aitte

If it keeps Affinity trucking along smoothly, I would happily pay $100 or more for the individual apps as they are! :D

It makes zero business sense to merge them. Buying both Designer and Photo is still a lot cheaper than buying ONE of Photoshop or Illustrator.
 
But to make matters worse:
* If they merge Designer and Photo then they will have to raise the price from $49 to something like $79, but that means a *lot* less of the casual users buy it. And it's still less than they would have made from 2 separate sales. So less income means they may have to fire employees and cripple product development.
* If the products merge, the GUIs become more cluttered and confusing.
* If the products merge, they will have to delete one of them from the app store, and only half of their users would get the merged upgrade - the ones from the deleted product would have to re-purchase the other one. The app store does not support license migration.
* If they had released the product "merged from day one", then they would have given a free "Photo" upgrade to every Designer user and would not have received any reward for their 5 years of hard work creating Affinity Photo. Alternatively, they could have made it a paid "Designer 2.0" update and piss off all the designer users who have been promised that their purchase includes free updates for 1-2 years to come.
* An alternative solution would have been to sell Designer and then have a $49 in-app purchases to unlock Photo, but that makes no sense either. People who only want pixel work would have to buy Designer which they don't even want. And Designers may feel cheated paying $49 for extended pixel editing power. So that option would just piss off both userbases.
* A merge would constrain all features and keyboard shortcuts in a way that makes sense for both vectors and pixels, instead of allowing each app to develop its own workflows.
 
It's horrible for business in 100% of the areas that matter. And it's not even an issue; people have happily worked with Adobe's separate software suite for decades.
 
A merge will not happen until *all* users are willing to pay $100, and to buy the software in the exact same sales volume as today.
 
The lack of a merge is not Affinity's fault. It's your fault. It's my fault. It's all of the users who would not pay a fair price if they're merged. So let's never talk about this again, and let's instead celebrate that we're getting awesome Adobe-killing software at $49 each for *perpetual* licenses and none of Adobe's monthly subscription fee bullshit. We're already getting a mindblowing deal, and we're used to working with individually specialized apps. Everything is perfect.

It only loads the parts of the library it uses at the time it uses them, so the file size of the libraries is misleading :)

@JasperD: Answered in AP thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/11658-affinity-photo-customer-beta-13126820/&p=50028

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta (Stable)
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
Good morning! I'm pleased to announce that we have started the customer beta up and the first build is available right now :) This week it's mainly stability improvements - but a couple of new features are present. More coming next week! This beta is considered stable and it's use is recommended over the App Store version.
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
- New “Lens Filter” adjustment, and ability to import them from PSD files (export coming soon!).
- WEBP import support (export coming soon!)
- Improved tool UI drawing speed by up to 5000% in OS X 10.8 and above (note that this is just tool UI - not everything!).
- Added a blemish width control to the Develop context toolbar, and associated keyboard shortcuts.
 
- Fixed GIF export (bad permissions were set on the resulting file).
- Fixed Split Toning when image contains transparency. - Fixed artefacts when using Live Depth Of Field Blur. - Fixed bug which caused Live Filter layers to go crazy when printing. - Attempt to recover when the default system fonts are not available. - Fixed issue where user could become stuck in Develop Persona. - Minor translation UI improvements. - Fixed issue where 3D LUT would produce weird colours if the cube contained negative values. - Fixed numerous issues in Develop Persona where the developed image would be very dark / light. - Prevent crashes when users mistakenly try to open folders instead of files. - Fixed issues where Develop Persona would fail to load DNG files where lossy compression had been used. - Minor performance improvements when editing 16bit RGB files. - Fixed issue where pressing Delete in Develop / Liquify would cause havoc. - Fixed small issue where changing tone curves in Develop would generate two undo entries. - Numerous vector export / import improvements. - Fixed issue which caused path text to be inaccurately positioned. - Fixed issue with Edit -> Fill not applying colour noise. - Improved behaviour of Select All. - Fixed issue where Shadows / Highlights adjustment slider had a different range to the accompanying text field. - Fixed issue where Document -> Flatten would go crazy when used on a document which had been started in Affinity Designer. - Fixed sporadic issues with Open -> Recent and other MRU things. - Attempt to resolve file association issues, so Photo files open with Photo and Designer files with Designer! - Fixed issue where feathering a selection by a large radius would produce weird results. - Fixed issues where growing / shrinking / smoothing / feathering a “Select All” marquee would not work properly.

