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Worth noting that there's a decent alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign from Affinity: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.
by bovermyer 7y ago
Worth noting that there's a decent alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign from Affinity:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
Affinity is European, and thus not affected by the executive order. Also, all of their products are buy-once-own-forever.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y agoHave you tried Publisher? How does it compare to InDesign?
- bovermyer 7y agoI bought it and use it, yes. It's missing some features that InDesign has and is a little slower, but it's a solid workhorse for laying out books and documents. I don't miss InDesign at this point.
- ghaff 7y agoInteresting. The near universal use of Microsoft Office--along with the later various SaaS products--really hollowed out the publication layout market between word processors that were pretty mediocre at layout and high-end design tools that mostly meant InDesign. (And Scribus always seemed a steep learning curve too.) I don't have a need at the moment but good to know there are still some tools that may make sense for more casual users.
- e40 7y agoI would love a real alternative to Lightroom. I'm stuck on version 6, since I refused to go to the rent it model.
- DHPersonal 7y agoI think Capture One Pro is superior to Lightroom in everything but the library system that is offered with Lightroom, though what is provided in Capture One Pro is still very good. https://www.captureone.com/en/store https://www.captureone.com/en/store
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y agoI always found the library system in Lightroom to be painful only because of how slow it is. It's hard to imagine enough features to make up for a UI that routinely takes >1s to render images onto the page.
- StavrosK 7y agoThat's what got me to switch off Lightroom, and Capture One's excellent other features kept me on the latter. Highly recommended.
- decasteve 7y agoI never got into the catalogs/sessions way of managing my library but Capture One is my favourite processing tool. So I use digiKam to manage my library and Capture One to process the individual photos.
- gorgoiler 7y agoInteresting. Capture One is a non destructive photo editor: how does that not force to use Capture One for managing your library as well? Is digiKam able to access the post-process images from Capture One?
- decasteve 7y agoI don't care as much about seeing the unedited thumbnail previews in digiKam as long as I can find what I'm looking for, and then edit and print from Capture One.
- peterhookgen 7y agoI was just about to post Capture One!!
- greggman2 7y agoCapture One looks great but it's way more expensive than Lightroom. Lightroom is $120 a year. Capture One is $500 and $150 for an upgrade between versions or $240 a year.
- wlesieutre 7y agoAffinity is "thinking about" a digital asset management tool. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when-are-damcataloging-and-tethering-features-coming-to-affinity-photo/&tab=comments#comment-408864 https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when... If they do make one, it may or may not have editing features built in (vs shipping you out to Affinity Photo). But I'm in the same boat. Stuck on CS6, couldn't stand DarkTable, haven't bothered trying any other alternatives.
- mceachen 7y ago(I'm building a DAM: check my profile if you'd like to be part of the closed beta!)
- wlesieutre 7y agoI'm interested, but whatever DAM I eventually move to will in large part be driven by how well it can import my years of Lightroom library (including edits out of the xmp sidecar files and at least approximating Lightroom's RAW rendering). I know that's a big ask, don't suppose it's on your roadmap?
- novok 7y agoI imported a 70k item library into mylio and it ingested it fairly well, along with the xmp sidecar files. I try to avoid doing edits on my images, so I haven't tested how well it imports throughly although.
- mceachen 7y agoThe current version added support for importing sidecar metadata. It does not apply LR edits to the previews it shows, though (which would require re-implementing swaths of LR...). If you see something you want when you try the beta, please tell me!
- krmmalik 7y agoHave you considered Polarr?
- e40 7y agoThat appears to be just the editor part. The asset management in LR is really what I use most.
- theossuary 7y agoSame, recently heard about Darktable, planning to give it a shot now that I don't have Lighroom anymore https://www.darktable.org https://www.darktable.org
- sneak 7y agoDarktable is abysmal, sadly. It is my go-to example for the failure of f/oss to fulfill common professional software needs.
