With only about a week of use, I have become quite fond of the overall experience. Affinity has brought us a comparable solution and has made it difficult to turn down this suite with the tasty price tag of $75 for all three of their design applications. After 20+ years of using Photoshop & Illustrator, then periodically diving into InDesign (Yikes! It is a nightmare in there if you don’t spend a great deal of time), I will be attempting to venture out into other design suites.

Though either way, I bought it.In short A strong potential replacement for the tired Adobe choke-hold on the digital creative space is currently on sale for 50% off. And of course this raises the question… how long will V2 be supported and are they maybe holding some things back to try and sell us a V3 sooner rather than later? Considering they supported V1 for a whopping 7 years, hopefully not… but I guess only time will tell.

Some cool new stuff, though I’m not sure it’s juicy enough for most people to want to upgrade and still leaves stuff to be desired compared to Photoshop. They go over the new features of each app individually on their Youtube channel, here’s the one for the desktop version of Photo: Buying the apps individually only gets you the Windows and Mac versions though. They’re doing a limited time 40% off sale at launch (though I couldn’t find any fine print specifying exactly how long this sale will be going for), including a $100 universal bundle that gets you all three apps for Windows, Mac, AND iPad. It was only a matter of time until they’d want existing users to pay for an upgrade, since new sales have probably trailed off… still, very much preferable to the subscription model since you can choose to continue using the old apps until the wheels fall off. I figured something was up since there’s been a dry spell of Affinity Photo updates lately.

Affinity designer on sale