Affinity Photo, the better Photoshop?

Gazu

Hey People,

anybody experience with Affinity Photo?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPFCpAvzIUo

For me it looks like a perfect alternative to Photoshop.
And its only 55 € without Subscription!

Can anybody say something about this nice looking piece of software?

Axi5

I only used it briefly, but if you have access to Photoshop I don't think you should consider this tool, unless you're fine with purchasing it for a particular tool they showed off or whatever. I don't think it's the perfect replacement for Photoshop in our (CG graphics) industry. There are a number of large features it's missing, though what they were I do not recall since I used it a few months ago.

With that said, what features they do have, they do rather well.

On a very subjective note and one I hope no one takes seriously. I'm not a fan of the interface, it feels like it was designed well, but the last 10% of polish wasn't applied.

Larry

They said it themselves. It is an alternative to photoshop. That being said, it does not do all of the things that photoshop does but it is cheaper. So they provide you with an alternative solution if you cannot purchase photoshop

walter

An another point of view,
http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/affinity-for-me/

lorenzo_di_pietro

I'm using it for image editing, seamless texture creation and stuff like that. In my opinion it's the best alternative to Photoshop right now, although in terms of painting Clip Studio Paint remains better. Obviously, like Axi5 and Larry said, if you have access to Photoshop you don't need it. More info here.

Gazu

Thanks Guys,
well, i have access to Photoshop. Its in the Photo Subscription only 12 Bugs a month.
But i thought about to save some money in the future. I think the big problem is that the industry will stay with photoshop like forever and that all other tool dont have any chance to show their real potential. 

lotet

Looks cool, Im constantly looking for non subscription alternatives, gonna try this out for sure.

myclay

Affinity Photo is neat but some stuff which 3D Artists tend to do or use are currently not possible;

• no option for exporting 4 channel packed images. - Channel shuffle  0$  helps packing images into one file.
• TGA and ico file export are so far missing.
• There is no Quixel support available nor plugin compatibility.
  
• If you export your files as a PSD, the text in the PSD is rasterized.
• No publicly available API, which is a huge problem when you want to make a plugin for Affinity Photo.
  

Painting normalmaps, flowmaps, have heigtmaps, use vector-normalmaps etc, is possible with Affinity Photo/Designer.
- if you want to do such maps right now, readily available files for such tasks are available on my gumroad page.

Affinity Photo works perfectly as an aid for Substance Painter/Designer, Image editing works well with it and this program can be easily used with zAppLink and also with projections in 3DCoat.

It is imo recommendable and the best 2D alternative to Photoshop.
At the end, it highly depends on your own workflow so you have to test it yourself.

thomasp

i'm using it, alongside designer.

i prefer it to work on large documents at 16 bit depth with layer styles, adjustment layers and so forth. photoshop does not cut it performance-wise in my experience. affinity also saves out it's own format that comes in a lot smaller and consequently does not require those looooooooooong load and save times that i ran into with PS.
not a fan of photoshop's brush-"engine" either. affinity feels better to me and also in the customer betas and the upcoming 1.6 release has a nifty lazy mouse function.

it's certainly the only viable photoshop replacement i have ever come across.

Bletzkarn

Photoshop annoys me in that there's no instancing for layers too used to parametric modelling.

Prime8

I'm curious about the Affinity Photo and Designer as well, especially Designer because I use Inkscape which lacks in many areas. It's good to have alternatives to Photoshop, even though they don't have exactly the same features, they might have others you find useful, I use Krita as well.

Axi5

Bletzkarn said:

Photoshop annoys me in that there's no instancing for layers too used to parametric modelling.

How do you mean? Have you looked into Smart Layers?

Fotis

I'm a big fan of Affinity Photo and Designer in particular - Affinity Photo falls a bit short compared to PS (it's an excellent piece of software but it lacks in terms of maturity and the extensive features found in Photoshop). Having said that, I have to agree that unless you have something against the subscription model of Adobe and/or the 10$/month price-tiers for PS, there is (sadly) no reason to consider Affinity Photo. Also the stroke/brushes engine is not as good as that of PS (which in turn is not as good as the one found in Manga Studio/Clip Studio Paint)

Affinity Designer on the other hand, is much better than Adobe Ιllustrator imo. Makes working in vectors as intuitive and creative as raster which illustrator fails doing; a very polished and fast piece of software - then again, there are features missing such as raster to vector conversion but overall it's a program that I would prefer over AI or Inkscape for doing for my creative vector-work.

McGreed

So was looking for peoples views on Affinity Photo after reading this reddit thread about Photoshop changing icons colors:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/hagdsc/adobe_just_updated_most_of_its_apps_to_be_all_the/

Didn't find any threads dedicated to Affinity Photo vs Photoshop apart from this one, so wanted to resurrect it and hear if anyone has an updated view about it now, how much it changed and is it more an alternative to Photoshop? I saw one of the missing features was TGA back then, has this changed?

thomasp

TGA has been added as an export format, yes.

My updated view is that Affinity on Mac is stronger than the Windows counterparts. Ever since they introduced hardware acceleration there is no comparison IMO. Windows seems to lag a bit behind in a few other areas as well from what I noticed. So, large brushes, large documents and higher than 8 bits per channel bit depth, all with smaller filesizes than PSD, that's Affinity.

And while I still have Win licenses kicking around, I only ever use it on Mac these days.

It still lacks some UI polish and there is still no scripting support and while it has macro recording functionality it can't be used for file IO. That is a bummer.

