The Affinity Suite - thoughts?

Some may have already seen the newsletter from Serif today hinting at something big coming for Affinity on the 9th. My guess is version 2 of the suite. My hope is that it will include a viable alternative for Lightroom.

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Yep, I saw this earlier - looking forward to the proper announcement to hopefully see some nice upgrades.
Having had a few months to play around intermittently with the 3 programmes, I’m starting to get used to their oddities.
I’m basically a pet portrait painter now, so do very little graphics work, so for me, they’re fine, but I’d never take on some of the jobs I used to do in Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop and put my full trust in the Affinity Suite as it stands now.

SUBSCRIPTIONS!!!

:joy: :joy:

I jest. Serif are more interested in creating great apps than screwing their customers.

On a more serious note, version 2 of the apps and I think a video editor maybe is coming. :grin:

That would certainly be interesting at the right price but the general concept behind affinity is that all the apps work in synergy.

It desperately needs an alternative to Lightroom or at least Bridge, because raw processing and asset archiving are painful at present. That will have kept a lot of people with Adobe.

That doesn’t exclude video though. It does if you just think of slicing clips. But I’m thinking of something that incorporates options like you find in motion etc.

I’d say cloud and asset management will be a give in at some stage.

Publisher for iPad must be due for release soon (unless I misssd it lol).

One thing I am expecting to see is quite a bit of AI like you see in Pixelmator Pro and Luminar Neo. I really miss content aware delete from Photoshop. Affinity has inpainting, which works in small areas but falls apart in situations like extending a canvas size and having the background blend in with a single click.

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I get the price of the whole Adobe suite is hard to justify, but the photographers bundle at 10.00 per month IMO is a great deal. The advances that come regularly in Lightroom and Photoshop are hard to beat. I use both every day and I would not consider switching.

I use Affinity Designer regularly and have come to really enjoy working with it.

Casey

They set the bar high with such an announcement. I am therefore very curious!

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Taken over by Adobe and switching to an overpriced subscription before they are shut down and forced to use the Photoshop etc :scream:

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I switched to Affinity 2 years ago. I must confess that it was the best solution for me. Of course it takes some getting used to, but that goes quickly. I am very happy that I made that choice.

Affinity and Pixelmator have been unbelievable value, lets hope they keep this business model with quality at a great price.

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One more sleep :sleeping: :grin:

Probably two more nights of sleep for you :grin: :sleeping_bed: :kiwi_fruit:

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First of the world problems. It’s hard having so many followers :joy:

You are probably right. Serif is UK right?

It’s out and I am just playing with the trial version of Photo at the moment. No opinion at this stage, however it is likely to be an excellent deal, particularly for new users.

One of the problems with Serif is that they always did have an issue with upgrades - it happened when they dropped the original Serif Plus Suite. There was no real upgrade option for existing Plus users when the Affinity suite was introduced. Now, arguably that was probably due to the fact that the Affinity line up was a completely different (new) suite of products designed for both Windows and Mac users. However, it ultimately resulted in the demise of the Plus suite.

With the current announcement, we appear to have a situation where V2 of the Affinity range is essentially an enhancement to the V1 product. However, there is no upgrade option for existing users. This means that you will end up with two versions and licences of what is essentially the same product. As an alternative, you can uninstall V1 and pay for a new V2 suite but I think that is grossly unfair for V1 users.

It would have been nice if Serif had provided an upgrade path to existing users BEFORE announcing a special launch price for the new V2. I’ve seen this situation handled much better with other products where a new version has been released to replace an existing one. However, in almost every case, users of the previous product were given the opportunity of acquiring the new product at an upgrade price. Although this often resulted in two versions of the software being installed, it did go some way to compensating existing users who may have wished to uninstall the old version of the software (maybe due to space considerations).

What I fear is that V1 users will now be abandoned by Serif if they choose not to move onto the V2 product. Clearly, support will diminish over time for V1, so even if people stick with their V1 product, they are unlikely to see any future enhancements as technology advances come along.

Whilst I appreciate that the price of the V2 product is currently quite low. I wonder what happens to people who purchased V1 at full price, say 6 or 12 months ago. They are faced with having to shell out again for a product that is largely the same as the product they already have. Personally, I think Serif have gone back to their old ways with this policy - simply introduce a new product and leave the old version users to fend for themselves.

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I’m rather happy with the universal price launch discount.

Regarding the lack of upgrade pricing for v1 users, serif address it in their FAQ.

“No, as many of our sales are made through third party App Stores we do not have a mechanism to offer upgrade pricing. This was why we decided to offer such a large launch discount—to give users an opportunity to upgrade at an incredible price.”

That kind of makes sense, I remember the initial issues with Studiolink when they released that feature, and I had a mix of apps from the Apple Store and their website, it didn’t work initially very well.

One thing to be aware of, is once you use a V1 file in V2 you won’t be able to use that file in V1 again.

Also they say no more updates to V1. So yeah it’s dead,

I will likely buy the universal license. But then I just woke up, and it’s only a little after 5 am, and I haven’t had coffee. The world needs to change their time zones :rofl:

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It’s $99.00 for the entire suite. If it was any cheaper they wouldn’t have the money to keep developing the product. Honestly I don’t know how they do it for the price it is.

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Worth it! :smile:

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This should help you make the choice.

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