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Affinity Photo - decent replacement for photoshop?

greentooth
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CheeseOnToast greentooth
I recently cancelled my adobe subscription as I'm fed up paying a tenner a month for a program that I maybe use for a few hours each month, if that. I mostly use it for creating 2D logos, images and text for use in Substance Painter, and occasionally for making alphas/ brushes for various programs.

Affinity looks like a potential replacement. However, working with channels looks pretty convoluted compared to PS. Anyone have much production experience with it?

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  • fdfxd2
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    fdfxd2 interpolator
    I'm a Photoshop user,  I got into this whole digital art rabbit hole through Photoshop 10 years ago, I love Photoshop. If there was any real 100% as easy to use and powerful alternative to Photoshop, I'd be using it, believe me I do not enjoy having to boot out of Linux every time I want to edit a photo/texture or design something, but unfortunately I haven't found that alternative.

    But affinity comes pretty close, for starters it's not gimp, already gets a gold star for that, if you're familiar with Photoshop you're familiar with affinity.

    I can say it's definitely a decent replacement for post processing, nothing lacking there, might even be more convenient than camera raw.

    I don't think it comes with the tools necessary to make logos, I think you'll need to buy affinity designer for that, which, I've heard good things about.

    For text... well it doesn't come with typekit so that's kind of a deal breaker for me in that department.


    Download a trial and see if you like it, you wont really have to relearn anything, at least from my experience.



  • Meloncov
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    Meloncov greentooth
    "Decent" covers it: no more, no less. If you're spending hours a day editing in Photoshop, you won't be satisfied with Affinity. But if most of your texture pipeline is in Substance and you're only dragging out Photoshop here and there for some basic stuff, you'll probably find Affinity a perfectly good alternative.
  • Sage
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    Sage polycounter lvl 19
    It's pretty good. I have all affinity products. There are some things that tick me off about affinity since I am used to photoshop, but it's still nice. the program seems to be improving all the time.
  • frmdbl
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    frmdbl polycounter
    Definitely not for game art purposes.
  • Udjani
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    Udjani interpolator
    If you don't need any obscure tool it's pretty good. You sometimes will miss some stuff like chromatic aberration, so you have to do it by hand, it does have macro recording so it makes it bit easier though.

    Also, this is a big one for me at least, sacrificing some tools that you use sometimes is totally worth to run away from subscription.
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    I've been using Krita for a bit - it's not offensive and is free so might be worth a look as an alternative to affinity.

    If I actually want to draw I use clip studio Pro - it beats Photoshop in many ways for sketching but can't really compete on painting. 

  • CheeseOnToast
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    CheeseOnToast greentooth
    Thanks everyone. I've used Krita here and there for a few years now. Mostly for the great tiling modes and making mirrored/radial/mandala patterns.

    My main concern after watching a few videos is how many extra steps it takes just to move/copy/paste channels around. I'll eventually get round to trying the demo myself - I was just wondering what others' experiences were with it.
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    Hmmm, Krita is too far on the painting side of things for me, not enough photo-manipulation to be a good choice for textures other than perhaps stylized ones. I also don't remember it as fast nor very stable. Not checked out most recent major revision though.

    Affinity IMO are first and foremost Mac applications - not sure how good they are on the Windows side of things but from peeking over they do seem to be lagging behind on hardware acceleration. On a decent Mac they are very zippy, nice for painting and photo-ops, working well with large canvases and higher than 8 bits per channel. Those were my priorities when picking them (Photo + Designer). I always had performance issues with Photoshop prior.

    They are not Photoshop/Illustrator clones however, some things simply do work differently also you better not be a heavy PS plugin user. The interface is still not as user friendly as Adobe in some regards plus they currently lack scripting support and filesystem access for macros.

  • ryanroye
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    ryanroye polycounter lvl 4
    Affinity photo is a great general-purpose tool, for *most* people its a good photoshop replacement. There are however some really basic things that should be in Affinity Photo, but aren't. For instance, you're expected to use an entirely separate program (Affinity Designer)  if you want to do something like curve text along a line or any vector element for that matter.

