tom_tshirts

I agree, I'm surprised this wasn't built-in from the beginning. I'm a software developer. I think it wouldn't have been a lot of work if implemented from the ground-up, but I'm afraid that if they wrote the application with no thought towards scripting, that now they've really got their work cut out for them.

We don't have adobe Stock. We only use Photoshop and Illustrator. We were paying $50/month, but they have just changed that to $80/month. Our only option is to switch to individual application licenses for Illustrator and Photoshop at $34/month each, which still leaves us at $68/month/user. You're probably talking about personal plans. I'm talking about business plans. The pricing is on their website. https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html If you know a way for a company to get Creative Cloud for the prices you're citing, please let us know. It would save us a lot of money.

Scripting Support I know there are already several threads on this, but I just wanted to bring it up again, because Adobe raised the price on CC again. It is now $80/month/user. Affinity is $50/app with no recurring charges.. not even factoring in discounts for volume licensing both Photo and Designer. My company's 2-year savings with Affinity at the current price would be well over $100k. More important than the savings, it get us out of Adobe having a knife to our throats, where we have to pay them any amount of money they decide to charge us, or go out of business. There have got to be a lot of professional users in my situation - I'm pretty sure Affinity has all the necessary tools except for scripting support... I haven't evaluated it in a while, maybe Spot Color support. But I know that aside from scripting, it is very close to being a professional replacement for Photoshop/Illustrator. This isn't just a request for scripting support - it's a suggestion for how to finance it. Sell an "affinity Enterprise" edition for a lot more. Maybe $400 instead of $50. As features age, every couple of years, you could roll the enterprise features down to the other version. Use that to recoup the costs of implementing scripting. I'm not suggesting sending all new features to the "Enterprise" edition, but send everything for prepress or other "professional-only" or "predominantly professional" features there - updates to scripting, PDFX, spot colors, multichannel, trapping, bleeds, crop marks, batch processing... maybe color management. If we just had scripting support, we'd buy a few copies, get to work rewriting all the Adobe parts of our scripts for Affinity, and then buy at least 60 licenses, even at $400. And I've got to think it's not just us. Digital printers, screen printers, flexo printers, offset press... there are a ton of professionals out there who are sick of Adobe holding a knife to their throats who would love any viable alternative. Who only need Photoshop and Illustrator, not the dozen other CC apps. Maybe some day when Affinity apps are more feature-complete and feature-stable, merge the two versions. I'm just suggesting this as a way to fund the resources necessary for immediate scripting development, so you can start cracking the professional market open faster. I know the programming language choice for scripting has been argued here before. It would be fantastic if you could support Applescript on MacOS. But you'll want the scripting support to work on Windows too, and I understand not wanting to have to implement multiple languages. (Although Adobe does maintain 6 methods of extensibility in Photoshop - DOM (Document Object Model) scripting via 1. Javascript, 2. Applescript, and 3. Visual Basic, 4. Javascript Scripting via Action Manager code, 5. Plug-ins, and 6. Actions with conditionals.) So if you aren't going to target multiple languages / paradigms, then probably either Python or Javascript. You'll get a lot of passionate arguments for and against either. Applescript can run Javascript and Python, and can be extended with OSAXen. (Open Scripting Architecture eXtension). So while it wouldn't be the full Applescript experience, if scripting were implemented in Javascript or Python, a developer could write an OSAX that provides Applescript terms that invoke all the scripting commands, which would extend all the automation abilities to Applescript without forcing a traditional prepress automation Applescript-er to learn another language. Of course, it would be fantastic if you want to just roll out scripting support without any higher-priced tiers or anything. But it's been a few years now, and I'm just trying to brainstorm a way to get this implemented faster. Lots of real professionals wouldn't hesitate to drop $400 once on Affinity if it got them out of $960/yr of Adobe. And the typical home-user or small company doing photos or web graphics wouldn't miss the features they don't have. Thanks for your consideration.

