Photo vs. Designer: Which should I buy?

[MineTruly]

I'm a little confused about which apps have which features. I want to draw in raster, and also edit photos. A good text tool is extremely important to me. Patch tool and lasso tool are very important. Vector drawing is a very nice bonus that I don't want to walk away from, but not necessary. My first exposure to Affinity was a description of the iPad app, which had everything I needed, but I think these features are split up between Photo and Design? This will run on a Windows machine.

Here are some specific questions I have:

- Does Photo have an advanced Text tool? How does it compare to the advanced text features in Designer?

- Does Photo have a paint bucket and gradient tool?

- Does Designer have a lasso tool, or other ways to hand-select a portion of the image? (such as cutting out a bear from a photo.)

- Does Designer have something like a patch tool or healing brush?

- Do Designer's "raster tools" match the tools in Photo?

Thank you so much for your guidance! I am pretty sold on Affinity but my budget only allows me to pick one product. I want to make the right choice!

[R C-R]

The iPad Photo app has most but not all of the desktop Photo app's features.

 

Photo has the same text features as Designer except for text on a path & converting a shape to an arbitrarily shaped text frame. It has paint bucket & gradient tools. Both apps have a pixel-oriented lasso tool with freehand, polygonal, & magnetic modes. Both also have a pixel-oriented selection brush tool but only Photo has a "magic wand" pixel section tool. Both apps have "refine edges" pixel selection modes. Both have select by color range, tonal range, or sampled color but only Photo has select by alpha range.

 

Designer has only a few of Photo's retouching brush tools (smudge, dodge, burn, blur, & sharpen) but no patch, healing, or inpainting brushes, & none of Photo's live or destructive filters (or plug-in support for 3rd party ones). Both have similar effects & adjustment capabilities.

 

Bottom line: If the iPad Photo app has everything you need then the desktop version will have all that & more. The one (sort of) exception to this is the iPad app already has a few features currently available only in the 1.6 customer beta versions of the desktop apps but not the current 1.5.x retail versions, which means some (but not all) afphoto documents created on an iPad will not open in 1.5.x desktop versions. However, they will open in the customer betas, which you can download & try if you own the respective desktop app (Designer or Photo).

[lepr]

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