halfcactus

*shoves failed Rubik's cube illustration to a corner* Affinity practice—Designer for the vector shapes and Photo for everything else, though technically I think I could have done everything on Photo:

Based on the following journal doodles:

I guess I'm warming up a little to Affinity... Photo feels closer to AI and ID than PS, which means it does have a lot of features if you adjust your expectations of its controls, but also that it's not exactly a PS substitute. I'm really struggling with placing images/objects (typically I only use Place when I'm using InDesign; most of the time I drag objects around from canvas to canvas because that's how my brain works) + gradients... I kind of get it conceptually, but for some reason I get a prompt asking for screenrecording permissions which I deny on instinct lol.

Paintbrush works pretty smoothly if you set the hardness to 99% (instead of 100%)~ There's a built-in line stabilizer that you can toggle on and off.

Type tools work well. Same shortcuts as PS + has opentype features, but doesn't take into account other languages yet, I think? No vertical text orientation button that I can see.

In this latest episode of "tools I can't figure out", I don't know yet if Affinity has a blend tool or more customizable stroke brushes, which is what I'd want to try for the fishbones? (They'd still be tricky to control, but at least I don't have to manually align anything haha.)

Inexplicably, Affinity also has a cat tool:


Which can only generate one kind of cat shape:


All of this may be an exercise in futility considering the Canva acquisition, but idk, I presume we'll be able to keep the non-subscription version... So far Photo is less laggy than my half-broken Photoshop ahaha.

I was informed by a friend that Affinity is currently having a flash sale (50% off) in light of all the Adobe stuff. The full suite includes the Affinity equivalents of Photoshop (Affinity Photo), Illustrator (Affinity Designer), and InDesign (Affinity Publisher) for Windows, Mac, and iPad. As far as I know my Illustrator is still working, but my Photoshop is barely functional. I installed both anyway because they're my ~essentials~, though I've only tried running Affinity Photo.

The free trial period is 7 days, and they seem to have Black Friday sales (30%-40% off, I was told)—I was hoping to save up until then but, well, here we are.

I won't really be able to assess the features until I have a project to work on—usually it's just Youtube thumbnails for my personal fansub/fanvid channel, but as I'm on indefinite hiatus, here are my first impressions from five minutes of clicking around Affinity Photo:

(+)

The interface is generally very similar to Photoshop with a lot of the equivalents—blending mode, effects gallery, pen tool, etc.

The bucket fill shortcuts are still the same (Ctrl+D | Cmd+D / Alt+D | Opt+D)!!! But a blank canvas in Affinity doesn't appear to have any layers at all (PS always starts you with a background layer by default) so you have to make a new layer first... The amount of panic I experienced over not being able to change the background color immediately made me realize that the first thing I do when I start a new canvas is to fill it so it's not white hahaha.

Basic filters like blur, distort, sharpen, and noise are included! Vignette, halftone, and emboss are also accessible under the "colours" menu. The Photoshop filter gallery (artistic, brush strokes, sketch, stylize, and texture) is not on Affinity—I haven't used them in recent years (bc all I do is make thumbnails) but I do miss the mezzotint filter as it was a huge part of my youth. :')

Affinity has a "Stocks" panel that integrates Pixabay and Pexels. I used to manually download or copy images from those sites to add to my Photoshop canvas, but the Stocks panel allows you to search for stock images within Affinity, which is exciting for me.

(-)

I can't seem to drag layers/objects from canvas to canvas??? Am I just dumb??? (A crucial part of my process is using multiple canvases for the same project pls)

This probably won't affect me in any way, but I can't find the image mode menu.

As expected, no Timeline/Animation features, which is what I use to GIF. ^^;

(IDK how to feel about)

Clipping masks: To create a clipping mask, you have to drag the object to the mask layer name... Typing it here so I remember it lol. (In PS, you hold ALT/opt and click between the layers.)