bayustudio

We don't know the exact percentage of people who support or oppose it, but it’s still a controversial topic in the creative community. Serif needs to tread carefully and understand their customer base before deciding to introduce generative AI. When Clip Studio Paint did it, it got huge backlash which led to them canceling their plans, and contrast that with the positive reaction Procreate received when they took a clear stance about AI. Setting themselves apart as a choice for those with real drawing and painting skills or who simply enjoy the craft. As mentioned frequently in this forum, I agree that the safest option is to make it optional / offer it as an extension. or start with AI tools that actually assist designer workflow rather than generative. With Canva’s acquisition, I guess Affinity may have less interest to open their API to other AI services, preferring to lock user within their own Canva/Leonardo ecosystem.

In AD 2.5, there's smoothing improvement for pencil tool, which is great. I guess now Affinity has good foundation to implement simplify on existing paths? As a vector app, This essential feature has been surprisingly absent in Affinity Designer for a long time. Hopefully, they will add it soon.

In my country, students can get Canva Pro for free, and now they'll probably also get free Affinity. There's no better way to attract future users and lock them into the ecosystem. Good thing that Affinity will be more mainstream. However, i'm pessimistic that Affinity will improve interoperability with other industry-leading apps, eg: better PSD export or supporting Figma. Hopefully, they will keep plugins and a scripting API in their roadmap to make the app extensible for everyone, rather than aiming to lock them into Canva walled garden ecosystem.

I have different opinion about inkscape. I find that the recent versions are quite user-friendly and intuitive. I use both Inkscape and AD in context of web illustration & design (not printing), and there are tasks that are much easier and more productive to perform in Inkscape, and vice versa. Inkscape is particularly powerful for working with SVG formats where it read & write natively. As an open source app, of course it still far from Blender level quality, but still closer to Krita.

Great retro style! It somehow reminds me the app icons from the 2010s, when icons were crafted in a realistic style with details much like this.

Not everyone requires generative AI. As an app with non-subscription model, No way Affinity can afford cloud-based generative AI capabilities. So, just like many people suggest here, It might be better to offer it as add-ons, either developed by Affinity or third-party providers, then let users to cover the subscription costs for that. I believe extension API/scripting is currently work in progress, hopefully it get released under ver 2. Introducing generative AI as core features can also be risky, since people still have divided opinion about it. Just as an example, what happened with Clip Studio when they unveiled its plan for generative AI, it got hard negative reaction from the community, leading Celsys to eventually abandon the feature. While Procreate said no to generative AI (because it doesn't in-line with their value). Users appreciated it and Procreate is doing fine. Therefore, Affinity should take the time to gain a deeper understanding of its user base. For the time being, I would be happy if Affinity maintains its primary focus on editing things.. since some basic functionalities are currently missing. Then it would be bonus if Affinity could also provide locally-processed assistive AI, such as object selection, upscaling, etc.

I've tried photoshop generative fill and it was enjoyable. however, the process is done in the cloud with the trained model from millions of adobe stock photos. if generative fill really happens in affinity (as core features), it would likely turn Affinity into a subscription-based service, right? Not sure the majority of users will be happy with it

I tried it out and performance seems good. The speedy Affinity I knew is back! Thanks for fixing it.

I believe Generative fill is just impossible with Affinity. It would be challenging to handle the costs associated with cloud processing and training photo dataset licenses. Photoshop can do that because its subscription-based, has huge cloud infrastructure and own Adobe stocks. It would be more feasible to integrate Affinity with a third-party AI generative images provider, which allow users to have the choice to subscribe to such services if they want. So Affinity can focus on their thing. I would still be excited to see basic AI tools integrated into Affinity, such as object selection, sharpening, enlargement, etc those are useful for photo editing and does not rely on cloud processing.

In ipad+apple pencil, pressure accumulation was working fine in earlier ver 2 updates, but now it's broken again since the recent update. For the desktop version, I never got this working, except in very old version like 1.8.x Hopefully, the developer can find a solution since this functionality is essential in digital painting "hard round pressure opacity" brush is commonly used in tutorials and courses. This bug makes people think that Affinity cannot be used for digital painting Thanks

If you use chrome and just want to treat photopea as an desktop "app" (with shortcut & dedicated window) In chrome, Choose menu - more tools - create shortcut then name the app and tick "open as window" haven't tried in linux but works well in windows & mac This way you don't need electron wrapper (huge stack of chromium+nodejs) just for running photopea. And just utilize your already installed chrome browser.

