Affinity Products 50% off

[Jaded]

Affinity products are often featured on here, as alternatives for Adobe. Well, there is a 50% off sale on at the moment.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

[Wombat]

They do this from time to time, I took heed of an earlier notification of this a couple of years ago, and have not regretted signing up for Affinity Photo, and Affinity Designer.  The others are less useful to me, but I can see their worth.

[ian]

I still heartily recommend them (I don't miss my subscription to Adobe at all) – powerful and fast, and even full price – a bargain.

[citoyen]

My ex-employer hasn’t got round to cancelling my Adobe licence yet but I figure it’s only a matter of time, so I’ve been thinking I should start getting familiar with Publisher, which I bought a while ago but have never used.

I got the same offer email from Affinity and was thinking of using it as an excuse to buy Photo and Designer as well.

[ian]

I was bought up on InDesign, and Publisher is better (unless you use any of InDesign's niche features or need InDesign as part of some production workflow for which it is not easily replaced). Most of the concepts are interchangeable.

Illustrator has some tools that Designer doesn't yet have, but it's very capable.

Photo is the biggest leap since it does things in slightly different ways to Photoshop, and Photoshop is a beast, so I suspect there are still some features to catch up, but I imagine for most use cases it's very capable.

[citoyen]

The kind of stuff I use Illustrator and Photoshop for is pretty basic, so I’m sure Designer and Photo will be more than adequate for my needs.

I don’t imagine it will take long to learn my way round Publisher - from a cursory look, the interface seems pretty intuitive for someone used to Indesign (as was the case when the whole industry migrated from Quark Xpress to Indesign all those years ago).

[Jaded]

Yes, seconded. And for those things that don't appear as intuitive, there is the Internet - which wasn't nearly as informative when InDesign came out.

[jiberjaber]

Still no Lightroom replacement though?

[Jurek]

I confess to being a big fan of Freehand.
Sorry.

[citoyen]

Another good reason to jump the Adobe ship... my CC account was finally deactivated yesterday, so I set about deleting all the Adobe shit off my computer. That was a painful process. So many little "helper" programs installed in obscure places.

I think I finally managed to get rid of them all.

And that freed up over 30GB on the SSD. 

[Wombat]

Still no Lightroom replacement though?

Capture One Pro. Its a full price product, though.  I gave up on Lightroom aeons ago, due to it being unbelievably slow, and Adobe were crippling the purchased versions of it to force you into the subscription model. 

[ian]

Another good reason to jump the Adobe ship... my CC account was finally deactivated yesterday, so I set about deleting all the Adobe shit off my computer. That was a painful process. So many little "helper" programs installed in obscure places.

I think I finally managed to get rid of them all.

And that freed up over 30GB on the SSD. 

I got so keen removing it that now when I open Office I get several messages about missing PDF stuff. Need to fix that annoyance, merely removing the add-ons, of course, doesn't work as Office resurrects them each time I restart. Doubly annoying as it was all unnecessary to start with, PDF is integral to Macs, it never needed a special add-on.

[road-runner]

... and Adobe were crippling the purchased versions of it to force you into the subscription model.

I have discovered that turning WiFi off before launching my old, purchased copy of Photoshop deprives Adobe the ability to cripple it.

I bought Affinity Photo a few years ago but it is not intuitive for a seasoned (30-year) Photoshop user. I must get round to learning how to use it, probably when Photoshop or the 2009 iMac it is on stops working altogether.

[Mr Larrington]

The ancient freebie version of Photoshop that Adobe graciously allow you to download nags you to register every time you start it.  Which you can’t, because they’ve turned the registration server off.  And the menu text is so tiny on my monitor that I lost patience with it very quickly.  Back to the warez version paint.net it is, then.