Affinity image editing software now free

I've been playing with it over the weekend, so it's early days yet. Initial impression is/was that it's very swift/fast and resource-efficient, contrary to GIMP. The way dynamic adjustment layers are handled is also quite pleasant with instantaneous response.

It's not all positive though. Some UI quirks; settings you have to keep adjusting manually because Affinity doesn't remember them and resorts to the default (lock aspect ratio in canvas resize for instance). More importantly, it doesn't handle downsampling and sharpening anywhere as well as GIMP does. With GIMP, I can easily downsample to a web-friendly size, apply a little bit of sharpening and everything looks pretty crisp. In Affinity, there seems to be no middle ground between grossly oversharpened or disappointing fuzziness. To make matters worse, in scans of B&W film with some grain, it tends to produce smears in certain areas that appear to be some kind of interference defect.

The workflow is quite nice; the result is...not so good. Not sure whether I'll proceed from this point onward.

I have purchased and own perpetual licenses for all 3 V2 Affinity products, and have been using them for several years (since V1). They are great, and are better and faster than my CS6 license (last Adobe Version I paid for, which I keep a High Sierra Mac machine around to run only when absolutely needed). The Affinity Suite was a true replacement for Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop, based on a modern codebase. Considering these V2 products were recently updated (just before they took them off market), and already optimized for MacOS 26 Tahoe, they probably are good for another few years.

I moved over to On1 PhotoRAW as my primary photo package a few years ago, so the shortcomings of Affinity Photo (like no DAM) don’t affect me. I find Affinity Photo really to be more “illustration-oriented” in its design/implementation than “photo-oriented” anyhow.

So, I’ll take a “wait and see” attitude on the new product; as many have said, I worry about it ending up being a bait and switch for some subscription product down the line. But, I have time to see how it plays out for now. I’ll probably test drive the new product sometime soon, but will stick to using the V2 versions for production work until this shakes out a bit more. Anything to avoid getting sucked back into the Adobe Trap…..and no, I don’t want all their AI slop! YMMV.

V2 are still available fr download. I'm not sure if they prompt to purchase f news license, but Affinity Canva does not lok like true replacement.

The smart thing to do would be to let the hobby users have the freebie, but keep the current individual core applications for the more demanding and professional users.

I think the current move is a giant leap backwards and will aid rather than harm Adobe.