We're talking here about PS vs Affinity Photo. Not on converting RAW files to JPG or TIFF. We're talking about a photo editor.
Lightroom and Photoshop are two different programs. Lightroom is a converter with small editing capabilities, and Photoshop is an editor with small file conversion capabilities. Like MikeFromMesa, I use DxO to convert NEF to JPG, and edit in the Affinity Photo, which is IMHO a much much much :D  better program. Affinity Photo needs to spend a little time learning how to use, change the habits learned in other programs. If you do, it's no longer return to the PS.

I am one of those people who use AP as an external editor for my workflow tool. I have used it with Lightroom but my preferred workflow tool is Dxo Optics Pro (although I have also used CaptureOne). But AP is still my Photoshop replacement for an external editor and I am very happy with it. It has allowed me to drop out of the Photography program (and to stop paying monthly) and there is very little functionality that I have given up to be able to do that. I have lost the Automation functionality in PS, but expect much of that to be restored when Serif adds the Macro Persona back to the package sometime soon) and some of the plugin functionality (but expect that to be restored when the AP developers finish polishing the plugin stuff).
 
For me, even though it is not my main editor, AP has been more than good enough for me to say goodbye to Adobe.

Leading (reads "Leh-ding", not "Lee-ding") comes from the old-school printing process of "moving type". They used strips of lead to create space between lines.
I'm from Portugal and even professionals misspell the word "Leading", pronouncing it "lee-ding". That if because they don't know its origin. :)

Ohhh so line-height is called Leading. I never knew, since the corresponding Photoshop setting only has an icon (no name), so I just assumed this name: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_dim_line-height.asp. 
 
Thanks for that! The setting is found under the Paragraph button: Leading. That's one thing to check off the wishlist.
 
 
And italics can be faked with Character button: Shear, with perfect results.
 
 
The faux-bold workaround is incredible too! The text toolbar has a Stroke option. Set the "Join" option to the totally sharp corners (last option) and the result becomes crisp and better than photoshop, since it gives total control over the stroke width (boldness). And if your characters start intersecting with each other, just open the Character button and increase the Tracking (space between letters). The only problem I discovered with the "stroke" feature is that it doesn't look good together with fake-italics ("shear"); it almost looks like a 3d dropshadow instead, but luckily I almost never need to use faux italics and faux bold together.
 
 
Excellent information. Funny how we both give each other tips for working with this new app, that the other had missed. Now I can finally rely on its text tool without feeling limited. Turns out all I am truly missing is the text arcs (and curving text along a path), but I don't use those very often, and I read that the devs want to add it someday.
 
 
Affinity Photo continues to impress! Let's hope the devs will read this thread and consider adding Calculations and the ability to do adjustment layers (like levels) on masks someday as well. ;-)

@Broicher, @Achim63: Go into System Preferences, Keyboard and add the US English preset. Enable the language switcher menu while you're there. Now you can set Affinity Photo to US English and when you press the keys in those [] locations it will act as if you pressed [] instead of your local keys. That means all keys will work. If you need to write local characters in Affinity's text tool you simply change language using the OS X menu bar temporarily, write your text and then change back to US English.

There are things in Affinity Photo that I think that are better than Photoshop :)
As for the Leading, you can adjust it. Even manually. Just select the line and press Alt+Up Cursor key or Alt+Down Cursor key.
And I also miss faux bold/italic. I can mimic it using Stroke effect and Slanting the text box... but it is a workaround.
But it will get better, I know. It is already excellent :D

"should be in affinity photo or any true photo editor"
"unfortunately reached the limits of affinity photo"
"this feature is indispensable for professional image editing"
"make masks powerful and easy to deal with" - (as if they weren't already, with features like the super powerful refine tool, and the way you can easily edit, move and toggle masks!)
Etc...
 
