ashf

5700XT and ryzen 9 5900X.
this is my gaming machine - workstation is running a threadripper 2920X and vega56 - so at least openCL works a bit better. but im quite fed up with radeons for work. davinci resolve doesnt run without stuttering either. capture one has started giving me artifacts with openCL acceleration again (thankfully not baked in when exporting, was a fun time in 2019), even had a gpu related system lockup while editing. time for team green, amd just doesnt care.
 
checked the gpu utilization and the card clocks to its full 3D clocks and draws more power, but the load duration in the benchmark is extremely short. gpu only is less than a second and combined is maybe 2 seconds of load.

We don't know that for certain, we only have Serifs records to hand. Other purchases may have been made on other Apple or Microsoft stores, but we have No Record of any of those, which is my point about being unable to be fair to offer differential prices to ALL existing customers without making thousands of mistakes and upsetting everyone. A single offer price is pretty much the only easy way to do this launch and I'm sorry that each person who thinks they should have been offered something else cannot see that all other solutions present different problems 

Reference for the paid upgrade problem at the App Store
https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/17/mac-developers-complain-about-app-store-bundles-and-the-lack-of-paid-upgrades/

The thread I started on the payment problems with Affinity 2 products has been closed, and that is the right decision,
I am  lucky in that I eventually found a payment method that worked. But that  does not help a lot of people.
Having followed this thread I have concluded that 
1: The banks have had to tighten up on security
2: Affinity/ Serif  have done all within their powers to resolve the difficulties.
3: There have been problems with Serif/Affinity contractors that they are still trying to resolve
4: Serif/Affinity have practical and legal difficulties in disclosing the problems they are experiencing with those contractors
5: Despite assurances from others, Serif/Affinity have not realised the reputational damage that they may/will suffer as a result of failing to look after a small, but significant, number of clients or potential clients who have experienced serious stress,
6: Too many people are passing the buck, but Affinity is not the bigest problem.
Sad though it may be, we all need to calm down and allow Serif/Affinity some room to address the individual problems and lean hard, very hard, on their contractors to sort out this mess. 
I have known this company for 20 years. They do care, they do look after their customers, and I am sure that, in the end, they will do so this time. Without being able to prove it, I believe they have been badly let down by others, and i hope and trust they will be able to negotiate their way out of this mess. The argiument that the number of failed transactions is normal will not wash. Serif will, I am sure, take this seriously and endeavour to make sure that everyone who wants their V2 range can have it at a very competitive price.
I congratulate the forum mediators who have been slammed by this problem over the weekend for dealing with the issues with a degree of patience. However, I think Serif/Affinity should think a little harder about what this problem looks like from a customer point of view, The situation  has not looked good, and I just hope it improves.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

But many popular apps are installed separately for each version.

These coexists on the PC.
Photoshop CC 2021
Photoshop CC 2022
CorelDraw 2020
CorelDraw 2021
The new version does not override the old version.

Because the new version often has bugs for a while. people tend to keep the old version.
Same goes for Affinity.
I'll keep V1 for a while.
 

Both in Designer and Publisher. both in V1 and V2.
 

Even if it's possible to turn it on in V2, it's not recommended yet.
Users reported that it has very slow performance and not usable.
Read recent posts in the topic Walt linked.

Also what Walt said is right. in order to make OpenCL work, both the driver and Affinity need to be modified.
Actually Blender ditched OpenCL already because of AMD.

I did not tell any lies. And I certainly never said I did not want to fix it. I pointed to the statement from Serif that they had made a restriction due to an AMD problem (And in any case, I'm a customer, and what I want to do doesn't matter).
Version 1 had its requirements, and restrictions, and I pointed to Serif's statement of the restrictions.
True, it is working now in Version 2, but that does not make my earlier statement a lie. It merely means that things change:
AMD has shipped new drivers with better performance. Version 2 has been developed, and allows those AMD cards now The restriction is still in place in Version 1. I do not know if Serif developed additional code in V2, or if they simply listened to the users who asked them to let them enable it, and decide for themselves if it worked well enough.
But there were no lies from me, nor from Serif as far as I know.

Yes, it does, as a name of the used GPU in benchmark screenshot suggest. If there will be no utilization instead of number (GPU name) you would have N/A
 
Some future probably, but yes HIP and Metal is a better way to go these days if you have people/resources/time who know how to deal with low level stuff. NGL I was hoping for HIP and Metal in V2 affinity apps, but yea

OpenCL's hardware acceleration in V2 works ok in Vega 56 as expected (bit lower, it should be closer to GF1070ti but ok), still better than in 5XXX/6XXX series cards. I'm curious how 7XXX series cards will do...