Ah i see, I'm using this device for light sketch and vectoring work and have been doing well with v1. Yeah i'm also amazed how this baseline ipad can be so useful i'll try to free up more spaces and reduce the undo limit and will see if things improves. Thanks for your suggestion!

I experienced this issue and can avoid by refraining myself from zooming too much. Thanks for the info However, i'm still experiencing app crash on other random occasion that i can't identify the trigger yet. Happen on any document, fresh blank document. eg: sketching in 1 raster layer. then drawing vector on top of it. Its really frustrating to Keep losing my drawing progress. ipad 8th generation. ipad OS 15.5 storage available 676MB of 32GB My ipad is not the high end, but i don't have issue with performance at all in affinity v2 app. This app doesn't have dedicated save button? in order to save, you have to back to main landing screen and open the document it again. is it correct?

I experienced the same issue. After a while, Designer 2 get laggy, and any operations even simple one like selecting, deselecting object takes ~1-3s. The only solution for me is restarting the app periodically when it start to feel laggy. Also when closing app, i often need to to do "end task" manually in task manager because the app seems to crash. Looking forward to stability improvement on v2 🙂 *Designer 2 on Windows 10. Ryzen 7 3700X + 16GB Ram + GTX 3650 Super.

I got the same issue in desktop version, but In ipad version with apple pencil, it seems to be working fine.

Aaand they cancel it within less than a week after the announcement https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/ Yeah the way AI image generator work is kinda exploiting artists and it was weird controversial addition considering their userbase. but I'm glad celsys at least listen to them, (and also to prevent ruining their reputation even more with their subscription things) This can be a good lesson for Serif too. Better to implement AI for useful assistive things like selection, image enlargement, etc

yeah, a lower bundle price is very common and a good strategy to attract users to enter (and hopefully get locked) into the ecosystem. with adobe, it even more extreme, like $20 for one app VS all 25+ apps for $55

I believe the simplifying path is fundamental functionality in vector app which is surprisingly still missing in Affinity. Affinity is great when working with clean nodes from scratch with its pen tool. However, once dealing with complex or dirty node objects, it becomes a deal breaker. I couldn't even use the pencil tool effectively because of the necessity to manually clean up nodes it produces. too bad because sculpt option in pencil is nice Hopefully Serif make this a higher priority.

Yeah, the excitement when a company announce new shiny features and you can get them right away Its the perfect time to start experiencing it with fresh v2

Such good news, JS is also a reasonable choice. Just hopefully this scripting & extension coming in v2.x 🙂 in my opinion, affinity has a solid foundation with good popularity, once it is extendable enough, there will be a growing extension ecosystem around it...

Wondering where you got the misleading info about the free update. I got AD 1 year ago and AP 6 months ago. both are already in the last major version of 1.x. So unfortunately I never experienced major feature updates as well But I was aware that free updates are only until version 2 becomes available, it is stated somewhere on the specs page. Yes it's like a gamble because serif doesn't inform V2 release schedule 🙂

According to other thread, 14 December, still plenty of time for evaluating trial version 🙂

But Affinity is cross platform apps for both Mac & Windows creatives & pros. which need to maintain UI consistency between OS.. Some degree of compromise is unavoidable 🙂 just like Adobe, blender, etc Hopefully, UI things get improved soon based on user feedbacks. But I still appreciate that all apps are built natively Lot of other companies doing much worse cross-platform implementation by using a kind of web/electron, flutter, java or own platform that clunky, eg: Adobe XD, Ms Onenote, Teams, Evernote, etc...

It's not the most feature-complete app (there are common features that surprisingly still missing) but in other areas, there are a lot of things Affinity Designer feels modern & innovative. eg: vector+pixel hybrid, performant engine, studio links, etc The foundation looks solid, they just need to keep adding features...

If no backward compatibility is by design, Maybe it's a better idea to differentiate the extension to avoid confusion because both v1 & v2 has same extension .afdesign for example for v2 file, it can be untitled.afdesign2 like what Microsoft did with .doc and .docx