It amuses me the passive-aggressive tone of people wanting Affinity to "hurry up" with their pet feature requests. It is like that in almost every feature request thread, and quotes similar to the above are seen everywhere on this forum. Usually in some obscure little thread, with only an irate original author doing most of the bumping and posting.
 
Massive props to the moderators for reading through these walls of text.
 
Serif works on features in order of global priority, and will get to everything important first and deal with nice extras when time allows. That's basic business management.
 
If the ability to use levels/curves on masks was as "essential" as the passive-aggressive posts here imply, it would already have been implemented. The same goes for all other feature requests that use passive-aggressive threat language. Relax. They've just released 1.0 and it will keep growing over time.
 
By the way, I have used photoshop for pixel based website designs for 15 years with loads of masking work in every project and never needed to use levels or curves on masks. I could see that it has a very minor value for very specific workflows but not much else. Besides, they've confirmed that mask editing will be improved later. What more do you want from them? These are real people you are talking to and they're working extremely hard in the wake of the launch to get truly *important* things fixed, like newly discovered crash-bugs and the like.
 
If you are so in love with minor features that photoshop has had time to develop in its nearly 30 years of development then stay with creative cloud, it seems you're happier that way. Personally, I ditched a 15 year relationship with Adobe, cleaned their crud out of my computer, and couldn't be happier! Affinity Photo is fast and slick and buttery smooth and does almost everything that Photoshop does, and it's going to keep evolving over the years, just like Affinity Designer has done. I for one know I made the right choice. Affinity kicks ass. And what other company is as interactive with their customers?
 
PS: In the YouTube video posted above, the author is creating a single-colored floodfilled layer of black or orange, and then using a mask to turn the fully filled layer into only a visible shadow outline, and then blurring that mask. Everything in that video was silly and overcomplicated. I'll just point out the obvious: Stop filling your layers with a solid color. Get rid of the mask completely and make all shape adjustments on a pixel layer with attached non-destructive adjustment layers like levels, curves and gaussian blur (use a live filter and you can paint the filter's own individual mask to gradually fade the blur). Because all you've achieved in the video was to move the pixel-work (of creating and blurring shapes) into a useless mask layer, for no gain whatsoever. If you did that so that you could easily recolor the shadow later, then that is pointless too, since you can simply apply a hue/saturation filter instead.

@aitte
 
"Besides, they've confirmed that mask editing will be improved later.”
 
Thank you for this information. I am very happy to hear that.
 
 
”Personally, I ditched a 15 year relationship with Adobe, cleaned their crud out of my computer, and couldn't be happier!”
 
Well done. After what I’ve seen from Serif, I’m very optimistic to do the same with what is left of Adobe-Applications on my computer very soon. 
 
 
”Affinity Photo is fast and slick and buttery smooth and does almost everything that Photoshop does…”
 
No one expects software, which is hardly out of beta, to be perfect.
 
 
”Affinity kicks ass.”
 
It very much looks like that.
 
 
“Massive props to the moderators for reading through these walls of text.”
 
They do the impossible. I'm sure they are prepared for it.

"should be in affinity photo or any true photo editor"
"unfortunately reached the limits of affinity photo"
"this feature is indispensable for professional image editing"
"make masks powerful and easy to deal with" - (as if they weren't already, with features like the super powerful refine tool, and the way you can easily edit, move and toggle masks!)
Etc...
 
It amuses me the passive-aggressive tone of people wanting Affinity to "hurry up" with their pet feature requests. It is like that in almost every feature request thread, and quotes similar to the above are seen everywhere on this forum. Usually in some obscure little thread, with only an irate original author doing most of the bumping and posting.
 
