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I've been using Krita a lot as my Photoshop replacement lately, but I bought both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and have been impressed with how much the

I've been using Krita a lot as my Photoshop replacement lately, but I bought both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and have been impressed with how much they offer for such a significantly more reasonable price. It's time to tell Adobe "no" to subscription based software.

jiveturkey 7y ago
adobe has way more and better features. the subscription model is working well for them. that ship has sailed. for people who only need affinity's feature set, it's perfect alternative. but it isn't putting a dent into adobe's revenue. i'm not sure why you care to continue to slam adobe. if affinity's products and sales model suit you, why care what adobe does?
- egypturnash 7y ago
  I am deep, deep down the Illustrator rabbit hole (20y of it being my main tool, working on big projects that are deeply entwined with how it works) and will not be changing to Affinity Designer, but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. The subscription model is super off-putting when you’re barely scraping by. Sure Adobe has student pricing but you know what? I wasn’t a student when I glommed onto AI, I was just recently out of school and struggling to get into the animation industry. I pirated it for a while, then started buying it every second or third release when it actually had features that sounded useful to what I was using the program for. Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft. I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription. Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.
  - Kelteseth 7y ago
    Give it a try. I have been using Affinity Designer since 2017 and never looked back. Took me only about a day to learn because it is so similar to Photoshop! I use it mostly for SVG and UI design related stuff for my open source wallpaper app ScreenPlay [1]. [1] https://screen-play.app/ https://screen-play.app/
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      I am thinking I might fuck around with it soon for some standalone art, but I am currently in the middle of a multi-year comics project[1] that pushes Illustrator really hard to produce complex, painterly work at high speed and really don’t feel like changing horses in the middle of a stream would be a good idea. :) [1] http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
      - timtimmy 7y ago
        I find Affinity Designer is way way faster to use than Illustrator. It's not just the rendering, the whole UI is streamlined. However, it's missing many features compared to Illustrator, especially some of the stroke patterns.
        egypturnash 7y ago
        “Missing many features” is certainly not doing a good job selling me on it, after 20y of using and customizing AI I can use it at warp speed, and lean hard on some obscure corners of it!
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. It’s currently half off, so you can grab it for 25!
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Illustrator is abandonware at this point. What a sorry joke it is. Decade-old defects not fixed. To me the last straw is its lack of a proper selection method (select only objects that are fully enclosed by the marquee, not just touched by it). This glaring deficiency had me running Corel Draw in a VM for years. Now we finally have some newer vector tools on Mac: Designer and Sketch (although Sketch buries the aforementioned selection mode under a hotkey).
- nnq 7y ago
  > way more and better features That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp. Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software. If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    The one thing I really miss from Illustrator is “Select Same Appearance”. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to implement, but it’s been “coming soon” for five years.
  - knolan 7y ago
    I learned to love Photoshop and Illustrator after watching a lot of excellent training videos back in the day. I held it up against appallingly bad CAD software like a SolidWorks and Pro/Engineer. Adobe’s apps are utopia in comparison to the hot mess of parametric CAD. Then I learned Blender and nothing comes close for speed and efficiency, except maybe Vim.
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Amen. The Photoshop UI is a mess. But... although I eagerly bought Designer when it came out (because Illustrator is basically dead), its UI isn't much better. And I consider that less forgivable in a new product.
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    > Affinity products are quite close. They aren't. Just look in this thread for many many examples. One thing I didn't see mentioned was scripts. If they were, Adobe would be scrambling. There isn't this grey line where one tool can do the same things but in some different way. There is a sharp line where the cheap tool can't do it at all. You're comparing excel to google sheets. UX enrages aside, the only thing not to like about illustrator is the cost. I also hate that you can't get a nice car for under $50k. That doesn't make the $50k and up cars an object of hate.
achow 7y ago
I was always surprised by Adobe's lack of product thinking and software development chops and their revenue and share price (inversely proportional). All of their products never evolved, very poorly integrated, terrible UX and product design in general, bad software development maturity. The last one is an educated guess based upon all of the previous points and also Steve Jobs publicly shaming them due to Adobe's inability to react on Flash issues. [1] Adobe took very long time to react to Sketch software challenge, and the result (Adobe XD)is just about OK, nothing remarkable. [1] Steve Jobs' open letter: Thoughts on Flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- Marazan 7y ago
  Thoughts on Flash is filed with lies. It opens with lies and continues with lies. Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs
  - applecrazy 7y ago
    Source?
  - inapis 7y ago
    Adobe has access to plenty of APIs on Windows, yet it didn’t run any better and was an incessant security nightmare. Why would anyone have a reason to believe that Adobe would’ve done a better job on the mac than much flexible windows? Adobe’s current performance on Windows and Mac in 2020 does not add any backing to that argument either.
    - Marazan 7y ago
      Flash ran massively better on Windows than on Macs. One of Job's specific complaints was that it didn't run as well on Mac as it did on Windows. And that's because they couldn't get the same graphics hardware access they could get on Windows. The flash player was a perfectly performany piece of software. The piece of shit programs people wrote for it were slow but that was not inherent of Flash. The same people went on to wrote piece of shit HTML 5 apps that peg out your fan just as much.
apozem 7y ago
This is an unpopular take, but for certain kinds of programs, I actually prefer subscription software. All software is a sandcastle build on top of a thousand other sandcastles. It takes active maintenance, especially if it's a professional-grade tool. Subscriptions are the best way to ensure active, responsive product development. They align the developer's incentive (keep paying me) with your incentive (keep my tool working). You wouldn't pay a contractor everything up front to renovate your bathroom. You'd pay as you go to ensure the work continues and is of good quality. Same thing with software.
- jolux 7y ago
  You do get to keep the product at the end though. And then you’ll typically pay someone else again 20 years down the line to fix different problems, or do different things, etc. Much closer to the old Creative Suite model than CC is. (the latter is also just dreadful software that I dread installing to use Adobe products, which I feel a need to bring up every time I think of it because of how awful it is)
- wwweston 7y ago
  Sometimes I think the optimal subscription model isn't to pay for additions to software but to maintenance for a stable environment/OS/API set. Like, I've long since failed to get excited about upgrades to macOS, but I might well pay Apple some yearly double digit number to keep snow leopard stable as long as I have hardware that runs back that far. That way, nobody's software rots out from under them, there's always the environment they first brought it to as long as there are enough people to pay the subscription.

