Technology

Unless you're a professional and want stuff like being able to set the white point of an image. 8 years and counting, stopped holding my breath.

Also, I think it's noteworthy that they touted "Pay once, free updates forever!", and then they release Version 2 which requires a new license. Oh, and has a new price.

I paid $100 for Designer, Photo and Publisher in 2021. The "full package" of V2 now costs $220 (although 25% off with existing license). Still cheaper than 4 months of Adobe sub, but I can't use it for anything when they won't implement simple features like white point selection, which I need multiple times daily.

I think this comment from the forum link above speaks volumes as to why serious graphic designers need to steer clear:

Another two years down the line - I bought Photo v2 and still there's no picker to set white and black. Affinity's ethos (with Photo Publisher and Designer) is clearly to de-monopolise Adobe and take a market share from Photoshop Illustrator and InDesign but when professionals have to Google just about every single new task, it's very frustrating. I get the impression Affinity designers have spent too much time in the world of Linux where manipulating software is the challenge and bending it to your will is the achievement. We ex-Photoshop users want developers who help us to create images and documents. The endless puzzle of how to do things with Affinity Photo doesn't interest us.

There are still so many bugs in the UI - annoying little things like having to click twice to activate a dialog, or typing in a value only to have the first digit ignored. Most of the tool icons are meaningless, jpg compression is so poor, native file sizes are so big, why can't I simply open a jpg edit it and close with a save? Why can't I batch save images as WEBP? I cannot move from the Develop Persona to Edit without committing the changes - and yet I can hit Undo when back to Edit - it's just clunky geeky sloppy stuff that smells of Linux.

We all hate Adobe and their monopolistic dictatorial empire, I think we all want to love Affinity but jeez it's really not working out for me. I could never recommend this to any of my clients.