Massive props to the moderators for reading through these walls of text.
 
Serif works on features in order of global priority, and will get to everything important first and deal with nice extras when time allows. That's basic business management.
 
If the ability to use levels/curves on masks was as "essential" as the passive-aggressive posts here imply, it would already have been implemented. The same goes for all other feature requests that use passive-aggressive threat language. Relax. They've just released 1.0 and it will keep growing over time.
 
By the way, I have used photoshop for pixel based website designs for 15 years with loads of masking work in every project and never needed to use levels or curves on masks. I could see that it has a very minor value for very specific workflows but not much else. Besides, they've confirmed that mask editing will be improved later. What more do you want from them? These are real people you are talking to and they're working extremely hard in the wake of the launch to get truly *important* things fixed, like newly discovered crash-bugs and the like.
 
If you are so in love with minor features that photoshop has had time to develop in its nearly 30 years of development then stay with creative cloud, it seems you're happier that way. Personally, I ditched a 15 year relationship with Adobe, cleaned their crud out of my computer, and couldn't be happier! Affinity Photo is fast and slick and buttery smooth and does almost everything that Photoshop does, and it's going to keep evolving over the years, just like Affinity Designer has done. I for one know I made the right choice. Affinity kicks ass. And what other company is as interactive with their customers?
 
PS: In the YouTube video posted above, the author is creating a single-colored floodfilled layer of black or orange, and then using a mask to turn the fully filled layer into only a visible shadow outline, and then blurring that mask. Everything in that video was silly and overcomplicated. I'll just point out the obvious: Stop filling your layers with a solid color. Get rid of the mask completely and make all shape adjustments on a pixel layer with attached non-destructive adjustment layers like levels, curves and gaussian blur (use a live filter and you can paint the filter's own individual mask to gradually fade the blur). Because all you've achieved in the video was to move the pixel-work (of creating and blurring shapes) into a useless mask layer, for no gain whatsoever. If you did that so that you could easily recolor the shadow later, then that is pointless too, since you can simply apply a hue/saturation filter instead.

Sorry pal, it's my story  :D
I confirm - Affinity Photo is so good... Worth every penny.

I care about this too, but I haven't been hit by it yet since I've always added at least 1 layer and thus saved as .afphoto.
 
This app is full of pro features so I'd appreciate if it didn't make assumptions about what format to save as. I think the app should pop up a dialog box with buttons when Save is invoked: "You have made changes to this JPG file. What do you want to save as? JPG (overwrite original), JPG, PNG, AFPHOTO" - something like that...

I care about this too, but I haven't been hit by it yet since I've always added at least 1 layer and thus saved as .afphoto.
 
This app is full of pro features so I'd appreciate if it didn't make assumptions about what format to save as. I think the app should pop up a dialog box with buttons when Save is invoked: "You have made changes to this JPG file. What do you want to save as? JPG (overwrite original), JPG, PNG, AFPHOTO" - something like that...

I have seen a few of the posted works on this forum and this is my favorite so far. What a cool idea, and I love the little plane to give a scale reference for this huge beast.

@MikeFromMesa: Happy to have helped a fellow AP user! I was honestly blown away when I discovered this feature. My Photoshop workflow was always slow and convoluted due to its limitations: "Take 5/whatever layers, duplicate them, merge the duplicates to 1 layer, hide the 5 originals, apply static effects to the merged layer" - and I could never edit the applied effects since they were all static, and if I wanted to tweak individual layers I had to delete the merged layer, unhide all the originals, do the edits and then repeat the whole FX process.
 
Now with Affinity Photo I just use Live FX on the group of layers, and I can even change the blend mode and opacity of the effect (avoids having to duplicate layers for FX too). It's already revolutionized the way I work. The documents I make now only consists of *actual valuable layers* and not hundreds of hidden "step by step" layers.
 
Launch day is tomorrow and I'm ecstatic, knowing that's it a total Photoshop replacement and that it will just keep getting better and better! :-D Serif are my heroes.

