photoshop replacement

[stumblebum]

just purchased Affinity a month or so ago in hopes of kicking Adobe to the curb, i was premature. i am a power user at an expert level. couple questions:

is affinity basically for hobbyists and tinkerers as opposed to us expert level power using professionals?

adobe discourages any contact with customers--is that the model for Affinity?

JPG  the industry standard, seriously... does Affinity have no way to make a jpg file?

I would dearly love to kick Adobe to the curb--however the underwhelming experience with Affinity seems that aint gonna happen anytime soon.

Adobe is ripe for the picking--is Affinity unaware of this opportunity?

I must be missing something...

 

 

[Dan C]

Hi stumblebum,

Welcome to the forums

6 hours ago, stumblebum said:

is affinity basically for hobbyists and tinkerers as opposed to us expert level power using professionals?

We certainly don't market it that way! Many professionals use our software, perhaps the best testimony of this is Affinity Spotlight, where we showcase professionals using our app. 

6 hours ago, stumblebum said:

 adobe discourages any contact with customers--is that the model for Affinity?

Not at all! I'm personally working at Serif HQ currently, in Technical Support  We have these forums, and a direct email address for support/bugs/feature requests. You'll even find threads on this forums where our developers directly reply, so I'd go as far as to say we're completely the opposite in this regard.

6 hours ago, stumblebum said:

JPG  the industry standard, seriously... does Affinity have no way to make a jpg file?

You can export a JPEG file under File>Export. 

[toltec]

9 hours ago, stumblebum said:

just purchased Affinity a month or so ago in hopes of kicking Adobe to the curb, i was premature. i am a power user at an expert level. couple questions:

is affinity basically for hobbyists and tinkerers as opposed to us expert level power using professionals?

adobe discourages any contact with customers--is that the model for Affinity?

JPG  the industry standard, seriously... does Affinity have no way to make a jpg file?

I would dearly love to kick Adobe to the curb--however the underwhelming experience with Affinity seems that aint gonna happen anytime soon.

Adobe is ripe for the picking--is Affinity unaware of this opportunity?

I must be missing something...

 

 

I was a professional in the (pre-press) print trade for thirty years before I retired, using Photoshop every day.

Apart from a few specialist printing needs (colour separations) I would have had no trouble using Photo all day. In fact I prefer it.

There are differences, so it is a matter of spending some time learning it. 

[Pšenda]

Even though you are in PS power user, I suggest you go through the Help, vimeo Tutorials, or Affinity forums. Then you will not have these elementary questions.

On 9/18/2018 at 2:53 AM, stumblebum said:

does Affinity have no way to make a jpg file?

As the toltec writes, something just does different - Affinity is not a copy of PS. So it can be a bit of a problem for a longtime PS user.

[Fixx]

Many things are more complicated but also more flexible.

[hifred]

22 hours ago, toltec said:

There are differences, so it is a matter of spending some time learning it. 

There's also a still lot of features clearly missing from the perspective of some long time Photoshop users. 
Affinity for me clearly hasn't reached the state to say 'everything's there, things just work a tiny bit differently'. 

But I agree, that the OP should have consulted the manual :o)
 

[toltec]

10 minutes ago, hifred said:

There's also a still lot of features clearly missing from the perspective of some long time Photoshop users. 
 

Indeed, the lack of decent channel editing (I used them to make sometimes 10 or 12 colour separations for silk screen printing). But I certainly could have used Photo for pretty much everything else that I can think of, ATM.

Multi colour separations is pretty specialised stuff though. What's missing most from your point of view?

Anyway, we had pretty much every program under the sun, trying to do it all in one program never works, lots of things Photoshop was pretty rubbish at (especially 20 odd years ago). Although at the moment, I seem to be able to do everything I need in Photo and Designer plus the odd free app like Faststone (scanning and organising) and Riot (compression).

[hifred]

4 hours ago, toltec said:

Indeed, the lack of decent channel editing (I used them to make sometimes 10 or 12 colour separations for silk screen printing)

Proper Channel Editing is on my list too, although I don't work in the print business.

I personally mostly miss an awful lot of small workflow details from Photoshop....
Just looking at the layer stack I miss useful previews for Layers and Masks (larger + in document aspect ratio), the ability to copy every Layer stack item with Alt pressed, including Layer-Effects!, better ways to bulk change visibility of layers (hold LMB and drag over Eye-Icon). Layer states were awesome too.

I also much miss truckloads of hotkey options. I want to set brush opacity and flow with the keyboard and assign Blend Modes via keyboard, when retouching I need this 3 times a minute. Existing essential keyboard mapping for Pen users are poorly executed – such as scrubby zoom and interactive Pen Size + Falloff change via keyboard.

In all programs I miss context sensitive RMB menus – having to go to the Top of the screen each time I can not perceive as an improvement over Photoshop :o)

But also in terms of basic things like panning and zooming I find Affinity lacks refinement.

I also fail to discover a powerful concept for dealing with RAW files – Photoshop is super good and flexible in this regard. I'm not talking about the quality of tools offered in the develop workspace and not even about the fact that everything executed inside this workspace is destructive /can not get re-edited.

I rather think that the present implementation architecture completely disregards in what ways many people work with RAW – and what performance standards do apply. I certainly will not wait for 10 seconds for a camera image to open, when I can browse through whole libraries of (true)RAWs in the same time. Things might change with the possible release of a DAM which (again possibly) includes a Develop workspace which would allow for for editing in an 'inside folder / across all images of the session situation' ... But I think one should offer something more meaningful and compatible (> sidecars) for the meantime.

_________________________________

Performance on Windows finally is the show stopper for me for the time being – that has nothing to do with features, but it's sure a part of my Affinity editing experience. On my pretty good machine Aphoto is just terribly slow in almost everything. Opening files, cropping, selecting, refine selection... In all editing scenarios my old Photoshop CS6 is ridiculously much faster.

 

Machine specs: Win10, i76850K, 32GB RAM, GTX1070