    My suggestion is to think about what you intend to do with Affinity Photo, and make sure there are tools in place to do those tasks.
  • TheFlow
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    TheFlow polycounter lvl 9
    I am trying to stay away from Adobe for months now. Affinity has great software and it is capable of most things. I'm using Affinity Designer paired with Inkscape (for occasional tracing) instead of Illustrator and I have only touched Illustrator at work in the last months, but not at my personal projects. Designer is very capable.
    Photo is also extremely good. I throw around a lot of images and data in these programs, and Photo is not as robust as PS right now under Windows. On a Mac I've heard good things about all Affinity apps. I think the 2.0 release of Affinity will tell us more about the future, should come in a few months. They still have a few little problems in the UI here and there and Photo is not yet as robust as Photoshop. On the other hand, Photoshop is nothing but a shadow to what is was once. I really wished, the idiot that I am, that I had bought CS6 when I had the chance.
    And I dislike Adobes strategy of subscriptions and the lack of good updates, if anything, they chance hotkeys and behavior and make Photoshop more unstable then before, at least for all of our agency where I work, with mixed Windows and Mac systems.

    So yeah, if you plan on using Affinity Software, have a look at Designer and Photo, right now they should be up for sale for about 25 bucks each which is a no brainer. For smaller projects that are not too heavy, they are absolutely capable and suitable, been doing that for over a year now. If you photobash 150 layers, probably stick with PS.
  • ElysiumGX
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    ElysiumGX polycounter lvl 18
    I'll echo that Affinity Photo is not as robust as Photoshop at the moment. I no longer use Photoshop for hours a day anymore, so I cancelled my subscription about a year ago. I picked up Affinity with the pandemic discount, and it has been useful for the projects I occasionally do, but not for games. I was a little disappointed in its lack of support for editing alpha channels and color channels directly. Other options seem to suffer from the same lack of support.

    But, for the price, and for someone who now uses it mostly for occasional photo editing and some design work, it's decent. I sometimes use it for simple textures I need in Blender. The focus merge and HDR merge functions are useful for photographers. I'm a fan.

    Be sure to skim through their documentation to get a better idea of whether it's suitable for your needs.
    https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html
  • Noren
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    Noren polycounter lvl 19
    Not sure how feasible and legal this is in your area and especially at this point in time, but it might be worth looking into getting an old PS CS5 or CS6. I'm still using my old CS5 and might be missing out on a few bells and whistles, but for my pretty limited use it's absolutely fine and so far I had no problems with compatibility.
  • CheeseOnToast
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    CheeseOnToast greentooth
    Noren said:
    Not sure how feasible and legal this is in your area and especially at this point in time, but it might be worth looking into getting an old PS CS5 or CS6. I'm still using my old CS5 and might be missing out on a few bells and whistles, but for my pretty limited use it's absolutely fine and so far I had no problems with compatibility.

    That would be ideal. If it wasn't for the relatively recent addition of symmetry modes, the last significant update to PS that I actually got some use out of was content-aware fill.
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    I keep CS6 around, pretty much only to do one thing Affinity doesn't: frame animations (animated GIF export). I use those alot in discussions/updates with clients.

    Anyway, CS6 = slow. slowwwwwww. (I think it was their first serious attempt at GPU acceleration, not pretty, lags all over). I do recall CS5 as way more predictable in terms of performance, used that a lot at work for everything I prefer Affinity for these days. It does not have the dark interface though which is a bummer.

    Not sure how much an old standalone version would be going for these days but it better not be three digits anymore.

  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter

      This channels issue  is totally  no problem  for me.   You  just have to start with a transparent document and  then could work in any of RGAB  in main layer stack  having a special group for each of RGBA. 

    They did very cool links   panel that could link  many parameters in between layers   providing shared masks  for example  but for some uncertain reason omitted the transform links.   To transform something in sync you need  to set color tags  and "select  same tagged"  which is  kind of annoying.

    Still it has a number of advantages over Photoshop  imo.     Especially as a  Substance Designer companion .
    If you change resolution of  SD output   and have it as a linked layer in APhoto  it stay same size there.

    I prefer to use  regular image editing soft for final texture compositing.    Anything  like crop , transform , a hand painting  mask correction to weed out some procedural  weirdness.

    With  so much pain in your a...  in Substance Designer   or Alchemist   or even Quixel  Mixer   I prefer  to use  linked layers  in Photoshop  or Affinity Photo    for depth combine   materials .   And  APhoto  kind of much better suited for that.  Works way faster in 16/32 bit   with way more complex layer stack math, mask stacks etc .        if some part of your procedural  texture seems off   APhoto is easier  and IMO better with it's "patch" tool  or content aware fill  that they call in-painting there.  

