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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1200 points dagmx | 4 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.816s | source
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mns ◴[30 Oct 25 17:21 UTC] No.45762506[source]▶
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.

There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.

I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).

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t-writescode ◴[30 Oct 25 17:23 UTC] No.45762554[source]▶
[flagged]
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qingcharles ◴[30 Oct 25 18:31 UTC] No.45763477[source]▶
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.
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GuinansEyebrows ◴[30 Oct 25 18:42 UTC] No.45763655[source]▶
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.
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1. t-writescode ◴[30 Oct 25 19:01 UTC] No.45763914[source]▶
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.

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2. GuinansEyebrows ◴[30 Oct 25 19:46 UTC] No.45764459[source]▶
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 :)
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3. kilpikaarna ◴[30 Oct 25 20:59 UTC] No.45765286[source]▶
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.
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4. archerx ◴[31 Oct 25 11:56 UTC] No.45771035{3}[source]▶
I can confirm they are in at least CS6 which I used recently for a project.