jiveturkey 7y ago

adobe has way more and better features. the subscription model is working well for them. that ship has sailed. for people who only need affinity's feature set, it's perfect alternative. but it isn't putting a dent into adobe's revenue. i'm not sure why you care to continue to slam adobe. if affinity's products and sales model suit you, why care what adobe does?

egypturnash 7y ago
I am deep, deep down the Illustrator rabbit hole (20y of it being my main tool, working on big projects that are deeply entwined with how it works) and will not be changing to Affinity Designer, but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. The subscription model is super off-putting when you’re barely scraping by. Sure Adobe has student pricing but you know what? I wasn’t a student when I glommed onto AI, I was just recently out of school and struggling to get into the animation industry. I pirated it for a while, then started buying it every second or third release when it actually had features that sounded useful to what I was using the program for. Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft. I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription. Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.
- Kelteseth 7y ago
  Give it a try. I have been using Affinity Designer since 2017 and never looked back. Took me only about a day to learn because it is so similar to Photoshop! I use it mostly for SVG and UI design related stuff for my open source wallpaper app ScreenPlay [1]. [1] https://screen-play.app/ https://screen-play.app/
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    I am thinking I might fuck around with it soon for some standalone art, but I am currently in the middle of a multi-year comics project[1] that pushes Illustrator really hard to produce complex, painterly work at high speed and really don’t feel like changing horses in the middle of a stream would be a good idea. :) [1] http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
    - timtimmy 7y ago
      I find Affinity Designer is way way faster to use than Illustrator. It's not just the rendering, the whole UI is streamlined. However, it's missing many features compared to Illustrator, especially some of the stroke patterns.
      - egypturnash 7y ago
        “Missing many features” is certainly not doing a good job selling me on it, after 20y of using and customizing AI I can use it at warp speed, and lean hard on some obscure corners of it!
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. It’s currently half off, so you can grab it for 25!
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Illustrator is abandonware at this point. What a sorry joke it is. Decade-old defects not fixed. To me the last straw is its lack of a proper selection method (select only objects that are fully enclosed by the marquee, not just touched by it). This glaring deficiency had me running Corel Draw in a VM for years. Now we finally have some newer vector tools on Mac: Designer and Sketch (although Sketch buries the aforementioned selection mode under a hotkey).
nnq 7y ago
> way more and better features That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp. Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software. If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
- mattkrause 7y ago
  The one thing I really miss from Illustrator is “Select Same Appearance”. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to implement, but it’s been “coming soon” for five years.
- knolan 7y ago
  I learned to love Photoshop and Illustrator after watching a lot of excellent training videos back in the day. I held it up against appallingly bad CAD software like a SolidWorks and Pro/Engineer. Adobe’s apps are utopia in comparison to the hot mess of parametric CAD. Then I learned Blender and nothing comes close for speed and efficiency, except maybe Vim.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Amen. The Photoshop UI is a mess. But... although I eagerly bought Designer when it came out (because Illustrator is basically dead), its UI isn't much better. And I consider that less forgivable in a new product.
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  > Affinity products are quite close. They aren't. Just look in this thread for many many examples. One thing I didn't see mentioned was scripts. If they were, Adobe would be scrambling. There isn't this grey line where one tool can do the same things but in some different way. There is a sharp line where the cheap tool can't do it at all. You're comparing excel to google sheets. UX enrages aside, the only thing not to like about illustrator is the cost. I also hate that you can't get a nice car for under $50k. That doesn't make the $50k and up cars an object of hate.

