hi guys,
i am always interested in new programs - especially a good alternative for photoshop (and for my work indesign).
recently i found affinity photo and it looks like a great alternative for photoshop in terms of compositing.
affinity photo link -
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/it looks very promising. the feature set sounds awesome and the price tag very, very low.
i think it is no real competition in terms of digital painting (for this we have krita), but for compositing? i am just curious about the quality of the raw converter. it has a built in openexr importer, but i read a few rumors about the raw converter/tone mapper itself. it is not half as good as the photoshop one or onecapture.
i dont know this is still a point for single cg shots, because all the guys are saying this, are photographer.
so - somebody used it before?
Replies
how solid is the psd output?
to bad, you don't use raw output.
for myself, i want to achieve better image quality in terms of more control over colors. i am rendering now 16/32bit openexrs and a built in raw engine with multi layer import would be nice. we can get this with photoshop to, but just with plugins or 3rd party scripts - the native way would be better.
https://vimeo.com/macaffinity
or at these videos;
It will also help a lot to write bug reports at their forum ,add feature wishes and send files which might need to be looked at.
The developers are friendly and are fixing a lot of stuff.
I like and use the Affinity product line and especially Affinity Photo is a joy to use.
Yesterday I downloaded the trial on a Mac (to bad, there is no Windows trial already) and it was quite interessting to see the minor differences. Well, I never use the liuqify function, but to implenet a wireframe is just smart and the kind of smartness runs through the wohle program. As you can see, I am a bit hyped...but i think I cant use it for professional work
There is at the moment no point for me in this part of my work to switch, but I will buy a copy for personal use.
Raise the flag for new programs
But the question is still there and I hope someone has great experience in terms of the usage in conjunction with photoshop and the raw converter.
This is indeed a big downer, but maybe they will change it ... and in the case the don't do it. Well, it's a question of relearning it.
I am also hyped about Publisher and a seamless pipeline is it worth to change the way of handling the tools.
i've been using the app as a photoshop replacement for texturing for a while now - however mainly so on mac where i think performance overall so far is a little better/smoother than on the windows version. at any rate they had an extremely short beta on that windows version. closest app to photoshop that i have ever come across and IMO feeling better in the painting department (also when coupled with designer) and able to work on big documents, so i'm not complaining.
i think you'll mostly run into trouble when you try to port very specific photoshop workflows over or depend very heavily on plugins.
other cool stuff: they don't require latest & greatest OS - not such a big deal on windows perhaps but on mac it can be quite annoying. i'm just hoping they won't hop on the subscription train anytime soon, jack up their prices considerably - or get bought out by a certain someone who's already into both.
edit: i just checked and the shortcut for brush size is different between mac and windows affinity programs. on windows it's indeed quite awkward: hold alt and right mouse butten and then drag on the canvas. finger ballet! almost softimage style.
but there is an unoffical Normalmap/heightmap solution in the making for Affintiy Photo.
It already supports vector shapes, brush input, text, easy layering and a couple other features.
like inward/outward, curve settings to change the appearance and a couple other things.
https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/31960-affintiy-photo-for-3d-aritsts-normalmapheightmap-creation-wip/
Its by no means perfect and needs quite a lot more work but its a step to make Affintiy Photo more usable for 3D-Artists.
more information about the available functions is on the
gumroad page;
https://gum.co/NP-AP