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Hi all, I am planning on getting Affinity Designer for Xmas and i have a few questions before I get it. I currently use Photoshop for website design, is this a programe which could do web design in or is it just vector art? Am I able to import and export to photoshop? Am I able to import and export PDF? I am not sure I can think of everything I need to ask now, but that is most of it. Is it compatible and how does it compare to Illustrator. I look forward to your responses Jon Fuller

I'm a little confused about how Designer relates to Photo (which isn't out yet, I take it), since Designer seems to have bitmap editing. But I'm ready to toss the dice pending a little clarity on this big question: One recent Photoshop feature that I'm using heavily is Generator - I'd say it has made my life easier than any feature since they added layers! Yes, I'm that old. I wouldn't expect Designer to have the same functionality exactly and generate images from layers with ___.png names in imported Photoshop files. BUT, if I'm ready to start building new files and manually convert my legacy .psd files as needed, is there any similar kind of thing in Designer? Or if not, what's the nearest thing/easiest way to set up object or layer exports? Edit - I found the export tutorial, looks like a reasonable solution for now. I hope that Affinity considers something frictionless like Generator in the future though. Just using filename extensions (with a syntax for settings options) as Generator does is brilliant - no bouncing between multiple windows to set up export of the same object – and I know I've always got the current version of everything at all times, without having to open/find/target an "export" button. It may seem unreasonable to be dissatisfied about those "little" workflow differences, but with the projects and workflow I have, the click object, target settings window, choose multiple widgets to create settings, remember to push a button to export process will actually make me take a pretty big productivity hit compared to Generator. And surprisingly, it suddenly feels like a kind of archaic UX model by comparison, for an otherwise shiny new program. Cheers Allen

Can I copy an object ( 1 closed path curve ) and paste it as a path / custom shape on photoshop ? right now it's pasted as a bitmap only Thanks DJ

Hello, It would be great if Affinity would support smart copy/paste and preserve vector capabilities within it's software support family such as Photoshop and Illustrator. We often create a shape in Affinity and copy/paste it in Photoshop makes a bitmap image. Would be great if it would create a Smart Object just as illustrator would. Other than that, great software.

One of the things that really bugged me about my PS / LR workflow is the way that Photos would get passed back and forth between the two apps. With a typical workflow you start with a Photo in LR and then need to send it to PS to do something that LR can't do. LR makes a copy of the photo so when you are done editing it you now have two similar photos in your library. If you decide you want to edit the photo again you now have three copies and then four etc. The way this operation should really work is you make an adjustment in Apple's upcoming Photos app, say move the brightness to 27, and then when you export the file to Affinity Photo it uses the same photo instead of a copy of the photo. You should then see your brightness adjustment of 27 in Affinity Photo and then be able to make an adjustment to the brightness again to 15 which should then show up in the settings to Apple's app as you return back to it. I can understand some of the reasons why Adobe's workflow was clumsy, they were trying to get a 17 year old app to work with a brand new app after all. But now that both Apple and Affinity are both starting out at version 1 and at essentially the exact same time let's try and get the way this works under control. I disagree with many people on this forum that Adobe's photo solution works pretty well I think there is a huge opportunity for taking on Adobe in this area.

When will Affinity be ready to unveil a Photoshop replacement for the Mac?

Earlier this year I wrote a review on the Photoshop CC page at Amazon describing the advantages that Sketch had over Photoshop. The review got a lot of positive votes and rose to the featured reviews section. Now that I found out about Affinity Designer I gave some equal time talking about it in my review. If anyone here would like to mark the review as helpful it will keep it in the featured section and will be a great way to give Affinity more exposure to potential Adobe customers. See the following link to get to the review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R37N9QYFC1JY6L/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00CS75KKI&nodeID=229534&store=software I also would have mentioned Affinity in my Illustrator review as well but to be honest it didn't get rated very high. If someone would like to do a review comparing Illustrator to Affinity in the Illustrator section that should give it some good exposure. A lot of the reviews just focus on being anti-Adobe but rarely give you suggestions for what you should replace Adobe with. I am glad someone mentioned Affinity in the Adobe forums and I am sure many Amazon customers would appeciate knowing about this software as well.

We often draw icons in adobe Illustrator to use them in our Photoshop layouts as scalable "smartobjects". We tried to copy and paste the icon that we have drawn in affinity designer but it sadly turned out to be a rasterized picture in Photoshop instead of a vector object. It would be really nice to have this "smartobject" opportunity with AffinityDesigner, too.