Adobe comparison (split)

[J Dog]

Hi Matt,

I'm posting this from northern Indiana. I know you've heard this thousands of times before, but I'm an Adobe Creative Suite user. Problem,  the Suite is on my laptop with a dying hard drive which I have to replace in the next few days. I've been doing graphics on Photoshop since Adobe put it out on 6 floppy disks in the mid '90's. The Creative Suite is absolutely crucial to what I do for my job with Aramark and also as a graphics freelancer. I'm officially a retired college art professor and I used the Suite extensively for my classes. But my huge beef with Adobe is their compulsory subscription service. My hard drive will be replaced in a few days and I desperately need a suite of apps like Adobe offers. So... I have a few questions for you!

1.) Since I have thousands of Photoshop and InDesign files, does Affinity have the ability to download these files into their own apps without having to reformat everything? In other words, I'm looking for a transition that would be as seamless as possible.

2.)  After working with Adobe products for almost 25 years, I'm wondering what the learning transition would be like?

3.) Finally, do you have an equivalent for Adobe Illustrator? A vector-based design program? I haven't seen everything you offer yet.

J.D. Woods

[jmwellborn]

2 hours ago, J Dog said:

Hi Matt,

I'm posting this from northern Indiana. I know you've heard this thousands of times before, but I'm an Adobe Creative Suite user. Problem,  the Suite is on my laptop with a dying hard drive which I have to replace in the next few days. I've been doing graphics on Photoshop since Adobe put it out on 6 floppy disks in the mid '90's. The Creative Suite is absolutely crucial to what I do for my job with Aramark and also as a graphics freelancer. I'm officially a retired college art professor and I used the Suite extensively for my classes. But my huge beef with Adobe is their compulsory subscription service. My hard drive will be replaced in a few days and I desperately need a suite of apps like Adobe offers. So... I have a few questions for you!

1.) Since I have thousands of Photoshop and InDesign files, does Affinity have the ability to download these files into their own apps without having to reformat everything? In other words, I'm looking for a transition that would be as seamless as possible.

2.)  After working with Adobe products for almost 25 years, I'm wondering what the learning transition would be like?

3.) Finally, do you have an equivalent for Adobe Illustrator? A vector-based design program? I haven't seen everything you offer yet.

J.D. Woods

I'll bet I am a whole lot older than you are, so I thought I'd answer part of your questions with what I've found.  I am a writer, not an artist or photographer, but I amuse myself with both.  And definitely am now using both for my own devices with Affinity.  First, your question 2.)  There is a learning curve, but it is mainly finding where all those goodies are, not figuring out what to do with them.  The Affinity developers have produced many splendid official tutorials, plus there is a whole section of these forums devoted to Tutorials.   There are many splendid ones from which to learn the "tricks of the trade."  Your question 1.)  I don't know about the Photoshop files, because I never used that app, but for InDesign files the easiest thing to do right now is to export them as PDFs and then place them in Affinity Publisher.  They can be edited very nicely after a little fiddling around at the beginning to link text frames, etc.  I used InDesign after years with Aldus Pagemaker, and rather hated it.  Recently, after using Affinity Publisher for a year -- from the original Beta issued on August 30, 2018 to the release version (now 1.7.2), I opened InDesign on an older computer just to check on something.  Ugh!  I was immediately reminded about how I actually rather loathed it.  There was a learning curve with Publisher, but it was WORTH IT.  I also have Affinity Photo and have been amazed at what I can do.  The other day I brought life and brilliance to a moonlit ocean view scanned from  a  35 mm slide from 1974.  Almost the first time I used Affinity Photo I was able to extract a vanished right eye from a c. 1880 portrait which was severely splotched and sepia-stained.  My niece, who is a professional graphic artist, tried and failed with Photoshop.  The best she could do was to duplicate the left eye and then reverse it and dump it into the face.  (Not desirable).  Your question 3.) I believe that Affinity Designer is the vector-based design program that is the equivalent of Adobe Illustrator, but it has the added charm of being able to switch from pixel to vector all while working on a single document.  And then there is Studio Link, enabled if one has the latest release of each of the three apps -- Photo, Designer, and Publisher.   One can flip back and forth from app to app, depending upon what one wants to do at the moment (mesh warp, paint, type pages of text, adjust an image, create a design, etc.) all while in the same document.  No saving, closing, opening another app, placing the file, saving, closing, opening the previous app ---  etc. 

