I'm not a professional designer but I do quite a bit of design, photo, and typography work these days.
The Affinity suite of programs (Photo, Designer, and Publisher) have been the perfect alternative for someone like me who does casual work, isn't locked into the Adobe ecosystem, and doesn't want to spend $60+/month on a subscription.
Their programs are full-featured, blazing fast, integrate with one another, and are - most importantly - pay once per license. Funnily, they're doing a 50% sale right now, which brings the entire line of products to a one-time payment of $83. Likely to capitalize on the Adobe's bad press cycle.
The value of this package is undeniable. I'm a very happy user.
The only caveat is that they don't yet have all of the cutting-edge high-end features that Adobe offers (AI integration, etc). But the nuts and bolts functionality is rock solid and they are adding more and more features each day. I find the lack of bloat and a massive codebase really help to streamline the performance. It's been flawless for me.
Yep, just got this package yesterday and I was pretty amazed at how easy it was to switch over. Their PSD compatibility seems quite good too, although obviously some of the effects are implemented subtly differently.
I've tried to quit Photoshop before with GIMP, Krita and even more obscure alternatives but gladly shelled out the cash for the Affinity Suite.
I'm a game developer and Affinity Photo is missing a couple key features which make it nearly useless for us. In particular, it doesn't have individual channel editing. This is sort of baffling because it's only a UX issue... the tech to edit individual channels (including Alpha) is innate in image editing.
The Affinity suite of programs (Photo, Designer, and Publisher) have been the perfect alternative for someone like me who does casual work, isn't locked into the Adobe ecosystem, and doesn't want to spend $60+/month on a subscription.
Their programs are full-featured, blazing fast, integrate with one another, and are - most importantly - pay once per license. Funnily, they're doing a 50% sale right now, which brings the entire line of products to a one-time payment of $83. Likely to capitalize on the Adobe's bad press cycle.
The value of this package is undeniable. I'm a very happy user.
The only caveat is that they don't yet have all of the cutting-edge high-end features that Adobe offers (AI integration, etc). But the nuts and bolts functionality is rock solid and they are adding more and more features each day. I find the lack of bloat and a massive codebase really help to streamline the performance. It's been flawless for me.