Devil in the details

[Kuttyjoe]

I bought this app yesterday. Not blindly.  I've been looking at it for a long time and passing on it.  But I bought it yesterday.  I used it a lot at work yesterday to see how much of what I normally would do in Photoshop could be done with this app and how easily.  I think that if there's anything that has any possibility, or even intention of making inroads on Photoshop domination, this is probably it. But, using this app does leave me kind of amazed at how many of the details Adobe has managed to notice and cater to in Photoshop.  So many things that are just done right, only in Photoshop and nowhere else.

 

Affinity Photo manages to do somethings better than Photoshop.  Seems like the HSL filter achieves a better result when doing exactly the same thing, but it's really quirky.  Photoshop has that simple preview checkbox that you take for granted.  AF doesn't have it.  It's nice to click it over and over to see before/after/before/after.  I found that I could simulate this by going over to the layer and turning the checkbox on and off but it's not as smooth or smart.

 

Speaking of that layer checkbox.  Why put it on the far right of the layer?  Is the eye symbol used by many other programs not better than a checkbox.  The checkbox says to me that it's selected, not on or off.  After using it for a couple days, I still find that I don't know if a layer is on or off and suddenly realize, Oh, it's the checkbox that determines on or off.  And there's that blank space to the left of the layer that your mind tells you, something is supposed to be there.  LOL.  I'm sure that it's just a matter of time, but the current way really does seem to be unintuitive.

 

Pop up boxes and dialog boxes.  They pup up in the bottom right corner...and I don't even notice when they do.  Very strange.  And when I reposition it to where my eyes actually are, they continue to pop up in the bottom right corner later.  It would be good if they remembered where they were positioned.

 

Custom key commands is on the roadmap.  I remember now, that's one of the reasons I initially totally disregarded this app.  Without that, it's difficult to think it's for professionals.

 

The Select Color range tool is lacking some important options.  Photoshop and also Serif PhotoPlus I believe allows for selection of Yellow, Red, Green, Cyan, in addition to Sampled Color. For whatever reason, Affinity Photo only Reds, Greens, Blues.  I tried to use this app today for a complex color separation job and I needed that option.  So I ended up going back to Photoshop to do it.  Also, it's not possible to hold shift and select additional colors.

 

No right click options.  Right clicking on the document offers nothing.

 

Copy/Paste in Photoshop is a lot better.  If I copy art from Illustrator for example that has vectors, and a 300ppi image, I can flip over to Photoshop, create a new document.  Photoshop will notice the dimensions of the document, then allow me to decide all about the rest of the details.  In this example, I would make it 300ppi. I could choose rgb or CMYK, etc.  Afinity Photo just grabs whatever is on the clipboard and makes it into a 96ppi image.

 

There are no options for printing color separations or halftones.  I see that "halftone filter" or something is on the roadmap, but I don't think that will suffice for print work.

 

Pantone and spot color support is also on the roadmap.  Hopefully that means spot color and pantone channel separations.

 

 

 

It's a good program so far.  There's plenty missing that would be needed for print work but the roadmap is encouraging. 

 

Oh, and it crashed yesterday within an hour of first running it.  Actually, it crashed in the background while I wasn't using it.

[MEB]

Hi Kuttyjoe,

Thanks for your feedback. Some of the points you mentioned were already addressed in the Beta and will be available in the next Mac App Store update before Christmas.

Custom shortcuts, Pantones, Spot Colours, Trim and Bleed control, Overprint control, Printer marks, Global Colours, Image stacking, Panoramas and a lot more were added since the last update. It certainly doesn't cover the decades of development Photoshop has - this is our 1.4 version - but we are improving it all the time.