- johnchristopher 7y agoThere is https://rawtherapee.com/ https://rawtherapee.com/ and https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/
- PavlovsCat 7y agoHave you tried AfterShot Pro by Corel? I don't use it, but that's just because I still use (and love) Bibble 5 from 2011, which is the software that was bought by Corel and turned into AfterShot Pro. I had a quick glance at the manual of the latter, and it seems like the batch processing and other things are still intact, so I'm hopeful it still might be worth checking out.
- slig 7y agoHave you tried ON1 Photo Raw?
- buzzy_hacker 7y agoI recommend Luminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_83opqLxyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_83opqLxyU
- notmadyet 7y agoI can't quite recommend Luminar over Ps/Lr because i've never used the latter, but Luminar seems good enough, and it also seems to be getting better. I've been getting into photo editing recently, and searched online for a few hours to learn about the differences between the various options. From what i gathered, Luminar (which is a pay once for a lifetime license that you can have installed in up to five machines at a time) is a serious contender to Ps/Lr even at the professional level, let alone at the amateur/occasional user level.
- Youden 7y agoI moved from Lightroom to Capture One Pro and eventually settled on Darktable. It took a bit of getting used to (still not a fan of the UI and its obsession with "film rolls" every time I import something) but once I did it's quite nice. Images come out looking good and it has a handy Lua scripting environment and CLI with which you can automate many tasks.
- tomduncalf 7y agoI actually feel Adobe’s Photography Plan is pretty good value. LR Mobile on iPad is excellent, worth it for that alone
- mkasu 7y agoIndeed. I used to use LR Classic on my Mac, but since the new LR got more and more features I switched to using my iPad almost exclusively. I don't think I used LR on my Mac in months.
- jiveturkey 7y agoDisagree. Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator. I'm still on CS6, the last version before CC. Even that version, released in 2012, is superior to today's Affinity Designer. I haven't explored the other ones as deeply but from what I have done, the features seem quite limited. For example, there's a translator for Photoshop plugins to work on Affinity Photo. Very very few plugins work with this translator. Why is there even such a middleware? Because the Affinity plugin ecosystem is very weak. It's an alternative, not a "decent" alternative. It's the equivalent of Google Docs vs Microsoft Word. If you need something barebones, it gets the job done, and there are a few things it does better. But if you need just one feature of the better software, forget it.
- open-source-ux 7y agoI have Affinity Designer and Photo and disagree with your assessment. You're right that Affinity apps do not match all the features of Adobe's apps, but Designer and Photo are well above "bare bones" in comparison. I'd say that Photo's biggest missing feature is an equivalent to Photoshop's smart object feature. As a former user of Illustrator, there's nothing I miss from that app, certainly not the clunky Illustrator UI. (Unfortunately, Designer also has some clunky aspects to it's UI.) Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial from their website - the apps work on both Windows and Mac. Also, take a look at the 'spotlight' section of the Affinity website to see some of the work possible with the apps. https://affinityspotlight.com/articles/recent/ https://affinityspotlight.com/articles/recent/
- jiveturkey 7y ago> Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial Because the discussion is not whether Affinity apps are good or not, but whether they are good relative to Adobe, anyone that wants to make up their own mind also can download a free trial of CC apps.
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago> Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator Where does it fall short for you? Out of interest.
- martin-adams 7y agoAnd if you want an alternative to Adobe Premiere, I highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. Free for most features, then just a one off payment of $299. One of the industry leaders in colour grading and has a composition suite (acquired from DFX Fusion) built right in.
- FpUser 7y agoYup. Davinci is what we use for our VR video production part.
- djsumdog 7y agoResolve is pretty nice. It still has 4k/HighDPI scaling issues (it's based on QT5 under the skin) that make things too large on some screens, but other than that it's pretty solid.
- rodolphoarruda 7y agoThanks. I didn't know about DaVinci yet. It looks impressive (including their website).
- seph-reed 7y agoDaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design. Such a pretty sounding set of names. It feels a lot more like the future I was hoping for.
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoI started using Davinci Resolve a few years ago and its fantastic! It seemed too good to be true, and I kept waiting to find some dark secret or "catch" but nope, it's just really good software priced reasonably.
