I care about customers and will push for a long term option. We have discussed a few that are easy to implement and we understand why this current approach concerns the more cautious. If the service is down the software already has some fallback code but I think more can and will be done
Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that this wasn’t a new ‘feature request’. It was a one-off review off the first major upgrade to Affinity‘s ‘pro’ apps, pulling together a bunch of missing features that I happen to think are most important.
Yes, these features have been requested more than once already, over many years. (I’ve linked to some of those discussions). That’s kind of the point—they were things we might have expected to be in V2, and their omission is a signal to me that Affinity’s software designers don’t rate the importance of these things highly.
If this isn’t the place for an overall review and discussion of V2 and its most glaring missing features, how about being a little constructive and telling me where the right place is? I did look at all the options, and the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V2 suite of products’ certainly seemed like the best fit.
Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'.
Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour.
You can't select more than one swatch at a time.
You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI.
There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.)
New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually.
Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.)
Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator).
There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.)
There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette.
There's no option to merge two global colours.
When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.)
Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.
Its Vector Q, available for iPhone, iPad, Mac only.
Seems to use some Apple library, the results look very similar to an iMovie filter effect.
Works for images and videos.
@walt.farrell I didnt really explain myself but what this user above said is how I feel. I think I said it shouldnt be there because I didnt like how they turned the group button into a pop up menu and added warp group to it. The group button was a solo button in v1 that you could hit to group and ungroup. I loved it. Super easy to group and ungroup. Now, in v2, you have to hit this new group button twice to ungroup since its now a pop up menu. So its more work for a simple action. What they should have done is kept the group button to group and undo as its own separate button and then create a new button that has a "warp" icon that when clicked on shows a pop up menu with all the warp groups. Thats what they should have done. Look at the photo below.
"free" competitor Vectornator is moving forward further while Affinity hasn't done nothing yet...
Vectornator 4.6: Auto Trace Just Leveled Up https://www.vectornator.io/blog/vectornator-4-6
Had to use this at work today... and once again had to go back to Illustrator.
Wow, and this thread is even older than the huge one asking for vector brushes and vector patterns?
Affinity still has a long way to go until I can start recommending it to coworkers!
maybe I'm missing it, but is there an option to open a JPEG, or bitmap image
and trace,or convert it to a vector file for further editing? If not there should be one, it would be a great option. even if it had only a few modes like black and white, and 5 color
it would make me convince me to convert from adobe illustrator
Very good summary! Is there an option to somehow forward this summary to the developer? Because I doubt they ever reach out to this forum or this thread especially...
It would be a great thing if it were realized, also to implement many small shortcomings that Affinity designer still has compared to the competition. Equalized these small shortcomings AD has all the credentials to become a valid and better alternative for vector drawing.
Wow ---- purchased (£0.00) pros: really simple and super quick, nice vector stylisation presets, the pen tool with pressure is super fluid, also has vector perspective distortions YAY! that work great (so can do stuff that's currently impossible in Affinity) ---- cons: no external clipboard so can't copy paste between apps (but export pdf works great)---- it's a little buggy and the prefs window can't be closed ----- still -- this shows loads of promise
It's extremely disappointing this feature is still not implemented almost 8 years after the original post.
I've used Inkscape and its trace feature, but Inkscape is crash prone and performs poorly with any slightly complex document (such as traced vectors).
I am not a professional graphic designer, I bought Affinity Designer assuming it would be a tool to cover all of my 'intermediate level user' vector graphics needs. The ability to automatically convert a raster to vector image is absolutely one of them. I don't expect it to be perfect, I'd be happy with a reliable feature that gives decent results with non-trivial images and saves possibly hours of my time.
With such feature gaps I struggle to understand how you can call this software "Best in class" when Illustrator is clearly that despite its excessive cost. I have even seen that this was a feature in the predecessor of Affinity Designer, about a decade ago. It's bizarre that in the time since and with so many requests it is still missing.
So I've found myself back in Inkscape far more than Designer in the past 6 months. This is not good! As such I really don't have many good things to say about Designer when talking with others, yet. I really hope you Affinity can change that.
When you wake up 1,000,000+ customers with an email many will find their important feature has not been implemented. Please don't think this is an attack, they are real owners with real concerns.
Particularly do not harass upset newbies, they can only be calmed by listening and NOT by accusing them of being part of some conspiracy to undermine us.
Affinity V2 apps do not have a Separated Mode on macOS. If for some reason you need this specific functionality, please continue to use Affinity V1 apps.
Please Note: All of the issues mentioned below should be resolved by updating to macOS Monterey 12.1 or higher.
Due to code-signing changes in macOS Monterey, Affinity Apps can experience performance related issues such as spinning pinwheel (beach ball), lag or delayed operations. Below are a few examples that are affecting users:
Delayed app startup
Panels such as Brushes, Macro, Styles etc... populating slowly and delays when scrolling
Lag when using Channels Panel, especially with Pixel Selections
Delay when selecting colours from the Fill Tool / Gradient Tool on the context toolbar
Lag when browsing Presets in the Crop Tool
This issue is logged with our developers and they're currently investigating.
As a workaround, some users have found that disabling Automatically Adjust Brightness under Apple > System Preferences > Displays reduces these delays.
After I purchase and downloaded Affinity Photo on my Macbook Pro. The software starts up slowing and I don't understand why. I have MacOS Monterey version 12.2.1.
Can someone help and tell why the software starts up slowing on my Macbook.
I have only two days left for the demo , and still on the fence about a future purchase
Biggest shortcomings , no perspective / warp tools and no real vector brushes ( they are bitmaps stretched across a path )
Affinity designer is great , but these unimplemented features even after years since it's release and the radio silence from the dev.crew does not show confidence
Thanks to this forum I found out about vectorstyler , WOW just wow
Affinity needs to step up their game , once vectorstyler is more widely known it will be the obvious choice for many who look for an illustrator replacement
+1 on what everyone in this thread has been asking for. We need vector perspective distort badly (and other warp tools would be nice too) to use this software professionally without frustrating workarounds. I love Affinity. I was a Fireworks user years ago and was so annoyed when Adobe bought it and just let it die not realizing the value it brought in ease of use and layout for screen. For a while I lost about 30% efficiency. Affinity has that intuitive ease of use but is missing this most important feature. I'm tired of trying to evangelize this software but having to say for years now, "It's great, but.... there's no vector perspective distort / warp tools or auto-trace." I want to be able to tell people hands down that Affinity can suit all the needs of most professional graphic designers. We're not there yet, but soooo close. Maybe Serif should get a round of funding and purchase VectorStyler to incorporate their features with some improvements for usability? Or maybe you're on the cusp of great things including this feature for version 2.0? Sure would be nice to have some idea when or even if this is going to be released.
Don't know if you are counting, but please add my name to your requests for capability of opening InDesign files in Publisher. I have 15 years of work in CS 2. A lot of it I still open and copy things to bring them forward into current files. Or I rework older files for a current project. No longer an option for me since my G5PPC finally died and those old Adobe apps won't run on my MacBook Pro. A lot of work to recreate everything in Publisher, even though I am enjoying working with this application. Thanx
