Affinity Reviews 7

Very bad experience. I just create a group of photos, took me 6 hours, I group them up , and after that, it just ungroup and it is moved all over the place, no one touch it, undo, not working at all, I will just delete this very poor software. my recomandation, AVOID.

Affinity charged me full price for their design studio suite. They are now giving it away for free. I never received an email about this announcement. I had to trip over this information. Affinity is refusing to issue a refund to people who paid for the suite while everyone else gets it for free. Affinity is a group of thieves. Furthermore, they refuse to pick up a phone. They hide behind emails while they take the money and run.

first got paid version but they stopped developing it and sent me to the free version. free version is garbage where nothing is working, super slow, creates more issues than helps editing.

I thought I would give Affinity a try once it went into its loss leader freemium model once I found out I couldn't buy it anymore.

The unified program seems great on paper, but it seems like a lot of basic things were broken in the integration which was not great for a first time user experience. I primarily wanted to use Affinity for its graphic design tools previously in their standalone Designer 2 software. I was quickly disappointed with what I was faced with. Affinity is unstable with odd behaviours for tools at times creating an unintuitive workflow whilst also weirdly lacking in a lot of features and true vector tools such as, "vector" brushes being pixel brushes in reality, breaking pure vector workflows with export issues with PDF and SVG formats, no image tracing, no real trim/scissors, and more.

What added insult to injury is the overwhelming praise for Affinity whether that is from creators, people you ask or from personal research, none of it lines up with reality. I found the interface of Affinity to truly be awful in terms of usability and readability. The fact there is no scaling for UI makes the use of Affinity abysmal on a 4K display. The customisation is sadly a bit lackluster in almost every single regard. Affinity can do the basics of reorganising your workspace and so on, but it has no real fine control over direct previews of changes, caching, UI scaling, tool behaviours and more.

I ended up uninstalling Affinity because it simply missed the mark on most levels. I decided to take a chance on a relatively new software called VectorStyler and it was simply the best purchase I had made all year. It offers everything I want from a graphics design software with an incredibly powerful feature set. The level of customisation and granular control over almost everything is incredible allowing users to create bespoke streamlined workflows by giving users the ability to create toolbox presets which can quickly be swapped out to fit the project you are doing keeping all necessary tools in sight not over cluttering the workspace while also having the essential panels you use the most for easy access.

I can not recommend Affinity to anyone, especially for graphic design in particular. My Affinity is with Inkscape a truly free and open-source tool then VectorStyler as my favourite paid tool.

I would love to have a viable alternative to Photoshop and I thought Affinity could be this be there's just too many bugs and issues with the software and it's impossible to get any help with it.

As a commercial retoucher for 15yrs, I am a photoshop user as well as Capture One and Hasselblad Phocus so I have created a workflow for myself. I was interested to see how affinity compared to photoshop and unfortunately, for my use, it is not comparable. There are no linked smart objects, so collaboration as in photoshop is not possible. I tried putting more than one gradient on a mask and was shocked to see that it cannot be done. The thought of having to create more pixel layers that are unnecessary would bloat the file sizes to ridiculous sizes (think what a medium format camera's image size is and then you start to get an idea). The UI is not friendly but maybe if I had time to practice with it for a few days/weeks it would make more sense. I commend Canva for trying to take on Adobe as someone needs to offer a viable alternative and some of the ideas are genuinely well thought out. The ease of use with photoshop is the winner here though. Some of the more basic functions like the masking is frustrating, so I will not be using affinity for my workflow as time is crucial.

Affinity Studio is now a Canva product and the makers of Affinity Studio lied in their promotion of this product.
They said you have to sign up for a Canva account and you can disable Canva Cloud Services and keep your creations offline. You can only erase your offline content as per the Canva dashboard.
Affinity Photo/Designer/ Publisher have now been ruined and you have to have a Canva account where Canva is subject to data breaches and when attempting to go to the Canva site I get the message from Bitdefender it has blocked the site due to malicious urls.
I do not trust Canva and Affinity Studio is suspect.
There is no way to receive customer service and their chat bot can only provide scripted answers and cannot acknowledge issues beyond its programming.
Be careful of purchasing any content for Affinity Studio through Canva. Canva has multiple complaints concerning taking unauthorized payments from customers for subscriptions and I wouldn’t trust Canva with my credit card info. I had this problem with Skillshare and Canva seems to be just as irresponsible.