VTracer is better in my experience.

OK, it's nice to have the DEVELOP Persona, but exiting it should be easier and less confusing than it is.
If you make a minor (or major) change in this, and then select another persona directly, the dialog box shown below pops up. Now clearly what it's trying to do is get the user to press either the DEVELOP or CANCEL button in the top left corner. However, why not just have those options - DEVELOP or CANCEL - in the dialog box itself? Then it's not a matter of double handling, the user commits or cancels and goes directly to the other persona.

Thanks @ashf.
I've updated/bumped the report to bring it up to devs attention again.

Those fonts are what Apple calls "Document-support fonts" that they have apparently stopped including - so they hide them.
See:
Fonts included with macOS Monterey
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212587#document
Fonts included with macOS Ventura
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213266#document
"These fonts are available only to documents that already use the font, or to apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of macOS or Apple apps."
We ran into this earlier here in the forum with the Seravek font (a few times).
There are some work-arounds here:
 
I would extract the files from the TTC and then rename the fonts using something like TransType.

For me,
- No force integer pixel option for transformation tasks.
- Usability of the Channels panel isn't improved at all.
- Still no locking layer completely for any action.
- Antialias gap on raster format export isn't fixed.
 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ifontmaker/id377381670

FontCreator (commercial, Windows only)
https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator/
Birdfont (free, open source, Windows, Mac, and Linux)
https://birdfont.org/
Glyphr Studio (free, open source, online)
https://www.glyphrstudio.com/
For a beginner who wants to "dabble" - Birdfont is a good starting point.
FontForge while free, and very powerful, is painful and confusing due to the horrible user interface. Once you learn what you are doing that may be useful. But not a good place to learn.

If you require the highest available quality and accuracy, then the developed image (which is always processed in 32 bits) must be converted/stored to 32-bit format.

Then any editing done during RAW development (pre-development is nonsense of course) or post-development works with completely identical image data, so it doesn't matter.

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.

"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

Probably Serif just didn't have the time to implement Russian translation.
It may come to v2 at some point...
 

I've just spent all day (!) creating a set of Affinity LUTs for all the Fujifilm film simulations. I have a shiny new X-S10 but I shoot in RAW so Affinity doesn't give me them. The free version of Capture One reads my camera and has all of them, but I just can't get away well with the interface (when I wanted to use a film simulation, I was doing a basic develop in C1, applying the LUT and exporting to Affinity as a TIFF, which was a bit of a faff). So I used 'Infer LUT', and a lot of patience etc to create LUTs for Affinity. I then checked them out by independently developing RAW files on both C1 and Affinity to end up with a base result where I couldn't tell the difference on my monitor (which is very colur accurate), as sometimes exporting a file from C1 gave me a completely different-looking picture on Affinity. (If you're thinking that this has been a headache, you're dead right!) This was to check the accuracy of my LUTs. First of all, I wanted LUTs so they'd be easier to use on Affinity and secondly, I have hundreds and hundreds of RAW files from my Fuji X-A7 - and C1 does NOT offer me the film simulations on that, so I had no other way of using them if I wanted to.
So here's the thing. I obviously can't tell you how it comparies to in camera, but I can say the film simulation end result on Affinity is very nearly identical to the end result on C1 without the need to use C1. The only difference I can see is a slight variation in green which is visible but not great (and generally I preferred the Affinity LUT version). I also have literally no idea if they work equally well on ALL Fuji sensors/cameras because I've only just this second realised I haven't even tested them on the X-A7 raw files.
I did have a set of LUTs previously that I know I downloaded from this forum posted by some kind soul. But I found they didn't work well for me (this was my X-A7 days, but I found the same with the X-S10 files); very intense and, even with opacity turned well down, they didn't seem to match JPG film sim shots very well.
I'm actually very nervous writing this post. I'm relatively new to Affinity and this is the first post I've made on the forum and I don't know how people are going to respond to a random stranger offering gifts!
Oh, and if you're a n00b like me, the film simulations have to be applied with a LUT layer from the Photo Persona. I try and do a fairly neutral develop just to make a reasonably toned and exposed picture and send it over to Photo Persona, add the film sim LUT and then make any further changes I might want. No idea if that's the best way, it's just the one I figured out.
Fuji_LUTs_X-S10_-_X-Trans.zip

I would be great to use LUTs on raw files in Develop Persona

I don't get why Serif is against the standard behavior of other apps.
Locking any action make sense. no brainer.

This is one of the main flaws. Working pixel perfect it's super difficult and frustrating in Affinity.