The new star: Affinity Photo by Serif
Adobe’s CS5/CS6 was never something I could recommend to students: expensive, complicated and slow even on fast machines. The new Affinity Photo beta description reads like my wish list.
– lightning fast: I can confirm that.
– never runs out of memory: at least not within 3 hours testing.
– cover the core creative disciplines of Photo Editing, Vector Drawing and Desktop Publishing: I looked only at photo editing so far.
– use exactly the same file format between applications: confirmed, also some CS5 plugins are working.
– have no bloat. A concept of ‘Personas’ would be used to separate use cases in each application’s UI: Like this concept.
– be unashamedly pro. Core requirements like CMYK and 16 bit would be built in from the start. Productive workflow for creative pros always taking priority over accessibility for novices: Great, although it takes me ages now to replicate my work flow.
– mac first, but relatively OS independent: Great.
– no stupid cloud. You pay and you get software: Yes, old school is better.
-reasonable priced: 49€ versus 919€ doesn’t need any comment.
And it saves even more money by reducing file size to less than 2/3 of the identical Photoshop file.
The only problem that I see – Adobe Lightroom is not recognizing .afphoto …