Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo

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Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo

Anyone here using Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo???

Sally

I use Photoshop but my partner just bought us Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo so I'm curious to learn more about it. Do you use it? Any beginning tutorials you found helpful and could point me towards?

I've got Affinity Photo, but not Designer yet. I haven't mastered it because I keep opening Photoshop! It's like trying to make the swap from GIMP to PS--everything's in the wrong place, and it takes me 5 times as long to do anything because I don't know the program well enough yet. One of these days I need to take time and work exclusively in Affinity Photo for a couple of weeks so I can get up to speed on it.

On the plus side, it doesn't have a subscription fee like PS CC versions, and it's supposed to have superior masking features to PS, which will be great for extractions once I master it!

I use the Affinity Photo app for digi scrapping on my ipad, and I use Affinity Designer for graphic design on my laptop. I love the Affinity range of programmes. They are so powerful and affordable, and I love that it’s not subscription based!

I bought Affinity Photo and Designer. I do not love Photo(yet) because I am so used to and entrenched in Photoshop but it is quite good and very comparable. I need to make the effort to get used to the interface. The downside is that Affinity, at this point, does not work with any of my actions or other 3rd party programs like Suitcase for font management and the interface with Wacom is glitchy as well.

Now Designer I love. I had Illustrator for a time to learn how to use it, but I don't use it enough to justify the subscription cost. But at $49, Designer was a no-brainer. I love it. It seems even more intuitive that Illustrator was for me.

I also bought Publisher and love it also. I bought all three programs for what a few months of Adobe subscription costs.

It is not where Adobe is at the moment, but they are nipping at their heels... which is great for someone like me who resents the subscription.

I have both Affinity Photo and Designer as well. I find I use Designer more than Photo, although Photo has some real advantages when it comes to image/photo adjustments. I find Designer easier to use than Illustrator and am hoping for an auto trace function in the future.

Both programs are very affordable and updates are free. I am in the same camp as everyone else not liking the subscription model of Adobe. For that reason I still am working in CS3.

I do go back and forth between Adobe and Affinity but do agree that completely cutting the Adobe cord hasn't happened for me yet either.

I have them and have used both Affinity Photo and Designer. I was an old PSE user, but hated the whole subscription issue. And, I do most of my scrapping on my iPad; that was perfect! I am trying to use it more and more as I think it offers a lot of hidden potential. Now that I am sort of retired I am hoping to work more diligently to learn them. Looking forward to more "talk" about these two programs.

I have both AP and AD. I was excited to find these for several reasons. I was impressed that one of the developers for Adobe PS created Affinity and they are similar. I find so much more for actions, styles etc for PS which is why I've stuck with the Adobe subscription but I don't know how to do much on any of them at this point since I'm a long time PSP user. I just couldn't pass up Affinity's great price with free updates. I'm very anxious to learn Affinity. If anyone knows of good free tutorials for very new users then I'm all eyes and ears. smiley

Deana, I just did a google search and found some that may help.... HERE

I also bought the full set of Affinity when they had them at a real low price. I grabbed them because some say my old Photoshop CS6 may not work in Windows 10 and my computer is slowly on its way out so if I need to buy another computer I will not longer have my Windows 7.

The best thing I suggest you do it do some google searches. Here is a tutorial for scrapbooking that might be good to watch: HERE

Thank you for the links Anne-Marie. I'll check them out. My computer went into the shop this morning and I don't know when it will come back so I'm fumbling around on my husbands laptop which has no programs on it.

Ahhhh thank you for introducing me to Affinity Designer. I like new toys *grins* lol

Anne-Marie CS6 works in Win 10. I do not have any problems.

Affinity is a nice choice of software. They put out a nice suite. Still waiting for them to Upgrade the web design software they have under the old Serif label.

Thanks for those links they are super helpful. I picked up these programs when they were on sale and just have to figure out how to use them.

If you go to the Afinity website you will find video tutorials to help you.

I bought Publisher and Designer last year when they had their 50% off sale - I got the trials first but didn't take the leap for photo as I kept going back to PSE due to all the actions I have for it. I have been loving Designer and even found I was able to do quite a bit of digi scrapping in that program too - I purchased Publisher on a whim... I used to use Microsoft Publisher for some bits back in the day and have found I do quite a bit of digi scrapping (mostly on my live stream) in Google Slides for a twist on things but because it was then multi-platform compatible especially when my son was doing his school work etc on my computer as he preferred to use that and then I could just hop on the Chromebook... It was one of those purchases that I said to myself "I'm sure I'll use it for something at some point - and it's 50% off!" LOL the full price of Designer is worth it alone, so in essence it was just me buying Designer and getting Publisher for free (at least that's what I kept telling myself LOL!)
I have actually made my 2020 book (inspired by Shannan Manton!) in Affinity Publisher, exported to BookWright and sent for printing but then I have the ability to make it a PDF book for myself without having to pay Blurb for the privilege smiley I can see having Publisher a great way of turning my pages into digital albums.
Then they had the 50% sale again right now... and I took the plunge and purchased Photo too as they all work together well (and it came in handy having the ability to adjust my photos from Publisher to Photos - though to be honest I think you could just purchase Designer and get away with the one software as the pixel persona within it would be enough.