Try this instead of duplicating:
 
* Select the layer
* Add new Live Filter (hourglass-icon at the bottom of the layers panel) > High Pass Filter
* In the bottom right of the open window, set the Blend Mode to Soft Light or Overlay
* Now just adjust the Radius

Best of all: Live filters work on groups! Take a bunch of layers, group them and livefilter the group without ever needing to merge anything or bake any effects; and you can reorder and tweak the fx at any time. It is so much more powerful than Photoshop!

Try this instead of duplicating:
 
* Select the layer
* Add new Live Filter (hourglass-icon at the bottom of the layers panel) > High Pass Filter
* In the bottom right of the open window, set the Blend Mode to Soft Light or Overlay
* Now just adjust the Radius

I bought Pixelmator yesterday and was reading some articles about it when I suddenly saw a commenter talking about Affinity Photo instead, which was total news to me. Downloaded the beta and was blown away. It's way faster than Photoshop, way lighter on system resources, and beautifully designed, while still having *every* powerful tool I was used to from Photoshop (and even more that PS doesn't do). Pixelmator is a total toy in comparison (lacks non-destructive editing, adjustment layers, editing history, etc). I got a refund on Pixelmator and anxiously kept reading this forum to find the release date. And now, I've set that date in my calendar. I'll be buying it on day 1 of release! Thanks Serif/Affinity for finally liberating me from the shackles of Adobe. I hope it will be available in the Swedish Mac App Store on release day.

Hi deeds,
 
Thanks for trying to see things from the other side. The two specific things which you point out (for now!) are both things which we are well aware are desirable and we have, from the outset, publicly committed to adding.
 
Why did we ever think it would be acceptable to offer a professional package that doesn't have customisable keyboard shortcuts? Well... that's because I've never (and I mean never) customised a keyboard shortcut in any other graphics software... I just want to use it the way it came - it's easier for tutorials, easier for support. But that's just me... So then we asked the Creative team (and I mean that we have an actual real world team of illustrators and designers - not just a hypothetical one or some random guess work) and in a world of reality where you can only do so many things before a certain date, they also agreed that it would be absolutely fine if customisation could come after a number of other things were finished. Our decision was not an oversight, or one based on some bad information - the people that we were aiming the software at actually value the feature, but would require it to do other things first and could manage in the meantime. As for why we don't make 'what we currently have' customer-facing... it's because we're typing in the code, updating xib files to match and then rebuilding the project - not something that we can give to the customer and expect them to do! This is not a terribly difficult feature to implement - and I refer back to what I said before that it is just this way right now and you know that we have already made clear that it is an important feature that we will add as soon as we're able to.
 
How hard can it be to just turn off the view clipping? Anyone sat in this office would know not to ask me that until I've had quite a few drinks... ;) You would not begin to believe how much is going on with our view to make it pan and zoom the way it does: I think you'll find it's pretty unique in its fluidity for large documents in particular. This is at the absolute core of the experience you will receive in all of our applications in the future so there was no option other than best in class (and then some). I wrote it at least 6 whole times (seriously) from start to finish and everything always had a problem until this variant. Turning off clipping actually means changing the areas we render and how we present them in OpenGL (by this I mean the clipped polygons I generate for each tile and the pixel shaders that I run on the card) - it's not dreadful, it's just not trivial. If I mess it up, I destroy the experience for everyone in all our products. I will do it - and it will be in the space of the next few months, but it needs me to be free and not in the middle of ten other things for it to be given the attention it deserves. Your question of whether I have never dragged a design variant off to the side for comparison/reference whilst working on a copy - well, the answer is that I don't do it. That may be hard for you to believe as that's obviously the way you work, but I just don't work that way. I'd either clone and hide the object then toggle one or the other to see them in place with different versions, or I'd simply lay them side by side on a larger canvas to see and work on either. There's something in my head that can't cope with the background being different and I see the design very differently, so I don't find it a workable solution for me - but that's just me. As I've said with the keyboard shortcuts, we do realise that our customers want this and we are adding it. Why wasn't it there from the start? Again, it's down to the extra time it takes to add these things and simply asking real-world creatives if they want feature x or feature y first.
 
