Affinity Photo vs Photoshop and brushes

I have used Photoshop for commercial work since it began on the Mac and became available for my PC. Undoubtedly it is a formidable piece of software that I have used for catalogues, posters and web development graphics. Teamed up with InDesign Adobe have met most of my creative/design needs.

Adobe is nowadays following a rental route for its software which I and many others find a challenge. Its not the money. If you can't get your moneys worth from Adobe software then you don't actually need it. Smart objects and content aware actions are just two features that save so much time when producing graphics or touching up photos. I was prepared to pay the annual upgrade fees to pay for the work and support of the team ,but having made the initial outlay way back to purchase, I can't help it I want something to keep.

There are other paid for and free offerings such as Paintshop Pro, Paint.net, Dx0 photo and Gimp and many of them try to emulate Photoshop to tempt me away and have failed. The Gimp is even available with a Photoshop skin as Gimpshop. Serif has always offered a budget photo editor that I didn't take them too seriously until they produced Affinity Designer and Photo. I found that Serif's UK born Affinity Photo is a great challenger to Photoshop with some great unique features. Affinity Photo is also available as a full application for iPad. Having used it for some time I found that the PC version was a little slow to load images than Photoshop but this seems to have been improved over time and I have pushed myself to do all my editing with Affinity. The blog background was created from scratch using Affinity Photo. Considering that It is so reasonable in price, UK made and supported and will soon have Affinity publisher to rival InDesign I find myself thinking this is a reboot of the 90's when I moved over to Photoshop and InDesign from Letraset Studio and QuarkXpress

One of the anchors keeping us with Photoshop was Plugin support. The alternatives didn't support plugins like Nik and other custom addins that have evolved over the years to add to Photoshop. Look here for an article by Andy Betts on the top ten plugins for Photoshop. I like the inclusion of https://www.pexels.com/ for royalty free images. Affinity supports plugins but not Photoshop actions so not all the extensions such as ZXP actions.

 Likewise many custom brushes are so useful and there is a thriving business in fonts and brushes for Photoshop.Its easy to import 'Photoshop brush' files into Affinity Photo. Follow this link or click the logo below to learn how.