This page was translated by AI. Please be forgiving of any mistakes.
‹ Photo Notes · 30 června, 2016
Today the first public beta of Affinity Designer for Windows was released. Is reasonable competition for Adobe on the Windows platform finally approaching?
The company Serif is known mainly among Mac users thanks to its popular software products Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. A while ago they set about developing Windows versions, and today, 30 June 2016, the first public beta of the first of these programs saw the light of day: Affinity Designer.
Affinity Designer, as the name suggests, is intended primarily for designers. If I were to describe it (I don’t want to say it resembles it), it is software of the Adobe Illustrator type. It offers mostly vector tools and work with text, but it can also edit photographs decently and slice web graphics.
When I talk about photographs, I must say that it really isn’t primarily intended for photographs and certainly not for photographers; you won’t find any retouching tools there, for instance. But even so it handles work with bitmap images very decently.
What will mainly interest photographers is the program Affinity Photo. It is already certain that it will appear on the Windows platform in the near future too, but we still have to wait a while.
Why Affinity?
The company speaks of its products as next-generation software. Hard to say whether they’ll succeed; I wish them well. Each of the mentioned programs costs €49.99 (so about 1,350 CZK) and updates to new versions are free. No annual or other fees. Whoever knows the prices of Adobe programs certainly needs no further explanation. For lots of users here is a chance to get quality software at a really reasonable price and thus (finally) legalize their computer and their workplace…
Hopefully it will really work out for them and last. Hopefully it will hold for us, the users. There have been promising programs in the past; I remember, for example, Aldus PhotoStyler, which was a capable competitor to the fledgling Photoshop. Adobe bought it and stopped its development. There were lots of similar cases.
Sign up for the beta testers programme and try the Affinity Designer beta for free. When the Affinity Photo beta comes out, you’ll be notified by email. Registration is here: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/windows/
It’s worth it.
Note: I had neither the time nor the interest to deal with the main functions of Designer, that is, its vector part. I only managed to try working with a photograph.