SanSerif Posted January 29 Posted January 29 (edited) Let me begin by saying that I actually think affinity is a great product -- in potential. Realise that's a disappointing caveat. But then again, my experience with Affinity Photo has been breathtakingly bad. It's bad precisely because it teases with you so much that's good only to let you down. I love Luminosity, Hue and Bandpass masks, for instance. But what can I use it for if merely switching brushes and smudge and eraser tools crashes the program so unpredictably. I was working on a concept for an Ebonite fountain pen. 2 hours in, the program crashed without warning. Just like that 2 hours of work along with extensive notes are gone. The restore file set me right back to the beginning. I was effing blind and near the point of tears. Likewise, contouring produces endless nodes and strange facetting artefacts in Designer. Merging layers blurs the results. Expanding strokes produces excessive nodes. Feathering brushes widely is well-nigh impossible. Warped shapes don't skew properly. There's no way to copy/paste warp shapes without also copying the coordinates of the original group. RAW editor is poorly thought out and extremely basic. Heck, even Darktable, a free software, has better controls. Selecting brushes with pen tablet doesn't really work - even if the brush looks highlighted. I could go on and on. Bugs and paper cuts galore! No amount of fiddling settings like turning GPU acceleration off and increasing RAM availability has helped. In the end, as it stands, Affinity Photo/Designer are not ready for prime time professional workflows. Because in the end stability and predictable results will always trump all other calculations. Including cost. So, having said my piece, I'm going back to Adobe again. Sigh. Serif, make me come back and eat my words! I'd really like to be proven wrong about you. Edited January 29 by SanSerif Westerwälder 1 Quote
Twolane Posted January 29 Posted January 29 Save often? I've never gone more than five or ten minutes without a version save. My time is worth more than it takes to rebuild a project from scratch. Storage is cheap these days. Saving often won't eat up a lot of it. Quote
SanSerif Posted January 29 Author Posted January 29 (edited) Thanks for responding. But it's not just the crashes alone as I've highlighted. There are too many paper cuts to be viable in my workflow. Some very basic and non negotiable things are utterly broken. Contouring and curve expansion come to mind. It also misses Essentials such as blending and vector brushes. I've given it a fair shot. Now moving on. Will come back in 1 year to see if any progress has been made. Edited January 29 by SanSerif Westerwälder 1 Quote
Komatös Posted January 29 Posted January 29 8 hours ago, SanSerif said: the program crashed without warning. I would say that is the nature of a crash. It comes without warning, and of course unexpectedly. It's always easier to look for bugs in others rather than in yourself. Crashes are usually caused by outdated drivers, operating systems that are not kept up to date or, in rare cases, defective hardware. AiDon 1 Quote MAC mini M4 | MacOS Sequoia 15.3.1 | 16 GB RAM | 256 GB SSD AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | INTEL Arc A770 LE 16 GB | 32 GB DDR4 3200MHz | Windows 11 Pro 24H2 (26100.3194) Affinity Suite V 2.5.7 & Beta 2.6 (latest) Interested in a free (selfhosted) PDF Solution? Have a look at Stirling PDF Ferengi Acquisition Rule No. 49: “A deal is a deal is a deal.”
SanSerif Posted January 29 Author Posted January 29 It's none of those things. Affinity Photo is buggy. My desktop is fully updated. And in fact a lot more capable than what affinity requires. All other programs run smoothly. Adobe too. But Affinity... I kinda feel like the point is being missed. It has non crash bugs. That impedes workflow. Hence my conclusion. Quote
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.