I was absolutely livid back in 2015 when Adobe told me that my $700.00 purchase of InDesign was my tough luck and I could now rent the right to access my own files.   In perpetuity.  Rent, that is.  Instead, I fired Adobe and waited.  I am extremely happy with the Affinity products, and am sure that you will be too.  And . . .  there is really nothing like learning something new to unclog "the little gray cells," a là that great detective, Hercule Poirot!

[SrPx]

I'm just a newbie in InDesign (and jmwellborn covered it) , so, I will only refer to the Photoshop/Affinity Photo and Illustrator/Affinity Designer situation. The overall adaptation is not easy, and is better to start with this in mind to avoid frustration, complaints, and depending on each one's personality, even anger. Habits with which one has grown with (I'm younger than you both, but way older than the average Youtube crowd, to mention some reference). I also started in early 90s (actually did my first "digital graphics" as a teenager in 1982-85), and yep, all those habits are not easy to translate to a new suite. Now, that said, it really, really ends up compensating the effort, if one is patient. About Photoshop, and Illustrator, and keeping / converting most of your work from the past... Well, anyone can give a better advice, but I know I would have to go (it's time consuming, no doubt) exporting each project as tiff file for more flattened stuff, or as PSD files (maybe better) but with no layer effects, maybe not even text layers (or knowing that I might have to rework those layers in Photo later on to make it look like originally), neither smart objects, and many other things. To keep the explanation simple, unless your back and force testing allows you to refine the I/O better : just pixel based only layers, with no complexity of any sort (but can be huge files, that should not be a problem),  should bring you 1:1 files from Photoshop to Photo.

I have not needed to import any old files from Illustrator, but I guess export + import with PDFs could do in certain way. You might realize that a lot of stuff gets changed in many ways, but there are ways to rebuild some details with not that much hassle. Also you might be able to use SVG format for importing, if I'm not wrong (as far as I know SVG format does not support CMYK mode, though. So, it depends). 

This is majorly not Affinity's fault. All these companies do protect/fight against competitors by not making available enough info to fully  translate scenes (their native file format specs and etc) from one suite app to the competitors' ones. As you know, this is as old as software started being a thing after evolving from those perforated cards as "programs". The workarounds are the mentioned ones in what we said. And there are a bunch more ways. You might want to give it a try to batch converters like XnConvert, it is free of charge (20 or 30 $ for legal commercial use, I think. Fully unlimited in free/personal use version, though) and could be useful to accelerate the works. Just be sure to do tests before doing large automatic batches, to see that all went right, and never ever delete/loose/overwrite your source files (make folder copies and work on those, IMO). That company's free viewer is also used by many here as an assets browser for Affinity native files. That said, I'm totally fine with Affinity's native file nice preview of the image in my Windows 7. But I don't really have a need to anything else than that (so, I don't use XnView as an assets browser).

If is it a recommended suite, my 2c: Absolutely.  Like anything in software, requires patience, and often tricks/workarounds. You might find some features are not the same, or aren't currently in Affinity. Each individual is a world apart, but as a fact, this has not stopped me from doing all my work with Affinity's suite (I don't have yet Publisher). And it's very intensive and varied in professional fields (I'm not just maintaining a family photo album, so to speak). That said, I came from, after using for decades Adobe's suite, being at several jobs and at home using almost exclusively open source and cheap and poor software.   In comparison, even the current open source for graphics (let alone 18 years ago....yikes) is several times harder to move professional workflows from Adobe suite. So, in a way, take my comments with a pinch of salt : I am WAY more used to workarounds than the average ex-Adobe user.   

Welcome !

[Patrick Connor]

@J Dog

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

as your post (and it's replies) went well beyond the scope of "introduce yourself" I have split it from that other thread.

if you would like to make another simple post there giving a little background about you, then that's fine. However, I thought that these fine answers to your long questions deserved space to breathe without taking that other thread took far off topic.