I've been doing design for a number of years now, and only recently gotten into vector design and I started with using Designer from the get-go so it was quite easy for me.
As for raster design, I've used GIMP for about 8 years and now moved to Affinity Photo which I enjoy using.

Adobe products were extremely expensive for me in the past but I'm not thinking of moving at all right now, Affinity ticks all the boxes for me for now.

 

[tom]

I'm using both, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. I didn't have any problems while switching. The main reason why I switched was the price as I don't need Photoshop/Illustrator daily which makes it quite costly.

By the way, congrats on Topic with ID 1000 here on Webwide. 😃 👍

 

[tobyx]

I believe Affinity Photo and Designer are viable replacements for most work already. I would suggest trying it out. As Adam said, Tracing is a feature I miss from Designer but I get how it’s algorithmically challenging to implement. I’m sure they’re on it.

I like how much thought went into their backend. The file formats of Designer and Photo (and I think Publisher?) are fully compatible in all of the applications. While each application offers a different feature set, you will work non-destructively. Adobe’s smart objects annoy me to death since their inception and that hasn’t really improved over the years.

Also, Affinity works in floating point, while Photoshop still defaults to 8-bit images, which is really embarassing.

 

[anghelvalentin9]

I still use GIMP. It's free, open source and pretty stable. For basic stuff is the perfect tool.