Serif have launched “version 2” versions of their Affinity Suite, which seem to have major new feature sets across the board.
Publisher now supports footnotes and endnotes (a major omission previously), and “Books”, which like in Indesign, allows you to manage separate files as one project.
There’s currently a sale on, giving you all three apps for £90 – on ALL platforms: Windows, Mac and iPad. (Discounted from £145.)
Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, more features are very welcome, and in terms of bang to buck, Affinity can’t be beaten.
Very interesting, thanks. I guess that presents a quandary for me… Do I try to migrate away from Adobe the second time? Maybe after the holidays I’ll give v2 a try.
I’ve used Affinity Designer and Publisher v1 for some serious fun with graphic scores. Even being able to open up the PDF of a student theory exercise and move the notes around has been a life-changer. I’m likely going to upgrade during this sale so I can have all the iPad apps. Incredible bang for buck!
for photography which is my main interest, not DTP, I reluctantly came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that Adobe with the Lightroom/Photoshop combination simply produces the best combination of features which actually work taking everything else into account – and I’ve tried all the competitors. I nearly downloaded the latest trial of Affinity photo and then realised, what’s the point. Affinity, unlike most others, has made no moves in the direction of AI, for instance which can really save time in the boring business of masking for local edits.
Having said all that, for an all-round design/publishing/photography suite, it does offer excellent value for money.
Since we’re OT anyway, have you noticed any slowdowns with the current version of LR? I’ve been on LR for over 10 years I’d rather not switch, but the editing slowness and the hangs when importing and exporting are driving me crazy. I have plenty of room on my drive and my current catalog (around 8K images) isn’t that big, certainly when compared to previous years when I was much more active. I hadn’t checked out Affinity Photo, but I had been considering a move to Capture One.
as you say, we’re off topic anyway! The latest version of Lightroom seems OK to me speedwise (I recently upgraded to a modest 2Gb graphics card so the basic AI functions would at least work) but I haven’t used it intensively recently.
I did move to Capture One for a while when with the Fuji system as LR was relatively poor with the handling of it’s specific demosaicing but after a system switch, preferred LR again and finally subscribed. Capture One is a solid choice with no glaring weaknesses in the processing but not cheap and the UI is not for everyone.
LR started slowing down years ago, despite ever more powerful processors, which is why I eventually switched once they made the move toward the subscription model.
These programs would be complementary, rather than exclusive. Just as you might bounce a photo from LR to photoshop, you might wish to do so from Capture One to Affinity Photo, but you’d certainly want Capture One to be your home base / starting point.
correct, though the new Affinity seems to finally have non-destructive RAW editing for the first time now which is why it briefly caught my attention this time round.
Many say that but for me it’s debatable. I find all the non-pro packages (i.e. all except C1 and DxO in my view) to be slower. DxO doesn’t render to screen properly at under 75% so it’s not surprising it’s often faster.
After years on Canon, I made the jump to Fuji maybe 5 years ago. The “worminess” with sharpening in LR took me a long time to get settings I was happy with. I currently have the Capture One free version for Fuji, but have only recently started exploring it as an alternative.
I hadn’t really experienced it much until recently, but it’s definitely really noticeable for me now.
LR has gradually improved in recent years this respect (providing you increase detail and reduce sharpness for foliage) but Capture One is arguably still the better choice for Fuji XTrans.
I used to use Serif’s PagePlus on Windows to create websites on my musical activities. But the sites haven’t been updated for a while, actually some years pre-Covid. From what I’ve read, Publisher was supposed to replace PagePlus, but is it a good choice for creating websites in this day and age?
I was thinking that this might be a good opportunity to reboot those websites, but bringing in the previous design from the existing html would be an essential, and I read that publisher didn’t or doesn’t do that well.
So is the new v.2 suite a good option, or are there any recommended alternative apps (on Windows) for this?
PagePlus was primarily a DTP package, as is Publisher. I’m surprised that you could create webpages with PagePlus. I don’t think it’s possible with Publisher; but even if it is, it’s the wrong tool for the job.
WYSIWYG web creation apps seem to be few and far between. They are either template-driven, using their own internal format until you export the site (and you can’t import existing HTML); or they are text-based with a preview.
This is one area where Adobe’s Dreamweaver is still unchallenged. There is a free app called BlueGriffon. It no longer works on MacOS, and has been abandoned, but it should still work on Windows. There’s also an app called Pinegrow, which does cost some money, but that’s what I use.
A lot of DTP packages pulled double duty for that stuff back then. It was the FrontPage era, where WYSIWYG was all the rage.
Xara Designer Pro - whatever it’s called, these days - also does web pages (it’s a DTP application).
It’s a bit disrespectful that Serif never fixed the GPU Acceleration issues for AMD GPUs. Instead, they simply blamed AMD despite every other high end graphics design and creative software package functioning fine on that platform.
Don’t think I’m going to upgrade, though. I only really used Affinity Photo, and I kind of want a DAM with cloud storage across platforms. Google is limited to browsers, and iCloud only works on Apple devices (decently enough for me to care, at least). I might end up getting an Adobe Photography Plan
Ben, the Affinty apps are excellent and superb value for money too.