d.k

Hi MEB, Thanks for your reply! I think the separation of Photoshop and Lightroom as two separate products predominantly has historic reasons. When the first Lightroom version was released in 2007, photographers liked the innovative GUI and workflow concept especially compared to Photoshop, and some people couldn't wait for Photoshop (which dated back to 1990 and has become a big old lady since) to profit from this fresh Lightroom approach as well. Adobe has not really done that, instead the basic, complicated principle of ACR within Photoshop remains - fine from a graphics designer's point of view, but unfortunately from a photographer's point of view. Without Adobe's historic "ballast" it would certainly make sense not to stick to the Photoshop concept too much but instead find a way to serve both groups of users with a single piece of software without having to swap between two programs. That would be revolutionary!

First of all, I'm most impressed by both Affinity Designer and Photo. My hope that one day there would be a real Adobe alternative has come true when both were made available also for Windows. And the price is ridiculously low. Though, for Affinity Photo my enthusiasm is slowing down a bit when watching the software from the Lightroom point of view, not from Photoshop. The Lightroom workflow is indeed fantastic for working with lots of images and going through a high-quality but effective and quick raw development process. On the other hand, Photoshop is not at all that handy, non-destructive and time-saving when it comes to raw development, but of course it offers the complete image manipulation potential that Lightroom is missing. So why not bring both together? I'm sure Adobe would if they could and if they didn't want one software to cannibalise the other. At the moment Affinity Photo is more or less imitating the Adobe Photoshop approach without making use of the (newer) Lightroom operating philosophy.

Thanks very much and keep up the good work! So happy that there is finally a real Adobe alternative. I'm already loving to use Affinity Designer (on Windows) for web design, and what I've seen from the Affinity Photo public beta so far is also more than impressive. From my point of view the price for both Designer and Photo is ridiculously low considering their huge potential.