Paul_Hol

It's not a "discount" because version 2 has never been sold before. It's, more correctly, an introductory price that will increase at some unspecified date in the future. look back at the history of Serif and you'll see this is their standard pricing method. Very regular offers of a 'discount' with periods of full price sales so that their 'discounts' don't contravene UK advertising rules. A real discount will be when it's offered at more than 40% off. It's good value cheap software, but I can see why some people are annoyed that their loyalty and advocacy for the product hasn't been specially rewarded.

You highlight Affinity's problem in programme development; Who are they creating this software for ? the less advanced users working on tablets with maybe just a few thousand files or serious users who expect to use professional software on capable systems with 10s of thousands of files. I wouldn't consider photo editing if I wasn't using a properly calibrated and colour managed screen.

But not everyone would consider that important or even useful. The sidecar file approach will be important to ensure that Photo can create a non-destructive parametric editing system. No question about that. The advantage of the catalogue approach is that it allows working with all files, not just the limited number of files you happen to have, or can cope with, in a 'gallery' or 'filmstrip'. Once you start trying to find files across years, decades or tens of thousands of files across multiple drives, having to work with small groups becomes exceptionally limiting.

That would be a major omission. The ability to sort, search and group is a VERY important feature of programmes like Lightroom, Capture One etc. It would also be very useful across the whole Affinity suite.

The real problem is probably not availability, but cost. The key bit there is "In time we have said we will have a DAM that compliments the current applications" so it's on it's way, but we'll have to wait.

"Extensive" ?? MoviePlus has hardly registered on most video editor's radar, just a low end amateur product development stopped almost a decade ago. Proper video editing software would be a ridiculously difficult market to break into when products such as Resolve or Avid Media composer are free. A DAM is just a glorified database, Lightroom just uses SQLite. One of the market leaders for photo DAMs, iMatch, is just made and developed by one person. It wouldn't be difficult to recruit a couple of specialist programmers to pull it together if Serif don't have capable people in-house already.

I think you're missing how little, comparatively*, needs to be added to make Affinity Photo work more like Lightroom. Photo already has the core functionality of a raw conversion engine, printing functions and Publisher, via the persona system, could handle book production. Serif would need to add the ability to save develop settings, a glaring omission in Photo now, then just add some DAM functionality. Some bells and whistles of Lightroom, like the map and slideshow modules might be harder to bring in, but also their omission won't put very many people off. *Compared to building entirely new products serif has no experience of eg video editing, CAD, etc

A bit late to this, but to the OP. The issue with the map not displaying in LR6 CAN be fixed without too much difficulty. It's due to a Google licencing issue changing in 2008. The fix is documented here https://github.com/astuder/lightroom-map-fix Bear in mind that even if Affinity do create a DAM to make the suite more like Lightroom, a map module might not be included. It's worth checking out Darktable for it's newly added mapping functions too.

You can very easily build custom tools panels using Adobe configurator which became available (free) from CS4 onwards. You can not only put on tools, but also buttons for actions and widgets etc. A great utility too few people know about.

Custom control panels were available in Photoshop CS4, nothing new here.

Anything original or of value to add yourself ?

There's a big fundamental difference between minor patches and updates and the sort of major changes in the early days of personal computing. Anyone who used Windows 95 would find version 10 pretty familiar and easy to work on. Similarly on Macs. OSs are mature now. Maturity in software allows better productivity because less time is wasted in learning. If they were totally set in their ways they wouldn't bother trying anything new. The point here is that change is only a good thing if there's benefit attached. Just doing things differently isn't helpful.

