Are any of y'all Affinity users? I just bought a new laptop and am strongly considering the Affinity suite for it rather than the Adobe subscription.

I think @Wolff tried it? I bought it to see if it would be a good thing for students but my understanding back then (3ish years ago) was that it's not quite mature enough yet to use professionally

@Scott it felt so nice to just own software though!

@Scott I bought the suite because there was a discount (it was around $130 which is really cheap).

I must admit that I haven't used it much. I spend a few evenings on it.

Affinity Photo is interesting because instead of Smart Objects it has live filters. So blur is just a layer you can move up and down and it will blur everything below. You can still draw in the layers below and see the blur effect live.

But I start to realize why Adobe hasn't done this in Photoshop. It quickly gets really sluggish and there's an annoying latency. So it's more demanding.

I also tried to make some layout in Affinity Publisher. It seems to be able to do 80-90% of what I normally can do in InDesign. So perhaps I could live with that. But I felt really noobish searching minutes for every single little function I would be able to find in InDesign in seconds. That's just a matter of investing time of course.

What really turned me off though is how lightly Affinity takes rasterizing vector content. The apps are integrated in a clever way. You can edit an image while seeing it in the layout. You can draw a frame in Publisher and switch to Photo and draw a raster drawing in 300 PPI directly in your layout.

That seems smart, but it's also very easy to by accident turn vector content into raster. You can for example add blur to an ordinary text frame. So one page in your layout is vector text and the other is rasterized. I fear it's hard for beginners to tell the difference.

Anyway, I think they have free trials so you could just start by checking it out.

I also have a friend who used Affinity to make custom halftone patterns. It's an inbuilt effect. I examined the file in Acrobat. It worries me if clients starts to use this because I found out that the halftone were 8-bit 300 PPI. So you would get small halftone dots along the contours of the larger halftone dots. The program offers no setting to counter this.

Besides that, turning on Simulate Overprint revealed that some of the objects affected by the effect got an unwanted beige color in the background which I couldn't understand the cause of. And random pieces of text were rasterized and others weren't. So I sort of lost confidence...

All this said, I haven't lost hope and I'll get back to testing Affinity's apps when I have the time. It doesn't feel 100% safe to base my whole career on the apps from one company. I need to be ready if I have to make a shift.

Interesting @Wolff Thanks for sharing. At under $200 it seems like it's worth at least a try, since I don't have an active Adobe subscription and the CS6 I have been using won't work on a new OS.

With the laptop... and "work" I'd be doing will all be web-based... mostly coding while lounging in the living room. In terms of editing, I'm thinking o more minor web0based images - icons and spot graphics.. that sort of thing.

Basically, I'll need raster/vector editors on the laptop for minor alterations or creation and I don't want to pay Adobe. So I'm looking more at Aff Photo and Aff Designer. Any full projects will still be done, at least for now, with the CS6 suite on my main workhorse.

@Scott Then if you try the trial, you should stress test how spot colors work in the suite. I might do that. I fear there might be bugs.

I guess I can't really go wrong with the Aff price point. And yeah. I"ll try the trial first of course. :)

Basically I'm thinking either Aff suite.. or Gimp and Sketch. There's going to be a learning curve no matter what I do.

Eventually I may get to the point where I just want to "dock" the laptop, connect more monitors and use it as a"hub" for the desktop. If that becomes the case, the Adobe subscription would probably be best.. but I'm not there yet.