6 ms·

Affinity can, though. I haven't touched Photoshop/Illustrator in years since I discovered Affinity.

by phinnaeus 3y ago

nikolay 3y ago
Adobe is not just Photoshop and Illustrator; Affinity is still subpar, and Adobe products are moving fast ahead.
- phinnaeus 3y ago
  Photoshop and Illustrator are surely a vast majority of Adobe product usage. What would be #3? Premiere? Lightroom? Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1
  - omnimus 3y ago
    Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.
    - phinnaeus 3y ago
      Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.
      - omnimus 3y ago
        I think they are serious competitor and probably that's why they were able to have payday and sell the product.
- yaomtc 3y ago
  Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.
  - lstamour 3y ago
    Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have complaints for Adobe products too, but usually missing features aren’t one of them. (Except if your product is named Captivate or was recently changed from a legacy app to a modern Electron app (or something), then I have a lot of missing features to suggest.) Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
    - omnimus 3y ago
      Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.
      - lstamour 3y ago
        I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)
orbital-decay 3y ago
You're probably not the target audience though. Adobe products might be old, dysfunctional, and janky under all that cruft, but they have vast amounts of domain knowledge put into them. Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.
- omnimus 3y ago
  Photoshop is the only software Adobe has bern giving atleast some attention. If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support). The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools). Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.

Affinity can, though. I haven't touched Photoshop/Illustrator in years since I discovered Affinity.

nikolay 3y ago

Adobe is not just Photoshop and Illustrator; Affinity is still subpar, and Adobe products are moving fast ahead.

phinnaeus 3y ago
Photoshop and Illustrator are surely a vast majority of Adobe product usage. What would be #3? Premiere? Lightroom? Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1
- omnimus 3y ago
  Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.
  - phinnaeus 3y ago
    Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.
    - omnimus 3y ago
      I think they are serious competitor and probably that's why they were able to have payday and sell the product.
yaomtc 3y ago
Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.
- lstamour 3y ago
  Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have complaints for Adobe products too, but usually missing features aren’t one of them. (Except if your product is named Captivate or was recently changed from a legacy app to a modern Electron app (or something), then I have a lot of missing features to suggest.) Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
  - omnimus 3y ago
    Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.
    - lstamour 3y ago
      I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)

orbital-decay 3y ago

You're probably not the target audience though. Adobe products might be old, dysfunctional, and janky under all that cruft, but they have vast amounts of domain knowledge put into them. Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.

omnimus 3y ago
Photoshop is the only software Adobe has bern giving atleast some attention. If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support). The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools). Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.