    For a task of mixing something hires photogrammetry based with a bit  of Substance Designer  output   I believe APhoto  is much better than Photoshop  due to this 16 /32 bit speed and a fact you don't need to save "smart objects" if they turned embedded.

    One more thing I love about Aphoto over Photoshop is  vector masks. They show you transform gizmo exactly  around the vector shape  not  around the whole invisible pixels.

  • sprunghunt
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    sprunghunt polycounter
    I use the GIMP as a photoshop replacement:

    https://www.gimp.org/

    It works fine for most things - it's closer to some of the older versions of photoshop but that works for what I use it for. I mostly use substance for texturing. 
  • rollin
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    rollin polycounter
    gnoop said:

      This channels issue  is totally  no problem  for me.   You  just have to start with a transparent document and  then could work in any of RGAB  in main layer stack  having a special group for each of RGBA. 

    (...)

    Can you elaborate?
  • myclay
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    myclay polycounter lvl 10
    It´s probably the method with adding procedural textures on a Group/Folder and 0 out the channles you do not want.
    An Example file is attached.

    There is sadly no explanation given regarding the handling of the Alpha texture or how to export it so it works.
  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter
    rollin said:
    Can you elaborate?

    Yeah, I meant what myclay have posted .   Not sure what's the problem with alpha although.  if you set zero for rgb  the layer still inputs to alpha  while being black and  input nothing  to RGB if set to Add blending.    Export  is just  tga  .   If  the document  has been checked in as "transparent" initially   the tga will be exported with composite alpha  that  you could always edit separately in this alpha group and make a hole stack of gazilion layers inputting only to  alpha . 
     
     It 's rather a channel packing  way.

    I prefer to just use  "erase" blending  for alpha group  and  regular  rgb  for other layers.   One of Aphoto conveniences is that you can click target chanel and see only this channel while continue to edit, add layers etc  contrary to Photoshop that switches  back to RGB automatically.     Plus  Levels have the drop down including  alpha  channel   so you can add levels layer and adjust only alpha channel .

    Also  "Blend if "  is much more convenient in APhoto vs  Photoshop sliders .   Another cool thing is that any bitmap you dropped in  is replaceable trough resource manager   and could  be scaled up and down without final rasterization. 

    The only issue I have i APhoto is absence of transform links , so I have to do redundant things like color tagging layers  and then  do "select same tagged"  to transform in sync . For some weird reason that "select same tagged" or "same named"   is hotkeyable only in Affinity Designer.   Kind of annoying . 


    Still imo it's much more convenient to blend  materials by height  with all those levels, blend if,  frequency separation, inpainting   + manual brush touch and precise scaling without blurry rasterization ,   having  complete and direct control     than doing same in Substance Designer   or even Alchemist 

  • Bolovorix
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    Bolovorix ngon master
    I found this video pretty helpful for manipulating channel maps for game assets in Affinity.

    https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/37474-how-do-i-modify-channels-freely/
  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter

    Saving, editing and manipulating channels is not an issue in Affinity Photo. It's imo actually more convenient there . You don't have to do channel packing scripts or copy /paste to channels manually. It all works through layer system where you can set what goes to what channel directly.

    There is an issue with importing files with Alpha although. Whenever you open a tga with alpha Aphinty photo makes black holes where alpha is 100% black. Basically multiplying black alpha pixels ( only perfectly zero value ones) over RGB channels. Nobody knows why. To save tga back you have to put a layer with 0.001 alpha value beyond 8 bit tga recognition. That way it doesn't make the black hole at export at least.

  • Bolovorix
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    Bolovorix ngon master

    Oh that's interesting... I'll keep that in mind.

  • kyaroru
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    kyaroru polycounter lvl 2

    It sounds like it does some un-premultiplying alpha internally and hits division by zero on black alpha?

    It was always my pet peeve with Photoshop and basically all 2D bitmap editing packages that it somewhat requires PhD about graphics formats to do what we want in gamedev for packing textures - just give me raw access to 4 8 bit channels and let me do my thing. If I need to do some manual packing shenanigans I use Substance Designer because it will just allow me to stuff numbers into channels how I need it without weird hacks.

