Affinity V2 launch - 40% discounts

[Brian Walton]

48 minutes ago, Yan Filiatrault said:

All other companies are selling similar products for a lot more, either by monthly subscription or with yearly paid updates.

I've been a long time lover of Affinity and as noted still support them financially.  But they do not have the "same" product feature set as anyone else on the market.  They fit into a similar product type/class so comparisons are not quite so easy.

Are you also going to lump Gimp in the same product class as Affinity Photo, etc?  

But the other piece we don't know here is how long until the next upgrade.  I'm hoping for many years with the Affinity products.  But we didn't see anything universal from them yet.  Publisher felt like it got maybe a year of updates from when they released it to when they stopped updates to work on v2.  

"All" other companies products also have AI as part of the package other than Affinity at this point.  

[InstrEd]

4 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

"All" other companies products also have AI as part of the package other than Affinity at this point.  

Didn't realize this. Thanks for the heads-up.

[Brian Walton]

1 minute ago, InstrEd said:

Didn't realize this. Thanks for the heads-up.

Photoshop added a fair amount.

Luminar AI and Neo have this at the core (I run them as plugins in affinity)

On1 keeps adding more (they also have plugin version that work in Affinity)

Paint shop Pro finally added some AI

 

DxO tout AI functions 

Topaz Studio moved to a focus on AI 

Affinity does have the in painting brush and selection tool that have some content awareness but that is as far as it gets and the AI selection process certainly isn't looking for subjects or things like that.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MusicMan]

For those that use their Publisher program, how do you find it?

I've been taking Scribus for a spin over the last couple of days and while it looks like I can get the end result I'll need from it, I'm not entirely sure it's going to be efficient using it.

That said, I started with their stable release, but just installed their development version and that does seem quite a bit better, so I'll give that a bit of a go too.

Open to other alternatives as well, unless they involve subscriptions.

[Brian Walton]

7 minutes ago, MusicMan said:

For those that use their Publisher program, how do you find it?

I've been taking Scribus for a spin over the last couple of days and while it looks like I can get the end result I'll need from it, I'm not entirely sure it's going to be efficient using it.

That said, I started with their stable release, but just installed their development version and that does seem quite a bit better, so I'll give that a bit of a go too.

Open to other alternatives as well, unless they involve subscriptions.

I"m not an advanced user but I've put together a few fairly large photo books with it (think file size above 3gigs.  ) And a few dozen presentations.

The ability to press a button and enter affinity photo and another to jump back to publisher then to designer if you own all three apps is a serious strength.  

[MusicMan]

39 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

I"m not an advanced user but I've put together a few fairly large photo books with it (think file size above 3gigs.  ) And a few dozen presentations.

The ability to press a button and enter affinity photo and another to jump back to publisher then to designer if you own all three apps is a serious strength.  

Thanks Brian. I've been reading a little more around it and it does sound like a capable option and I think worth spending the time to at least give it a demo. That functionality does sound handy too.

I use Darktable which I'm really comfortable with and after a bit of learning curve, it's quite fluid for photography and I normally use GIMP for all my graphics stuff. Again, a bit of a learning curve, but it definitely gets easier as you go. Darktable I use quite a bit and don't feel a need to replace it and same with GIMP really, but I don't really have a GoTo for DTP. The bundle price seems pretty reasonable though, so I may even still consider it.

[pseudopop]

I checked out the demo for Affinity Photo 2. There are still the same small annoyances that are in v1:

• No way to close all open files without a) closing the app and b) getting a confirmation dialog for each modified file. I often have more than a dozen files open at the same time.
• Cropping an image when zoomed in really close is annoying, because you can resize the area only from certain points and if they are out of view you need to do a lot of panning. I often need to crop transparent PNG images where the widest or tallest part of the image is not conveniently either in the middle or in the top or bottom. (And no, I can't automatically trim off the transparency in this case.)
  • In Gimp each side has big grabbable areas (see image below), which is so incredibly nice that I don't understand why that feature hasn't been copied to every other image editing program.
• There is no way to resize a rectangular selection without drawing new rectangulars. I never get my selection right the first time and either end up doing it multiple times or getting weirdly shaped selections.
  • Gimp's selection tool works like the crop tool.

I struggle with these three so often that if they had fixed them I would have coughed up the money right away.

One annoyance that they seem to have fixed is crop tool aspect ratio amnesia. In v1 if I want to to crop multiple images using the same aspect ratio, I need to set it again for each image when I select the crop tool. In v2 it remembers the previous setting.

 

Below: When you use the crop or selection tool in Gimp and move the pointer (not shown) close to the edge of your selection, an area is highlighted that you can click and drag to resize the selection. It's worth noting that this area is pretty big (the image is actual size), so you can easily hit it even if you have poor motor control.

[Brian Walton]

8 hours ago, MusicMan said:

Thanks Brian. I've been reading a little more around it and it does sound like a capable option and I think worth spending the time to at least give it a demo. That functionality does sound handy too.

I use Darktable which I'm really comfortable with and after a bit of learning curve, it's quite fluid for photography and I normally use GIMP for all my graphics stuff. Again, a bit of a learning curve, but it definitely gets easier as you go. Darktable I use quite a bit and don't feel a need to replace it and same with GIMP really, but I don't really have a GoTo for DTP. The bundle price seems pretty reasonable though, so I may even still consider it.

I really wanted to like Darktable but found it too slow and clunky to do the work I need to get done in a reasonable amount of time.  I can be powerful though.   

GIMP didn't feel refi ned enough to me, but again really wanted to like it.  

Affinity Photo won't get rid of Darktable if you are applying edits to multiple images or need ot catalog stuff, I would say it can't revisit edits but I also haven't dived in on the ins and outs of how the new "go back and edit RAW" works in v2 workflow.  

As much as I didn't love the upgrade pricing - I think it is reasonable for new users that are coming from free software if they use it frequently.