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Posted

Wondering if anybody is using Serif's Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop, and if so, what your opinions were/are. Currently on the 10 day trial, and liking it so far.
My Adobe subscription is coming up for renewal, and trying to decide whether to keep or ditch it.

Pros I've found so far:
-The panorama stitch seems significantly better
-3rd party plugin support seems pretty decent (less buggy than moving from PS 2015.5 to 2017)
-Layout is pretty similar
-Far less RAM and scratch disk intensive

-Live Lighting is much more intuitive and seems more powerful
-Price. One time payment of $50 compared to $120 yearly.

Cons I've found so far:
-Photo stacking is marginal. It passes, but ghost reduction and focus stacking are sub-par often leaving artifacts
-Not impressed with chromatic aberration reduction in the Develop "Persona" (equivalent to Camera Raw)- there's no sliders to choose the aberration colors or the reduction amt. I'd have to use a third party plugin to replace that.

-Settings in the Develop persona do not "stick" like they do in Camera Raw. If I go back to change exposure/white balance/etc, all of the sliders are back at 0 after I click "develop".
-Limited presets for things like tonal range, curves, etc. I often used one of Photoshop's baked in presets and adjusted curves/levels from there, saving me time. I could make presets, but some should come "out of the box"

-Lens distortion tools are finicky. I really liked Photoshop's smart "auto" correction features, which Affinity lacks.

With all of the above said, I think it's definitely worth the $50 asking price, especially considering lifetime upgrades. Migrating my workflow has been a bit of a learning curve, but that's to be expected. It would be hard to justify using both Affinity and Photoshop though, so it'd probably boil down to one or the other.

  • 100 1
  • 1 month later...
Posted

Update: Serif won me over and I switched over to Affinity as of yesterday. Ultimately I fell in love with the superior content-aware fill and panorama stitching.
There's not much that I miss from Photoshop. Made my own presets and LUTs, mitigated the Chromatic Aberration problem with a plugin and figured out the issue I was having with HDR stacking. I was wrong about a lack of auto lens correction tools.

Will have to post some photos I've edited with Affinity soon. I bought it at full price, but it should be on sale around Thanksgiving for anyone interested!

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

Haven't tried it yest, but running Affinity Designer trial right now. Sadly it lacks multiple point transformation for doing perspective. 

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