  • Tiles
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    Tiles greentooth

    May i ask the Affinity Photo cracks here a question? Is there an easy way to adjust a box selection in Affinity Photo afterwards?

    As an explanation, in Gimp the box selection tool gives me a cage with handlers, which i can pull around until i am satisfied. I can box select the area, then zoom in to the four corners, and pull them where i want them to be.

    When i last checked a demo of Affinity Photo it was quite a challenge to pixel perfect box select areas of an image. And it is honestly one of the few things that still makes me stuck to Gimp.

    So, is it possible to do a box selection and adjust it afterwards, like in Gimp? A plugin maybe?


  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter

    Make a selection rectangle > press Q and then V then edit . Or select>edit selection as a layer. One cool feature of APhoto is you can scale both selection and layers around arbitrary placed center of transforms (with ctrl pressed) not just corners , same as with rotation. Photoshop can do it too but only by field digits input which I find less convenient.

    Also for pixel precision something you have to have "force pixel alignment" on and move by whole pixels off or use pixel work preset in snap menu

  • Tiles
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    Tiles greentooth

    Many thanks gnoop :)

    So the answer is still no. Still no easy selection cage. But maybe we misunderstand each other here. What you describe is a quick mask, followed by a move tool, followed by an edit <- is this the part where you can finally adjust the size of the selection rectangle?

    As told that's what keeps me with Gimp. It's simply hard to make a pixel perfect selection when the element that you want to select is bigger than 50 pixels already. In Gimp i roughly drag the rectangle around what i want to select, zoom in, grab the edges, and can drag them to where i want them to be.

  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter

    Tiles . just try it. Once you enter quick mask and press v (move tool) you instantly get your cage, same as in photoshop or elsewhere. And more convenient to actually scale around. After you scaled your cage hit Q ( not enter) again to confirm.

    That said I never use rectangle selection . I draw vector rectangle over and hit "mask to bellow" usually . Kind of like a vector mask in Photoshop

  • Tiles
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    Tiles greentooth

    Got it. Many thanks gnoop :)

  • Alex_J
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    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter

    I've just switched from adobe to Affinity.


    Like the OP, I open photoshop so rarely and I only use it for basic work. The price of Affiinity photo + designer one time price is hardly more than just a couple months of photoshop so it seems like no brainer for me. There is a 10 day free trial as well.


    I saw it mentioned that Affinity photo lacks type kit and ability to type along curves - that does not seem to be the case with the latest version.

    I've only made an initial impression but basically Affinity Photo looks like a carbon copy of photoshop, which is nice transition. Even has many of the same icons in the same places.

  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter

    Photoshop still could be used in modern texturing pipline as a texture mixer / compositor. You can do action/script that could make one click 'height blend' masks stack and keep normal,roughness, depth 'channels' inside switchable smart objects and layer compositions . With a bit of java scripting you can automate the whole workflow , do final channel packing from layer compositions . You can easily recreate the whole Quixel mixer material mixing process in Photoshop minus real time preview although. Somehow still more artist friendly and responsive for important subtle depth/height touches here a there.

    Ever switchable 'pattern preview' working on top of your smart objects composition let you get perfectly tilable result any time.

    Since Sampler killed content aware fill Photoshop is place to do it. Could be done in Affinity too but in Photoshop you can force copy/pasting parts rotating and flipping randomly while in Affinity it often makes visibly repeating fragments . Content ware move tool in Phtoshop is also a bit superior to Affinity patch tool. I still prefer Photoshop to edit photogrammetry scans for example .

    Displace aka direction wrap or slope blur ( my most used thing in SD ) works in Photoshop almost same way and in Affinity it's totally wrong.

    Gradients it Affinity makes noisy normal map except it's layer FX gradient and while contrary to Photoshop you can make a live filter effect of turning depth to normal map it works properly only in 32 bit mode.

    Affinity has a lot of potential and if devs would want it could be much more flexible. It works much speedier with gpu support and has a few true advantages/conveniences over Psh. I like how it allows to pack channels right in layer stack , easily do dynamic mask stacks and use 'erase' blend mode to input into alpha where in Photoshop it requires a hell of a groups clipping inside another group and so on . But I think Affinity is still not there yet IMO.

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