daveu

As sad as I am to say it, unless you are doing simple RGB web graphics in Photo, it's not a realistic solution to make the switch (especially with Designer) even with v2. I have been in a terrible bind with a client where I created their logo in Designer—nothing but a couple of fairly simple paths and one font. But no matter what vector format I try to export to, they are unusable by any other app. I get client requests all of the time for vector formats they can send to vendors, and none of them work for any vendors. EPS is tiny, blurred, and rasterized. PDF, flattened and not helpful. SVG completely broken and three layers are turned into 21 layers and won't open anywhere. TIFF, flattened rasterized. I at least expected PSD to work even if it will annoy those expected vectors... but nope, not even PSD (!) it's flattened, rasterized, and shrunk down a worthless blur. Of course, PNG and JPG are fantastic and easy, but anything with layers or vector maps are completely useless after export. And it's not one setting here or there, I have literally spent hours and hours doing nothing but exporting with every single combination possible during export for each format. After much frustration and many apologies over months... I have angrily returned to Adobe and rebuilt the exact same logo in Illustrator. Presto, no problem. Everyone gets the files they need, everything works perfectly. I love the idea of Affinity, and I was thrilled to support them in their no subscription mission. Photo is a nice tool for a casual web dev, but it's not an Adobe replacement for a designer.

Honestly, this is absurd. If I wanted to export all of the layers and ignore the document sizing, crop, and positioning that I've made then all Affinity Photo is doing is exporting the original photos back into new files. That's not exporting layers... that's exporting source images back into new files of the same source images! I cannot believe that such a basic Export Layers function is missing when it is absolutely required by just about anyone working with photography for websites. The Export Persona tool is a weird and complicated side step to make you manually do the thing you were trying to automate... but then it doesn't even do that. It doesn't slice to the dimensions of the document, it just goes back to source for every layer. So why bother "slicing"?. I just can't figure out how anyone thought this makes sense? This is a design tool, not a super complicated graphic format conversion app.

I'm easing into making the switch to Windows and I absolutely love all three Affinity products. But if I have to repurchase them, it would be massively cool to get a cross-license discount. Of course I was stupid enough to buy through Mac AppStore, so it probably renders everything moot. Nonetheless, fingers crossed.