Affinity goes free...

[AeroJ]

...possibly for suspicious reasons, but time will tell...

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Now we have all the previous Affinity programs in a single application, and a free version that includes all the features of their previous programs, except the AI-ones, which are now in the paid version, and, according to our 'speak-as-he-finds' reviewer up there isn't worth it because they're all a bit rubbish so far.

[Removed by moderator]​

So well done Canva, initially, as long as you promising free-forever is true, and you don't enshittify your product as soon as you have on-boarded enough people ! I'm afraid I suspect that is their long term plan.

I have been using Affinity photo for a few years now, and, as a recovering Adobe user, have been mostly happy with that once I got over Affinity's slightly different way of doing a lot of things. It does most things we need for editing photos and adding graphics pretty well, but don't try feeding it unprocessed drone panoramas - it really struggles with those for some reason. Of course fine to edit the pre stitched ones that comes out of the drone for color-grading etc

 

[Ralph thompson]

I don’t like the corp. Adobe, but having lived as a pro photographer (less so today), I can tell you there is nothing to beat Lightroom and Photoshop, especially today with the AI features. When time and quality are priorities, they are unbeatable.

 

[anotherlab]

...possibly for suspicious reasons, but time will tell...

You mean marketing for customer acquisition...

But posting here because we, as UAV pilots have much need of image editing, and it is important that as few of us as possible are getting ripped off by terrible corporate bastards (IMO) like Adobe for the privilege !

It costs money to develop and support applications. As much as consumers hate the subscription-based costs of the Adobe Suite, it has never been a consumer-focused product. Their "Elements" line is the consumer product line.

For a business, the subscription is a fixed cost and can be budgeted year after year. The old way meant a business would have to eat a large license cost every time they added a new person who needed that license or when a major upgrade was released. For a home user or a small business, that's hard to manage. But before the subscription, the perpetual purchase price was out of the hands of the home user.

So well done Canva, initially, as long as you promising free-forever is true, and you don't enshittify your product as soon as you have on-boarded enough people ! I'm afraid I suspect that is their long term plan.

And that assumption is based on what? They are gambling that enough people will start using the free version, and a portion of those users will pay for the AI features. AI sucks up CPU/GPU resources, and the company spends money each time a user uses server-based AI.

I have been using Affinity photo for a few years now, and, as a recovering Adobe user, have been mostly happy with that once I got over Affinity's slightly different way of doing a lot of things. It does most things we need for editing photos and adding graphics pretty well, but don't try feeding it unprocessed drone panoramas - it really struggles with those for some reason. Of course fine to edit the pre stitched ones that comes out of the drone for color-grading etc

Most people don't need the Adobe Creative Suite. Affinity should be able to grab a lot of free users and be able to convert enough of them to paying ones to make it work. This appears to have worked for Blackmagic Design with DaVinci Resolve.