Photoshop competitor is coming to Windows!

JohnnyRoy wrote on 3/17/2016, 9:02 AM

For those of you who detest subscription models like I do and refuse to pay Adobe random money to use Photoshop every month or else it stops working... there is now a significant competitor that has come to the rescue.

Serif's Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are Photoshop and Illustrator competitors that, until now, were only available on the Mac. Serif started their advertising campaign by declaring that they will never "rent" their software. You own it forever. They were clearly talking to the Adobe haters and I own both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for the Mac ($49 USD each) and they are very much high quality competition for Adobe. I've stopped using Adobe CS6 completely now and thanks to Affinity, my workflow is "Adobe free".

Well... Serif is bringing their Affinity products to Windows. Anyone who wants a Photoshop equivalent for $49 USD (assuming they keep the same pricing as the Mac version) should sign up for the beta of Affinity Photo for Windows:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/windows/

I have no affiliation with this company. I just own, and use, and love their products. I feel it's wrong that Adobe is abusing their power position in the market by forcing customers into a financial model that benefits only Adobe and I applaud companies that stand up to the big guys and give us little guys a chance to control our own business budgets.

Read more about it here: Affinity is coming to Windows

~jr

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Comments

Laurence wrote on 4/6/2016, 8:22 PM

There are a couple of things I really like about Photoshop that may not be in Affinity Photo.

One is the Adobe Camera RAW program that comes with Photoshop. I set it so that JPEGs open up in Camera RAW as well as RAW photos. I use that all the time. Does Affinity Photo have a Camera RAW equivalent?

Another is the Plugins. In particular I use Portrait Professional, Smart Photo, and export to PhotoZoom Pro to uprez. I also am about to get TinyPNG. Will these work with Affinity Photo?

Edit: OK, I found this:

https://fstoppers.com/originals/affinity-photo-first-impressions-and-call-action-59542

Encouraging! :-)

Kinvermark wrote on 4/7/2016, 6:44 AM

Keep in mind that article is from more than a year ago.

Marco. wrote on 4/7/2016, 7:02 AM

I'm not sure how about that certain plug-ins mentioned, but other Photoshop plug-ins like Google's NIK work fine in Serif's Photo Plus (which I see as Affinity's precursor) – so I would assume they'd port it to Affinity Photo, too. Also that RAW converter is already part of Photo Plus.

So I think in many or most of this regards Serif's Photo Plus already is a serious alternative product to Photoshop and I won't expect Affinity Photo to be worse. ;)

Looking forward …

aboammar wrote on 4/7/2016, 12:49 PM

Laurence, Corel PhotoPaint which is part of the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite dose have a feature to open and edit Camera RAW files .. just like Adobe Camera RAW.

Also, normally all Adobe Photoshop plugins should work with PhotoPaint. I have been using many Photoshop plugins with PhotoPaint for many years now, including Portrait Professional.

ddm wrote on 4/8/2016, 11:15 AM

My favorite feature of the lastest version of Photoshop (I think it's been around for the last few versions) is the ability to use adobe raw as a filter. I find adobe raw so easy to fine tune an image with, all the usual suspects there, with a raw image or a jpg, it's like the best parts of lightroom as a layer. I'm open to other models and I look forward to trying out the beta and I hope it has something comparable.

john_dennis wrote on 6/7/2016, 1:28 PM

I received a note from the Affinity developers this morning about their progress leading to the beta test.

"Hi John,"

Parallax Abstraction wrote on 6/7/2016, 2:35 PM

I'd never heard of this product before (probably because you couldn't pay me to use a Mac) but it looks really slick. I've desperately wanted a proper image editing tools to do thumbnails and graphics for my YouTube channel but I refuse to be a part of Adobe's Creative Cloud ripoff and Paint Shop Pro is an unintuitive mess to use, as is GIMP. This looks like it can give the ease of use of Photoshop without the insane price. Signed up for the beta. I look forward to it!

