Should I move over from Adobe Products to Affinity

[Richard Broom]

I have just caught sight of the Serif Affinity products.  I am currently an Creative Cloud subscriber and, frankly, I have never been keen on their monthly payment plan.  And, Adobe updates amount to them rearranging the furniture.  I can't help thinking their products have become a cash cow.

 

I am ready to jump ship and leave Adobe behind and would truly appreciate advice from any Affinity users.  Is it worth me leaving Adobe?

 

Next question.  I make great use of Adobe InDesign.  Can I use the Affinity products as a DTP?  Any thoughts

 

Look forward to hearing from anyone who can offer advice.

 

Best Wishes

 

Richard 

[peter]

Hi Richard, welcome to the forums

 

In a word Yes! So long as the features that you want and need are in AD and APh. Some features have not been implemented yet; hence the road map  to see what's coming up next. So you may have to use some work arounds :ph34r:

 

https://affinity.ser...opic/1689-faqs/

 

You can wean your self onto Affinity! It's gonna be worth it ;) 

 

Look at this from mystrawberry monkey...

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10056-menu-design/

 

and this from ronnyb

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/4262-flyer/

 

All this...without APu amazing eh?

 

Let's see what you can do...I've put my favourite pins on my Pinterest board... here's a few from it

https://www.pinteres...inity-designer/

https://www.pinteres...-family-guy-tr/

https://www.pinteres...ets-the-eejits/

 

As for the various tutorials, MEB has kindly posted these links here

http://www.miguelboto.com/affinity/

 

Should be enough to get the ball going.

 

I use this:
AD=Affinity Designer=Vector and Raster: (Illustrator)
APh=Affinity Photo=Photo manipulation: (Photoshop)
APu=Affinity Publisher=Desktop publishing: (In Design), due 2016

This clears up any confusion and is a handy short cut. This copies Adobe's style of naming, which also copies the periodic table abbreviations. As seen in the current US TV series Breaking Bad titles.

peter

[Pentaxian]

As a very recent buyer of both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, but a LONG time user of Photoshop (heavy user) and Illustrator (occasional user), I absolutely LOVE these first releases by Affinity/Serif.

 

Sure, there are still a few tweaks to be ironed out - not least of which is to get Photoshop plugins working flawlessly in Photo.

 

So why don't you do what I'm doing? I'm using the Affinity pair of apps alongside the Adobe pair. My use is mainly on clinical and anatomical photos and diagrams. (I'm a surgeon and surgical anatomy prof).

 

Apart from sessions with large numbers of photos to process (I use Photoshop exclusively for those at the moment, especially for the plugins), for sessions with just a few photos, I first use Photoshop, then using a copy of the original, I use Affinity Photo. That way, I'm learning my way around AP and I'm also finding out just what it WILL do as well as what it WON'T do (not much). So I'm running them in parallel.

 

Currently, I'm amazed at what Affinity Photo does, and does flawlessly, and most of all - very quickly. Once they get the plugin problems sorted out - especially for Topaz, Nik, OnOne, Noise Ninja, and Photomatix - then I should be familiar enough, and confident enough, to wean myself off Photoshop and onto Affinity Photo.  This will probably be a reversal of what I'm doing now - I'll start to use AP as my primary processing app, but still use Photoshop on copies as backups just in case, for a little while. Eventually, I hope to be on Affinity Photo alone, and can retire Photoshop (CS6) to the "Not Used" folder.

 

So far, Affinity Photo continually surprises me when I go to do something new, and it just does it. Yesterday it was creating a new layer, changing the type to "Multiply", perform a selection on the new layer over some labels on a clinical diagram, fill them with bright yellow highlighter, flatten the image, save.  Bingo - perfectly done images with some labels highlighted. It worked as quickly or even more so than in Photoshop.  The day before, I had to remove some stuff from some clinical photos taken during surgery, using the inpainting brush - worked perfectly first go. (By the way, I still get confused by the terminology. In Photoshop, what AP calls the Healing brush is the Clone tool, and what AP calls the Inpainting brush is the Healing brush).

 

Bottom line - Affinity Photo is just about there. Plugin compatibility needs to be sorted, but once that happens, I'm all over it and will kiss Photoshop goodbye.

 

Just one person's experiences so far, but I hope it helps.

[JimGoshorn]

Best way to decide is make a list of what features you make use of in Photoshop and then when the trial version comes out, check to see if everything is there that you need. Make sure that Photo would fit well in your workflow.