First Impression (Jipp, another one of these)

[Det]

Hello Affinity, Hello Serif,

 

first of - thanks! Thanks for building something professional, good looking and with a great promise. You have to know: that comes from a long-time-Adobe user. I use PS since V3.0 - not CS3 - so there's some familiarity there.

 

I really hope to not sound too much like "I want Photoshop without calling it Photoshop" - but I'm afraid, I'm going to sound a bit like that. And there's a reason: workflow. I've spend the last decade finetuning everything I do in PS, I rarely use any menu, know my keyboard by heart.

 

Why? Simple answer: time is money.

 

When I'm processing my images, I want to do this as fast as possible. At the same time, I need a really high quality output. Well, I guess thats the reason everywhere for a good workflow.

 

That said - let's head over to Affinity Photo!

 

Starting at the start - what the hell does the installation do? 23x MB and it takes ages to install. OK, it's beta - and I'm not using my normal graphics workstation for the test - but on an SSD that should run much faster.

 

Starting up - same. On this small machine, AP takes about a minute to start; same system with PS CS6 - about 30 Seconds.

 

I grabbed an old NIKON D50 i had laying around and fed a NEF into AP - another minute, until I saw the image. The RAW Import (Develop Persona) was not usable - moving any slider took somewhere between 5 and 20 seconds - on a 6MPixel RAW. Same System: PS CS6/ACR runs smooth. I didn't try a NEF from my D800 - I guess 36MPixel would have been no fun.

 

So - speed should be a major issue. Any real good feature that simply isn't useable won't cut it. Mayby there's debug-code in that version.

 

UI - great! Your designers did a relly beautiful job, putting everything where I'd expect it. Theres enought similarity to photoshop to get started without too much thinking. I really appreciate that you've included floating palettes - to me the design with them fixed to one side never made any sense.

 

Personas - well, interesting approach. I'd guess I'd call them "Workspaces" but I can live with that. It remains to be seen if this concept works with my mindset.

 

Keyboard Shortcuts - here's the part where I start whining again: can I please have them all compatible with photoshop? As mentioned before: I use shortcuts all the time, so it would be great, if I find any tool on the key I expect. I know: a lot of shortcuts are already the same with PS, but - for example - I'm missing ALT-RightKlick to set a brush hardness- and diameter. I know: STRG+ALT+LMOUSE+RMOUSE... you can do better than that.

 

I do a lot of work on a single image - so for me its SOP, after opening the image, to go into Fullscreen (without Borders; F in PS) and navigate by pressing SPACE. There's no such mode in AP, and I'm not sure how much I'd miss that one.

 

What I'm sure missing is the color selector ala PS. I usualiy only need my fore- and background color (basically the two circles upper left in the color palette) - if I click onto one of them, I expect a color mixer, with a pipette to sample any color from the underlying image. Yes, PS does it that way - and I can't think of any better way. And please: "D" for default colors (Black and White) :)

 

I know: this is no in depth test. But a pot of points mentioned I use all the time. Again: you did a pretty amazing job, creating AP. The world is in dire need for an alternative to the almighty Photoshop, and I see a whole lot of potential here. If you want to get us old Photoshop Workhorses to change quickly, make the transition as easy as possible (without beeing sued by abobe). I will continue testing and recommend AP to everyone.

 

[Mark Ingram]

You're in the Designer Windows Beta forum currently, so I'm just going to move this to Feature Suggestions forum instead.