Nobody wrote on 6/30/2016, 8:15 AM

Just a heads-up. I received an email today saying the beta for Affinity Designer is ready. I've downloaded and will install later today.

rs170a wrote on 6/30/2016, 9:09 AM

I got my email this morning too. Looking forward to playing with it :)

Mike

Former user wrote on 6/30/2016, 9:39 AM

Downloaded and installed it this morning. Looking for forward to trying it out. Although, I guess we better keep the public conversation about it to a minimum considering it is a Beta.

But, then again it is labeled as a "Public Beta" -- so not sure how restricted we are discussing it in a public forum...

rmack350 wrote on 7/1/2016, 12:01 PM

It's a public beta and I didn't notice any sort of nondisclosure agreement. Chat away.

One thing to point out, though, is that Magix also has a Designer and a Photo product so they might also like your attention, especially while you're posting on their forum.

Anyway, the notice was for Affinity Designer, which is a more vector-centric application. I tried it out briefly yesterday and there are some things I like and others I'm skeptical of. I'm hoping to make some time over the long 4th o' July weekend to play a little more and send them some feedback.

One thing I noticed with the canned shapes like arrows is that there's no obvious way to make it remember how you want to draw the arrows (like, only draw an arrowhead at *one* end of the shape rather than both, etc.)

The other thing is that they use a custom file format so I need to figure out what format I can export in that will then import nicely into other software (like Flash in my case, but obviously Vegas would be the target app as far as this forum is concerned).

So, currently it's just a Beta of Affinity Designer. The bitmap editor hasn't dropped yet and that's the one that might be a Photoshop competitor.

Rob

ddm wrote on 7/1/2016, 12:28 PM

>>>The bitmap editor hasn't dropped yet and that's the one that might be a Photoshop competitor

Yeah. That's the one I'm waiting for.

DGates wrote on 7/1/2016, 5:54 PM

"...This looks like it can give the ease of use of Photoshop without the insane price..."

They already have something like that, and Adobe even makes it. It's called Elements. More than enough stuff for amateurs.

MSmart wrote on 7/2/2016, 1:33 AM

It's called Elements. More than enough stuff for amateurs.

Hey! Hey! I resemble that remark!!

set wrote on 7/3/2016, 12:20 AM

I didn't tried Adobe Illustrator, but tried CorelDraw many years ago. But have a chance to experiment with Inkscape (the open source Vector application).

And now just trying playing with Affinity Designer, and already followed their 'For beginners' tutorial creating a book cover : 'Ketchup for Blood'. So far it's interesting on playing around with vectors. Very interesting on having 'Draw Persona' and 'Pixel Persona' mode, so whether you are working with Vector or Raster, you have that combination of both workflow...

John222 wrote on 7/4/2016, 6:32 AM

I don't recall Elements doing much more than very basic resizing, cropping and very basic amateur stuff.

NickHope wrote on 11/11/2016, 12:02 AM

The Beta of Affinity Photo for Windows is finally out. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/windows/

Grazie wrote on 11/11/2016, 12:31 AM

Thanks Nick. Signed-up.

Grazie wrote on 11/11/2016, 2:46 AM

Running BETA on PC - nice. It's almost identical to my COREL PSP, but not so cluttered.

Quitter wrote on 11/11/2016, 6:06 AM

Thx for the link

Running the Windows photo and the designer Beta, looks good
Seems easier to use than Adobe

Former user wrote on 11/11/2016, 8:07 AM

I didn't see it on their page, but is there an indication of the cost of this software after it is out of Beta?

NickHope wrote on 11/11/2016, 9:11 AM

Affinity Photo for Mac is 1750 Baht online here in Thailand which is USD49.

Former user wrote on 11/11/2016, 9:51 AM

Thanks, that is a reasonable price.

ByronK wrote on 11/11/2016, 11:30 AM

The Beta of Affinity Photo for Windows is finally out. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/windows/

Hmm. I got the email also and filled out the fields to email the link for the beta but never got the link in my in box..

Affinity Photo for Mac is 1750 Baht online here in Thailand which is USD49.

Though I haven't received the link to download it,if it can do what I've seen on their website video I'd pay $50 and as Grazie said it looks much less cluttered than Paintshop Pro 8.

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