General Purchase and Support

[gene lee]

Hello,

 

I am interested in purchasing Affinity Photo and possibly Affinity Designer. I have some general questions.

 

1. How many activations are allowed per purchase for personal use?

 

2. If 2 or more, can one be Window 10 and the other a Mac?

 

3. Does AP and AD support the Microsoft Surface Pen and Dial?

 

4. Is there a Workbook for AP (Like the one for AD)?

 

5. Does AP support or have built-in presets like those on ON1 PhotoRaw? 

 

6. In general, is AP or AD better or easier in Mac or Window? I am debating on changing to Windows because interacting on the screen seems better for fine art photo work. Your opinion will help.

 

Thank you.

 

gene

[Leigh]

Welcome to the forum gene lee :)

 

1. Taken from here: “As a private individual, you can download, install, use and run for personal use, one copy of the Serif Software directly on each computer running Microsoft Windows (“Windows Computer”) that you personally own or control.”

2. You need to purchase separate licences for both Windows and MacOS.

3. Our apps are optimised for Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book :) They also include gesture, pen, and touch screen input. AFAIK, we have no support for the dial yet but I’m sure it will come in the future.

4. Not yet but it’s coming.

5. Yep, it has some Adjustment presets but you can create your own.

6. I guess this comes down to personal preference - I've made the change from Windows to Mac, so I can't comment :)

[R C-R]

re #6: Because the Mac versions were released first & there has been more time to optimize them for the comparatively fewer Mac hardware configurations than PC ones, some things run faster, smoother, or more stably on Macs than PCs. One of the staff also mentioned around a year ago that most of the development work was done on Macs & then ported to Windows, but I do not know if that is still true.

 

Anyway, while they are devoting a lot of time & effort to ironing out the Windows issues (which apparently do not affect all Windows users), for the immediate future running the apps on Macs may be a little better in terms of speed & stability.

 

A few other things you might find of some interest:

• Both AD & AP share a common file format & if you have both of them you can seamlessly switch back & forth between them while editing -- there is an 'Edit in AD/AP' item on the File menu so you don't have to save anything in one to open it on the other.

• Support through this website is outstanding. The staff are very responsive & many users devote a lot of their time to answering questions, sharing tips, etc.

• Neither app is as feature rich as their Adobe counterparts but some things, like live previews, are (in my opinion) in a class by themselves.