achow 7y ago

I was always surprised by Adobe's lack of product thinking and software development chops and their revenue and share price (inversely proportional). All of their products never evolved, very poorly integrated, terrible UX and product design in general, bad software development maturity. The last one is an educated guess based upon all of the previous points and also Steve Jobs publicly shaming them due to Adobe's inability to react on Flash issues. [1] Adobe took very long time to react to Sketch software challenge, and the result (Adobe XD)is just about OK, nothing remarkable. [1] Steve Jobs' open letter: Thoughts on Flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Marazan 7y ago
Thoughts on Flash is filed with lies. It opens with lies and continues with lies. Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs
- applecrazy 7y ago
  Source?
- inapis 7y ago
  Adobe has access to plenty of APIs on Windows, yet it didn’t run any better and was an incessant security nightmare. Why would anyone have a reason to believe that Adobe would’ve done a better job on the mac than much flexible windows? Adobe’s current performance on Windows and Mac in 2020 does not add any backing to that argument either.
  - Marazan 7y ago
    Flash ran massively better on Windows than on Macs. One of Job's specific complaints was that it didn't run as well on Mac as it did on Windows. And that's because they couldn't get the same graphics hardware access they could get on Windows. The flash player was a perfectly performany piece of software. The piece of shit programs people wrote for it were slow but that was not inherent of Flash. The same people went on to wrote piece of shit HTML 5 apps that peg out your fan just as much.

apozem 7y ago

This is an unpopular take, but for certain kinds of programs, I actually prefer subscription software. All software is a sandcastle build on top of a thousand other sandcastles. It takes active maintenance, especially if it's a professional-grade tool. Subscriptions are the best way to ensure active, responsive product development. They align the developer's incentive (keep paying me) with your incentive (keep my tool working). You wouldn't pay a contractor everything up front to renovate your bathroom. You'd pay as you go to ensure the work continues and is of good quality. Same thing with software.

jolux 7y ago
You do get to keep the product at the end though. And then you’ll typically pay someone else again 20 years down the line to fix different problems, or do different things, etc. Much closer to the old Creative Suite model than CC is. (the latter is also just dreadful software that I dread installing to use Adobe products, which I feel a need to bring up every time I think of it because of how awful it is)
wwweston 7y ago
Sometimes I think the optimal subscription model isn't to pay for additions to software but to maintenance for a stable environment/OS/API set. Like, I've long since failed to get excited about upgrades to macOS, but I might well pay Apple some yearly double digit number to keep snow leopard stable as long as I have hardware that runs back that far. That way, nobody's software rots out from under them, there's always the environment they first brought it to as long as there are enough people to pay the subscription.