Affinity Photo - decent replacement for photoshop?
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/37474-how-do-i-modify-channels-freely/
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.
Oh that's interesting... I'll keep that in mind.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
Got it. Many thanks gnoop :)
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.
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.