Affinity Studio now free

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Any type of updates (bugs, security, OS support) will go only to the Canva version, no part of my comment was about the new hotness or that being the reason I bought any of the licenses.

>It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software

Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.

The FOMO created by online games. You need the latest DLC to get the latest armour you know...

> It’ll keep working for decades to come

“Decades” is probably a stretch. Especially on macOS, updates to the OS may eventually break them. And the apps were removed from the App Store.

I admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner.

And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part.

And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo

The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.

Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.

Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/bl...

I primarily use Affinity Photo, not Designer, so my knowledge of what a vector art tool should be able to do is quite limited, so I can’t speak to that.

My friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings.

Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.

Raw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.

Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.

There's already precedence for app deterioration in their iOS apps. Affinity Photo V1 for iPad lost a lot of functionality in brushes and other features with later versions of iOS (e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/comments/1725daf/what...)

It was never updated.

Learning GIMP as a PS user is like changing operating systems.

... but it has always been worth it for any normal person, IMO.

That said... PS's new AI tools might make GIMP no longer a viable option even for normies like me.

If you are dependent on certain software you don't upgrade your OS until you are 100% sure that the software will continue to work. Especially money-making software like pro photo editing tools. If needed, you keep old machines around especially for that software.

Very true, this is an area that could have a major miss. Thankfully, I believe most camera companies have a RAW to JPEG converter with some basic level of UX. “Is it good enough” is a very real question where the answer is probably “No.”

You don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.

I hate to say it but some of the newer PS features have become indispensable in my usage - mainly smart objects. nondestructive layer effects are a godsend when you want to tweak and retweak stuff that would otherwise require a ton of time and effort to undo/redo or duplicate layers/groups to A/B changes.

This is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.

Nondestructive changes, in Affinity, Photoshop and Substance Painter are all amazing, yeah. They also exist on all 3 of those software :)

In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.

Ah, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely.

Of course, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.

I haven't checked, do they use Apple's RAW library on macOS? If so, at least support might evolve with macOS updates for the time being.

Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.

If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.

That sounds like ongoing work that you should pay for if you want to benefit.

Photoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)

Yeah, but Lensfun (the library they use for this) doesn't have anywhere to donate.

Serif (I guess Canva now) maintains their own which uses the Lensfun database.

That does make things a bit more complicated.

Smart objects and smart filters were present in early CS versions I think. CS5/CS6 had them for sure, though I don't doubt that new filters and features have been added in CC.

Historically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world.

This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.

If you need a constant stream of updates for the software to be useful, this seems like a reasonable fit for a subscription.

> but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.

For it to be a problem you need to actually buy said new cameras and lenses.

I am still using my Pentax K5 II and Samsung NX from a bit more than a decade ago (as well as some analog cams but I disgress).

There is a lot of FOMO + Gear Aquisition Syndrome to make that a problem. Maybe one should focus more on actually having a life,using the products they akready own, make arts or memories instead of thinking what is new on the market they are missing out and what to buy next.

Makes me think of those people, perfectly happy with Airpod pro v2 who purchase v3 ones, only to end up frustrated by their new purchase.

The Photo (v2) app gives you a choice of using Apple’s converters or “Serif” converters. But, when last I looked, lens corrections were not available with the Apple converters.

Windows itself has a great backwards compatibility story - but the Internet doesn't, so the moment you have to communicate with the outside world, you need to deal with the high churn culture of modern software.

I can still run my old executables that I compiled back in 2002 and 2003 on my current Windows computers.

I don't think I could do that with anything that was compiled for Linux or MacOS back then.

I wouldn't want to do that with anything that opens ports on my computer that was compiled back then.

Learning GIMP is not worth it for anyone, people should use the much better and actually usable open source alternative called “Krita”.

I can confirm they are in at least CS6 which I used recently for a project.

Maybe other apps are better, but my guess is that they just work harder at copying PhotoShop's UX whilst GIMP actively worked to innovate.

Remember too that PhotoShop itself is unintuitive and hard to learn.

That unintuitiveness is a mark of honor for Photoshop ("ooo, it's so powerful you have to take _classes_ to learn it!") and a mark of shame for GIMP ("ooo, those twits didn't clone PhotoShop, the fools! It's so hard to learn!")

Well GIMP innovated in the wrong way, you can put the steering wheel in the backseat of a car in the name of innovation but that doesn’t make it better. I honestly would rather use JavaScript and canvas over GIMP because it’s just more intuitive.

Photoshop has had smart objects for quite literally 20 years - have they gained some important features recently? Smart filters have also been included since CS3 in 2007.

> My guy

Please omit patronising barbs like this from comments on HN.