The things that you want are coming. You think that we play up to the fact that we're a version 1.0 software and that we try to get away with not having these 'essentials'. The honest reality is that we are version 1.2 software (although we released at 1.1, so I'm not sure how that works) and we're at the start of the road. The order in which our features have appeared so far have largely been down to practicality - sometimes you'll get a feature you don't expect at a time that seems weird, but that's normally because it's actually just a small tweak of some other thing, or uses the tech introduced by something else. We aren't stupid, we aren't arrogant, we aren't too proud to admit when we make mistakes, we're just actually trying to make something that we want to use at a price we want to pay for it (yes, I did buy Designer for myself the day it came out, just like everyone else!) :)  I don't think we're doing anything so dreadful here that we need to be reprimanded or held up as thoughtless individuals writing an inept clone of something else. The reality of what's achievable with the resources you have in the time that you have available - that's what sets the stage... Start by writing something you can be passionate about to give it a soul and a purpose - make it really good at something. Then flesh out the features when you actually have more time and resources.
 
Hope you can understand my perspective too :)
 
Thanks again,
Matt

Hi deeds,
 
I'll be the first to confess that I haven't read all of your posts, so please forgive me if the point I'm about to make is moot.
 
In your opinion we have missed a trick - and one that we could so obviously have not missed if we'd just asked someone. Okay. In reality, great things come down to people and their passion... I like to draw things with vectors, I always have - right from being little I've been writing vector drawing programs so I'm sorry to say that it's just in my blood to write a program that I want to use - and for me, it's illustration where my passion is. So, when you start from scratch and you build the program up you're going to end up with something that reflects the passion of the person pouring their heart into it. Without a purpose we would've lost focus. Affinity is at its strongest for vector illustration right now - but the key point here is that that is the situation right now... If I'd had to split my time onto other areas like UI design, web design, print design then Designer would have been diluted and that means it actually would've just either been released as a damp squib or just not released at all - potentially ever. So I think it's a fantastic thing that we chose to do one thing and do it really well and also lay the foundations for the future. We called it Designer deliberately, not Illustrator because illustration is just the start - we are adding everything modern Designers need and the package that they bought will turn into something that can genuinely be used as a stable, solid alternative to any other design tool out there - and it's not that far away. You have to start somewhere and a good place to start is by making it work well and fluidly for people who throw down hundreds of thousands of shapes with different effects - it exercises our renderer's tech, our Document Object Model and command architecture and puts us in an extremely strong and stable position for adding the other features. What I'm trying to say is that we did what we did because it actually makes sense from a development perspective and a personal perspective.
 
The 'M' Rectangle tool shortcut is good example of exactly what you think we did, that we actually didn't... No, we didn't slavishly copy Illustrator's more ridiculous nuances - we actually had it as 'R' for Rectangle because that makes sense but early in beta we had so many people saying 'if you don't copy the shortcut for something as simple as a rectangle, then how do you expect my years of muscle memory to cope with using your application professionally?' that we were actually forced to swallow our pride and accept that some things are the way they are because it's what the customer wants - and they're the ones we're trying to attract! Why do we appear to do snapping wrong in your opinion? - well, it's actually because we deliberately don't look at what other people are doing and slavishly copy it. Ben has great plans for snapping and I'm looking forward to him having the time to get there and show that his method is actually better.
 
I know that probably won't make any difference to the fact that you think we're being stale and adhering to the past - but actually it's just a start and if you don't do the basics at the start then you never get them right! Wouldn't it be great to add everything fancy straight away - sure would, but then we probably still wouldn't have released anything at all - and the fact that people are doing such amazing work in Designer is testament to the fact that what it does fundamentally offer is a solid base set of tools from which to develop.
 
Thanks,
Matt