Stories about the early development of word processing software really aren't helpful now. Those days were limited by the big changes that were concurrent with operating software development. We now have mature OSs that don't make major changes to the possibilities of software design, so products stick to generally understood principles, workflows and user interface conventions for everyone's benefit. AP was launched into a very mature market for image editing where conventions have been well established for two decades or more. Let's start by pointing out that Affinity Photo is most definitely NOT non-destructive. If you want examples of non-destructive photo editing go and look at Capture One, Lightroom or any of the other raw conversion programs that use sidecar files or proper catalogues. If you arrive at a 'professional' product from a novice application like Elements, you're bound to have to spend some time learning the new advanced features previously unavailable. If the way they've been implemented is different to most other similarly pitched products the novice won't know and will just assume that's the way it's done. They'll only discover there are more 'standard' approaches if they then try other software. If Serif really want to capture a bigger slice of the experienced user market they'll need to listen carefully to where the product is proving too different for those users to bother learning.

As I work more with Affinity Photo, a couple of 'features' are starting to drive me up the wall and back to Photoshop. View; If I select view actual pixels, that's exactly what I want. I don't want the image jumping up to fill the window every time I change a dimension or crop a bit. It might be a suitable behaviour if I'd chosen zoom to fit or zoom to width fitting, but it's hugely irritating when I'm try to work on specific actual pixels for web imagery. Stroke; Where's an option to stroke a selection ? Very useful in Photoshop, but missing in AP. Having to Export instead of save as; Just continually annoying. Gradient fill; Why can't I just fill a selection with a gradient ? what hoops need to be jumped through ? Unintuitive and unpredictable.

I can understand your frustration. I think the problem is that lots of experienced Photoshop users arrive expecting AP to just be Affinity Photoshop, it isn't. There's a lot to like about AP, but it does break some conventions that long term image editors will struggle to adapt to quickly. It also has some frustratingly different 'features'. The whole personnas idea seems sound to me, just think of it being a tidier version of the standalone windows in Photoshop like ACR, make panorama or Liquify etc. It really comes into it's own when working between all three programs. I'm also not at all bothered by the update process, just like Adobe used to do and makes keeping old versions much simpler. This leaves experienced newcomers with the dilemma of whether to just stick with what they know or put the effort into learning new working methods. I'd rather hoped that some of these different 'features' would have been dropped to make it more compatible with OS conventions, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet. Serif will know if their 'different' approach has been sensible when they roll out version 2, just how many people who paid modest amounts for the software will stick with it and upgrade.

This isn't particularly helpful. Because there no way to make non destructive crops in the way people understand non-destructive editing from programs like Lightroom, Capture One etc.. It took a couple of reads of the manual and watching tutorials to appreciate that the way photos are opened in Photo is unlike any other pixel image editing program. In that the image needs conversion to a pixel layer to actually crop the image and make the cropped off area invisible. There's a lot to like about Photo, but there have been a few development choices that have made certain aspects of it's use unintuitive and more complex than most users expect. The crop tool is one aspect, the gradient tool is another and needing to export rather than save as... further confuses new users.

If we look at the way 'stand alone' programs just become personnas within the Affinity suite, it seems pretty obvious that making a stand alone program that also acts as a personna would be the most likely way a DAM would be added to the suite. I'm sure most suite users will be happy to buy another program that could transform the way we work with the suite and it's capabilities.

Another vote of support for rygar's request. The gradient tool is something I've used a lot in Photoshop/Lightroom/Capture One for 20 years and trying to change working habits to accommodate the Affinity interpretation of the tool is far from easy.

A good integrated DAM option is the next big feature that needs adding to the Affinity suite. It's tickling in with the new resource manager features in 1.9 and that is a good omen that this will come in time. For me it needs to support every format the suite currently supports, plus video and audio formats. It needs the ability to create virtual collections within it's database, also automatically generated (smart) collections based on user defined rules . Another feature that will take the suite up to another level is the ability to save history steps to side car files to make parametric changes (particularly to RAW photos) repeatable and changeable. That would then bring Affinity Photo's capabilities up to properly compete with Lightroom and Capture One. That would also allow virtual copies in the DAM.

It would be really useful to open the image at the exact size it's being used on the page to allow optimal sharpening for the output process. In addition is would be even better if it was possible to do this with all photos used in a publication in a batch process. Getting photos sharpened optimally makes a significance difference for photographic reproduction.