Which Product Best Fits My Needs?

[themanicotti]

Hi,

My name is Dennis and I'm a web developer/designer. Just started Figma for doing mockups and am happy with it.

I used Photoshop CS5 (never went into creative cloud subscription, just rode CS5 as long as possible) for the following things and am wondering which Affinity product would suit these needs best:

1. Being able to import PDFs and save each page as a JPG

2. If possible being able to take individual graphics out of a PDF and saving them as as their own PNG

3. Cropping and resizing images

4. In an image being able to extract the person from the background 

Items #1 and #4 are the most important to me.

I'm guessing the first two would be best done in Publisher and the second two in Photo. Just wondering if it's possible to do 3/4 or even 4/4 in one program.

Also, since I'm a web developer/designer - if there's features in a certain affinity product that you think are really beneficial to my profession's workflow let me know. I'm always looking to improve.

Thank you so much for your time!

 

[Komatös]

Hello @themanicotti and welcome to the forums.

If you on Windows or MacOS you can tryout all three as trials. This way you can see which programme best suits your needs. 

A little tip on the side. Do not install and test the programmes together, but one after the end of the 10-day test period of the other.

In principle, you could use Affinity Photo for all tasks, but for exporting individual pages from a PDF you have to reload the PDF file for each page in order to be able to select the page to be exported. This also applies to exporting individual images from a multi-page PDF document.

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Komatös said:

In principle, you could use Affinity Photo for all tasks, but for exporting individual pages from a PDF you have to reload the PDF file for each page in order to be able to select the page to be exported. This also applies to exporting individual images from a multi-page PDF document.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Photo can Open a multi-page PDF and you'll get each PDF page represented as an Artboard. You can export the Artboards individually if you want,

Or it can Open a specific page or page range. Or you can use File > Place to embed an individual page into another document, and switch among those individual pages as you want.

Note, though, that to Open a PDF with appropriate fidelity the computer needs to have all the fonts installed, at all the right versions, That is true of all the Affinity applications, And for some cases (fonts using music fonts in particular) it's unlikely that Open will work correctly in any of the Affinity applications,

[Alfred]

4 hours ago, Komatös said:

If you on Windows or MacOS you can tryout all three as trials. This way you can see which programme best suits your needs.

https://affin.co/designertrial

https://affin.co/phototrial

https://affin.co/publishertrial

4 hours ago, Komatös said:

A little tip on the side. Do not install and test the programmes together, but one after the end of the 10-day test period of the other.

Thanks to the shared file format, any files saved during an earlier trial can be opened and further edited during a later one.

[themanicotti]

Thanks everyone for your replies. It sounds like Photo will work for all my needs. I'll get started with that.

And it's a good idea to try the 10-day trial with the others. Except it seems Publisher is geared more towards print than web and therefore I'm not sure how many web designers seriously use it as a design tool... But who knows, I might discover a new workflow I enjoy. If anyone has experience or insight in this I'd love to learn more.