- tomduncalf 7y agoSeconded, I am not at all knowledgable about video editing but had to do some stuff which was beyond the capabilities of iMovie and was impressed by Resolve. It’s fairly complex and the UI is pretty non-standard (true of many “creative”/media applications) but fairly logical and there’s loads of help online. Plus it’s free if you don’t need larger than 4K export!
- tmikaeld 7y agoBeen using both designer and photo for about 2 years, to replace Photoshop mainly. While mostly great, some features are missing for vectors which makes layers broken down into tiny bits instead of groups. The only way to solve it is to open the file in illustrator and save it as an .ai file to fix it. I've been told it works in Corel draw as well.
- nothis 7y agoHmm. How good are they with the "grunt work" stuff for professional print design? Color profiles, PDF export, scripts for text formatting, files loading a gigabyte worth of photos, etc? I'm desperately waiting for a proper Adobe replacement but they're sitting on that segment, not with flashy, new features but with a solid-as-hell base of tried and tested background functionality.
- trynewideas 7y agoAffinity convert on Windows here. Profile support is fine, compatible with ICC profiles, does soft proofing and black point compensation. You'd have to go into more depth about your use cases as I know Adobe let some wild stuff happen, but if you just need to use and embed profiles and soft proof, you can do that. Its PDF export is good, not great—again, Adobe allows for extreme granularity in PDF settings so I'd need to know specific use cases to advise. PDF import and placing PDF docs is surprisingly good, in some case shockingly so. If you're publishing books built from scratch in Affinity Publisher, there's nothing off the top of my head that I had to fundamentally change about my workflow in shipping 4-color books with layered artwork and columnar text with sidebars to prepress. If you're editing PDFs or converting from INDD, you can get away with a lot but you need to be careful since there are a few feature gaps (see the next paragraph in particular) that don't convert well or at all. What you'll miss the most falls under what I think you mean by "scripts for text formatting". Publisher doesn't do grep styles or anything similar enough to replace that. It's the biggest feature I miss regularly. You'll miss the level of automation complexity and droplets in Photo too if you use those regularly in Photoshop. I don't have any problems with large or complex layouts loading huge amounts of data for artwork, or massive text docs. What I get that I didn't have in Adobe, and especially InDesign: pretty much full access from any of the component apps to vector drawing tools, raster and vector brushes, and shape tools, all of which behave consistently across the suite. No more having to flip my brain from Illustrator's vector drawing to Photoshop's to InDesign's, they all just work with each other and the same way, copy and paste across each other without any fuss, edit within each other easily when necessary, etc. I miss some power features, especially around styles and Photo automation, but I've adapted, and I appreciate the hell out of how well-integrated the three apps are with each other in interface and functionality. The forums are a good place to ask about or research feature implementations and requests, especially https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature-requests-suggestions/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature...
- StavrosK 7y agoIf only it ran on Linux... I hate having to reboot to Windows to edit photos.
- sitkack 7y agoIf you are on a desktop, you can dedicate a graphics card to windows and run it with PCIe pass through into a VM. Best of both worlds.
- drdeadringer 7y agoWhat's wrong with GIMP? Are there special abilities and features in Photoshop GIMP does not have?
- StavrosK 7y agoYes, there's a lot of stuff the GIMP doesn't have, but mostly it's just the annoying UX. I'm sure half of it is just that I'm used to Photoshop, but I'm also pretty sure the other half is GIMP.
- andyfleming 7y agoI'm not sure how I haven't seen these before. Those apps look great! I've tried sketch, but it just feels too far from the adobe world I'm used to, especially for raster graphics work.
- snowl 7y agoThere's also a sale currently on Affinity Photo if you go to https://www.ephotozine.com/article/50--off-affinity-photo-software-offer-is-back---34048 https://www.ephotozine.com/article/50--off-affinity-photo-so... They usually do a black friday sale but you can get it here for half price.
- drukenemo 7y agoI own a copy, but it doesn’t handle plugins not nearly as nice as photoshop.
- kzrdude 7y agoNot affected now, but being non-US is not a guarantee. Many European companies would like to trade with for example Iran, but can't since they also have a big market in the US, so they can be targeted.