So sorry I didn't see your reply! I was just trying out Affinity Designer again to see what's new, did a search for "Spot Color" online to see if you had that yet, and ended up here and saw your response. I'd be glad to go over our actions and scripts more thoroughly. We're talking about dozens of scripts and thousands of lines of code. Many actions and short scripts just automate a small part of our workflow, but then there are big scripts running into thousands of lines themselves. Some examples of essential scripts: One script reads the currently open Swatchbook in Photoshop (with some logic, it'll interpret certain swatch names to divide up the presentation of swatches, and to stop reading them if it hits a certain swatch) and then presents a UI with a button of each swatch (with the button in the swatch color, with the swatch name on it). Whatever button is clicked is then assigned as a "Color Overlay" layer effect to the current layer, and the layer name is re-named to the swatch name. The layer effect is applied with a blending mode based on what the RGB value of the swatch is, so different blending modes are used with some logic to which mode we need for which color. That alone saves us a mountain of time and mistakes. Although we only rarely run that script by itself - it's usually run from an Action, different actions take different first steps before running the "Color Overlay" script. The most common action creates a new layer, fills the current selection solid black in the new layer, then runs the Color Overlay script. Our biggest two scripts save out our files and create our customer proofs. The save script checks the URL's of all open Chrome tabs and parses the order number out of the URL, for any tabs that are for an order in our CRM. Then a JSON gateway is queried to get information on all the print areas for each open order. A UI is displayed to allow a user to easily associate which open order/print location their current file goes with. The script then performs dozens of validations on the file to be sure it's constructed properly, and then... well, then it does a lot of things. It checks when it run whether Photoshop or Illustrator was the frontmost application, and it runs different things depending on which it was in, but it always saves a Master File, a Production File, and a small file for the mockup proof for each piece of art. There's a lot of logic that goes into what constitutes the "production file" based on the Master and the production process for the order. Rearranging layers, deleting non-printing assets, etc. From Photoshop, it actually moves the data to Illustrator and generates a press-ready spot-color raster EPS that's recognized by RIPs for auto-trapping and separations off the Photoshop Layers. It also reports data about the saved files (size, ink colors used) back up to our CRM through a JSON gateway. The proofing script also queries a JSON gateway, and and then updates a bunch of information fields on our blank proof, uses CURL to grab product images off the web and place them on the proof, import the mockup images for the order saved by the save script from our network drive.... changes the visibility of lots of layers based on the order info. Then it saves the Master (editable) proof and a JPG of it for the customer. There are several dozen short scripts/actions too. Let me know if you want any more information, or a demonstration or anything. I have not gone through our workflow and the tools we use thoroughly comparing everything to the features of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo yet. But I did spend a while trying to check. So far, the things Affinity does not have that caught my eye are: - Spot Color Support (both programs - arbitrary Spot Color channels in Photo, Spot Color swatches in Designer) - Scriptability - Designer would need an equivalent of "Recolor Artwork" in Illustrator. (Edit -> Edit Colors -> Recolor Artwork). Although honestly, if there were scripting access... that entire piece of functionality could be scripted. I've heard Corel Draw has a real equivalent now, but as of X6, Corel Draw's "Recolor Artwork" equivalent was still a script - Oberon Color Replacer, and variants based on that tweaked by other scripters. That's one thing about implementing scripting support... once you've got it, other people will implement missing functionality for free. http://dev.oberonplace.com/draw/drawscripts/index.htm http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/20-free-and-useful-adobe-illustrator-scripts--vector-3849 Or with a plugin architecture, even much more ambitious stuff for sale: http://www.astutegraphics.com/ Can you guys, just, like, buy Astute Graphics and put all their Illustrator stuff into Designer? That would be a dream come true. Thanks, Tom.

Just wanted to add my 2¢. We would love to have any viable replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, especially since they went to CC and can extort any amount of $ from us per month to maintain access to our existing files. And if this becomes viable, we'd gladly pay well over the $40 or $50 asking price... we currently pay that per user per month to Adobe, and we only use Photoshop and Illustrator. But there are two absolute requirements we'd need here: spot color support, and scripting/action support. As a production prepress art department, nothing is a replacement for Photoshop/Illustrator without these. We have thousands of line of customer scripts. We will hire someone to rewrite them all for Affinity Designer if the feature set meets our needs - we could make back many thousands in programmer time on the cost savings, plus we're just sick of Adobe's terrible customer support, bug ridden applications, and subscription-only plan. But we can't use this until we can use this to do what we do...