50% off each product (one-time purchase with updates, no subscription) too during the COVID pandemic.
Won't take you long to adjust at all as they're very similar and the apps are more lightweight and faster than Adobe's products have ever been. Also iPad versions if you want to edit on a tablet.
Been using Affinity Photo for a while now as an alternative to Photoshop and wouldn't look back.
I’ve used Affinity Designer as a cheap alternative to Illustrator. Not surprisingly it’s way better than Inkscape (the Inkscape UI alone makes me lose all interests in designing anything), but Illustrator definitely has a lot more features and power tools, and arguably more importantly, a hell lot more online resources. So I guess Affinity Designer fulfills the role as a budget alternative, but not much more.
I've always wondered why the space of professional graphics programs isn't like the space of professional DAW (audio) programs. With DAWs, everything is a standardized plugin (a VST) that can be run inside any of the workstation programs. Customers can buy VSTs separately from any consideration of what ecosystem they're going to be using them with.
Because only now are viable professional alternatives to Adobe programs starting to show up. Adobe would be shooting themselves in the foot by working with some interoperable plugin format. Also, for graphic design at least, plugins are a much smaller part of your workflow than they are in audio production— the basic tools really are the most important thing in design. I'd say most professional graphic designers, if absolutely necessary, could replace their entire digital workflow with a few hundred dollars in art supplies, maybe minus typesetting and color matching functionality, and likely produce more interesting (if much slower and less polished) results. I don't even think they make Letraset letters anymore.
That's very true! Although, I don't think it used to be true; there used to be several different, incompatible font systems. There were many simple bitmap-font formats for operating systems/display protocols (Windows, MacOS, and X11 all had their own); and then there were more complex, vector font formats, originally designed for printers to use internally, but then extended to computers through desktop-publishing software (e.g. Adobe Type1, Apple TrueType.)
If you think about it, much of the original point of desktop-publishing software, back when OSes could only natively use bitmap fonts, was that desktop-publishing software could do WYSIWYG layout and preview-rendering for vector-font "instructions" (e.g. PostScript.) Fonts were indeed a lot like VSTs!
I have no experience with graphic design programs, but I would guess that it has something to do with the fact that VSTs are self contained and have extremely simple interfaces. A VST takes some input (MIDI or audio) and produces some output (MIDI or audio). That's it. They're extremely modular, and you can chain them together in arbitrary ways so long as the inputs/outputs line up.
I imagine it's not so simple in the graphic design world, and without such a simple interface that everyone can agree on, it's much harder to create standardized plugins that everyone can use.
I lost my adobe license from my old job and gave designer a go. For my purposes, I’ve found it to be a superior solution. Runs faster, and basically the same shortcuts.
I needed to do some water color recently. Corel Painter blew my mind. The interface looks a little outdated but the brush styles and effects out of the box are just a joy to use.
Have you checked out Adobe Fresco? It's a free app that works for iPad and Windows, and let's you draw/paint in Fresco and use that same document in Photoshop
I am looking to replace Adobe because 50 USD per month is quite a number. I prefer one time price like Affinity. Too bad they don't have replacement for Premiere Pro and After Effects. For now I'm stuck in Adobe's purgatory.
I tried both. Pixelmator lacked (or I couldn’t find) vector tools I was looking for at the time, then the trial expired. That pushed me to Affinity and I had less trouble. Take this with a grain of salt, but vector work feels like a bit of an afterthought with Pixelmator.
What level of bug would it take for you to believe that a company is inept and bug reporting to be a waste of time?
For example if I was selling lemonade, you bought some and when you tried to drink it, you discovered sand instead of lemonade, would you come back to my lemonade stand and report a bug in my lemonade making abilities?
By the way, no refunds, you keep the sand. Legit lemonade business right?
Photoshop - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
Illustrator - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/
InDesign - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/
50% off each product (one-time purchase with updates, no subscription) too during the COVID pandemic.
Won't take you long to adjust at all as they're very similar and the apps are more lightweight and faster than Adobe's products have ever been. Also iPad versions if you want to edit on a tablet.
Been using Affinity Photo for a while now as an alternative to Photoshop and wouldn't look back.