I'm interested in finding digital Scrapbooking resources for the Affinity suite. I have some I have made myself such as some shapes for designer and a 5x8 Blurb Trade Book template for Publisher I have tweaked numerous times to get it -just right- for when I sent my book for printing...

I took a little "rest" from scrapping and have now returned. I have a goal to conquer Affinity Photo / Designer for my scrapbooking needs. It is slow going (I am old!) but it is rewarding. Unfortunately, there is not a lot out there for scrappers in the way of tutorials. I hope to be posting my little efforts soon!

I use Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo, but I'm not an established digiscrapper, so my experience is probably of limited usefulness. I tend to look up tutorials one at a time as I come across a need to do a particular thing.

It is disappointing that they aren't compatible with PS actions, brushes, etc., since this is what most people are creating, so I'm hoping to figure out how to transfer some of the template-y things creators here have made for PS over to something Affinity-friendly. My skills are pretty hit-or-miss, so we'll see.

Hi, Rachel!
I am reasonably new to Affinity Photo, but learn in a similar fashion as yourself. I have had great luck with the PSD templates here. Also, I learned today that if I use a PNG file as a mask (some great ones in the shop) I have to rasterize it first. There is much to be learned, but I try to do something new with at least every other page! Good luck! Looking forward to your discoveries.

@Rachel Ramey You absolute can import Photoshop brushes into the Affinity suite smiley I have many PS brushes that I have in all 3 programs - with Designer you have to be in the Pixel persona to be able to use them smiley I do wish we could have some of the styles but they don't always translate well to Affinity smiley Some of them do as long as they are in a document file you can open in Affinity (ie. have some layer styles saved into a PSD), you can click on the hamburger menu on the top right of the styles menu and then click "Add Style from selection" and it will create a style from that layer - but it's hit or miss depending on if Affinity has the ability to do what was done to create that in PS.

I still find Photo tricky to use (over my copy of PSE) but absolutely love Designer and to be honest with the pixel persona within it I think Designer would be my go to over Photo!

It would be great to be able to upload some of the Affinity extensions up on to the commons! smiley There is the Affinity Forums where they have some resources: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/11-resources/

I just found this tutorial on adding kits to assets, sounds interesting but I have not used it yet. Digital Design Resort https://youtu.be/tz7DioQeIzs
Looks like she has other Tutorials too.

Thanks for sharing Emily smiley Yup it's super easy to add things to assets. I personally only have things I would use repeatedly as I'm not sure whether adding multiple kits to the assets panel would slow the program down, I would be interested to hear if anyone has done it and whether it's still running smoothly.

I have found this very cool video on how to add texture in Affinity smiley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3tCajXSjUw

I've added a suggestion for commons creators to be able to upload Affinity files, if anyone would like to go and vote on it please smiley Hopefully we will be able to see some resources here as I don't see them anywhere else at present smiley

https://feedback.digitalscrapbook.com/forums/243028-feature-requests/suggestions/43313613-affinity-files-in-the-commons

Hi everyone, I'm curious about making the switch to Affinity (I have a very old copy of PS and I hate that they've moved to a subscription service). They have 50% off right now, but I don't know which one I should get for scrapbooking? Or should I just get all? Open to advice/suggestions!

@Shannon, if you want it for scrapbooking, you probably want Photo. That's roughly equivalent to Photoshop. If you want to create graphics, you might also want Designer.

(I don't personally use Publisher much at all, and definitely not for anything scrapbooking-related.)

@Kirsty, thank you; I didn't even know we had that feature request area. I'm not able to upload anything like that right now, regardless, because I'm still just level 1 in the Commons, but I'll definitely go vote!

@Rachel, thank you!

Do you know of any written (not video) tutorials for affinity photo or designer. I prefer to read instructions than watch them. Thanks

Hi Leslie. I am fairly new the the Affinity family. I was a previous PSE user. I have only really worked in Photo so far and I am also looking for some great tutorials. I have found this site where they sell video courses or as ebooks. They also have a youtube channel that is very helpful https://courses.affinityrevolution.com/

Yes, I have Photo, Designer and Publisher. And I love them. I have also Photo en Designer on the iPad.

Yes, have Photo, Designer and Publisher V2 for both desktop and iPad. Would like to know if there are kits here in Digital Scrapbook for styles that work with Affinity (in particular looking for shadows).

While there aren't YET, I'm using Affinity V2 pretty much exclusively at this point to create designs--Designer for making templates and Photo for paper patterns--so I've reached the point where I'm beginning to build presets for them to speed my own workflow. I should be able to sort out a set of 4 or 5 basic shadows that are pretty universal by this weekend--nothing too complicated, but solid starting points that will give fairly realistic appearances to a speed scrap.

Thank you for the reply. Since writing the post have dabbled and played around with fx and all the other neat things in AffinityV2. Just takes time.

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