VelvetElvis

We ditched Photoshop and went firmwide to Affinity products. 2 months later, we went back to Adobe. Affinity is great at certain aspects, but their support is terrible. If there is a bug or a feature, their response is usually "It will be done when it gets done" and that just didn't cut it for us who purchased over 2,000 licenses from them. Everyone understood it won't get fixed overnight, but the Half Life 3 development timeline also doesn't cut it. The biggest bug was saving network files and the high probability it would become corrupted. If someone was saving and our network did the hourly backup where it switches over for 1/100th of a second, that would corrupt the file save in Affinity. Where as every other program would just pause, Affinity kept trying to write to the network. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/97777-serious-problem-with-random-corrupt-files/

Personally, I feel Affinity is slowly phasing back out. They had about a 3-6 month window to really steal Adobe users away and they absolutely dropped the ball. If you have little experience with Photoshop, then Affinity may work better since you may not have a lot to compare too. But if you have been using Photoshop for a while, even though you tell yourself not to overly compare this to Photoshop, it is still hard to not directly compare them.

Daf57

Neil Blevins has an interest in replacing Photoshop (all subscription soft actually) and I believe he gave Affinity a shot - I don't think it stuck tho. He keeps a wishlist for  it - it may be of interest in this inquiry.

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/wishlist/wishlist_affinity.htm

Daf

McGreed

Hmm, interesting. I have downloaded the 90 days trial and gonna have a look at it, and see if it's worth anything, however this is for home use, so cannot compare it with in a shared environment.

TheFlow

I pretty much only wait for a bit more stability and bugfixes they have still to do on windows. Sometimes the program lags for a few seconds but it's gotten so much better over the last year that I'd be surprised if they didn't get it right in the next few updates. And a little bit of UX, scripting and customization would be great. Overall not yet on the level of PS, but I hope with version 2.0 it will be balanced out. The Mac version is pretty fast tho, as thomasp already said.

Once I reported an input lag even with small brushes, made a video to demonstrate the bug and the windows lead dev took care of it in two days. I love it when things like these work out. Serif tries their best, while Adobe sits in a corner and eats itself slowly.

myclay

Depending on your needs, I would give within a blink of an eye a recommendation for Affinity Photo.

Serif has recently announced to implement more features which are beneficiary to 3D artists like a 3D model viewer where you can edit your textures and adding normal map editing capabilities.
GPU acceleration for the windows builds also got announced but all of that is yet to come.

gnoop

On a Mac mini  I bought specifically for Affinity soft few years ago  it's nothing special speed wise.  Bet it needs true video card .

I unsubscribed from PHotoshop for a half of an year but eventually went back to PS.

Affinity Photo has  few superior features over PS

1.  Much speedier work in 16 bit not taking forever like PS saving height/depth texture purposed images.   Read multilayered exr files from 3d soft   but still doing an utter mess of layers with them.  No support of cryptomatte.

2.  Smart objects : you don't have to save  to update master file . It all occurs on the fly.  

3.  When you re-link a smart object (they call it embedded file) to another file  it's only one dimension side  updated  if the  new file has a new size ratio

4."patch" tool is greatly superior  since it allows to scale and rotate the patch on the fly.   Asked Adobe for a decade to do so and finally it's in APhoto.   It's actually usable there.

It had a few more before but PS  got it too in 2020

 

Photoshop over APhoto :

1. linked smart object keeping the link to outside files when they have been edited in 3d paty soft.   In APhoto you have to re-embed manually.  

2. Layers chain links for layers sitting in different groups and no clipping grpoups.     The last two features make PShop a truly non-destructive.   You could use it same  way as Substance Designer to some extent,  have non destructive masking  doing its own stacks of layers and adjustments.     You can do layers doing height blend  much like Substance Designer  height blend node is doing,    turn some color layer into ID mask to something higher on the stack and all sort of non-destructive tricks .  

Unfortunately all that non-destructive beauty  in PS is being killed by its super slow work in 16 bit

 

APhoto also can use smart object as mask for something  but its monstrously inconvenient there and the layers stack is a puzzle for that.   

3.  Layer compositions  allowing to switch view in between color/normal/roughness/depth in one click and access to compositions in smart objects deep down.  Plus 3d party scripts that can pack compositions into output file RGBA.

4.  AI based selection.   A really nice feature that makes life a lot easier

As of A Designer it's just a nice addition, nothing special .   They even cut off feature that had been in their older vector soft.    Not even close to what  Xara or Expression was decades ago .

Only nice thing is same 16 bit support for depth composing

 Non-destructive features  and  "compositions to RGBA" packing script is what brought me back to PS

thomasp

I treat Designer as a nice addition to complement Photo's toolset. Do like to play with the vector brush tool. You can copy and paste between these apps and file formats are compatible, too. I ended up using a lot more vector art in my files than with Adobe (always disliked Illustrator, felt so different).

In terms of features Affinity has a neat history slider similar to Zbrush and a stabilizer (lazy mouse). I have not kept up with the very latest developments in Adobeland but I don't think PS features either of these.

Just checked out Neil Blevins' list of wanted features and background saving (and loading) is high on mine as well. Such a neat way of dealing with large files. In Affinity you have to wait, foreground document locked while it's doing its thing.

Shrike

Photo is a good alternative but I wouldnt swap, the highlight is more Designer
For the price or people who rarely need it, its surely very good. Price performance is much better, but Photoshop is still king

poopipe

The big question for me is around HDR support and whether it supports linear space alpha blending. 

I was all set to move to gimp til those two things got in the way.

Does it do that? 

thomasp

Is that what you are after?

https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/Layers/layerBlendRanges.html

https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/pages/Layers/layerBlendRanges.html

HDR support sounds pretty broad. I don't deal with any of it but perhaps you mean this https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/HDR/hdr_merging.html

poopipe

Ooh,  now I'm interested..

Thanks  

rollin

Honestly.. I just bought it bc it's so cheap. And for that price it's also very good.