I’ve used Affinity Designer as a cheap alternative to Illustrator. Not surprisingly it’s way better than Inkscape (the Inkscape UI alone makes me lose all interests in designing anything), but Illustrator definitely has a lot more features and power tools, and arguably more importantly, a hell lot more online resources. So I guess Affinity Designer fulfills the role as a budget alternative, but not much more.

I've always wondered why the space of professional graphics programs isn't like the space of professional DAW (audio) programs. With DAWs, everything is a standardized plugin (a VST) that can be run inside any of the workstation programs. Customers can buy VSTs separately from any consideration of what ecosystem they're going to be using them with.

Because only now are viable professional alternatives to Adobe programs starting to show up. Adobe would be shooting themselves in the foot by working with some interoperable plugin format. Also, for graphic design at least, plugins are a much smaller part of your workflow than they are in audio production— the basic tools really are the most important thing in design. I'd say most professional graphic designers, if absolutely necessary, could replace their entire digital workflow with a few hundred dollars in art supplies, maybe minus typesetting and color matching functionality, and likely produce more interesting (if much slower and less polished) results. I don't even think they make Letraset letters anymore.

Come to think of it, one of the most important graphical resources we have is even more interchangeable than VST plugins— fonts.

That's very true! Although, I don't think it used to be true; there used to be several different, incompatible font systems. There were many simple bitmap-font formats for operating systems/display protocols (Windows, MacOS, and X11 all had their own); and then there were more complex, vector font formats, originally designed for printers to use internally, but then extended to computers through desktop-publishing software (e.g. Adobe Type1, Apple TrueType.)

If you think about it, much of the original point of desktop-publishing software, back when OSes could only natively use bitmap fonts, was that desktop-publishing software could do WYSIWYG layout and preview-rendering for vector-font "instructions" (e.g. PostScript.) Fonts were indeed a lot like VSTs!

I have no experience with graphic design programs, but I would guess that it has something to do with the fact that VSTs are self contained and have extremely simple interfaces. A VST takes some input (MIDI or audio) and produces some output (MIDI or audio). That's it. They're extremely modular, and you can chain them together in arbitrary ways so long as the inputs/outputs line up.

I imagine it's not so simple in the graphic design world, and without such a simple interface that everyone can agree on, it's much harder to create standardized plugins that everyone can use.

I lost my adobe license from my old job and gave designer a go. For my purposes, I’ve found it to be a superior solution. Runs faster, and basically the same shortcuts.

Do you do any digital painting? That's a large component of photoshop for me, although lately its been sharing with Procreate.

I needed to do some water color recently. Corel Painter blew my mind. The interface looks a little outdated but the brush styles and effects out of the box are just a joy to use.

I own Corel Painter 2019 but it hasn't been very stable for me. Lately I've been doing my digital work on an ipad pro on procreate.

Have you checked out Adobe Fresco? It's a free app that works for iPad and Windows, and let's you draw/paint in Fresco and use that same document in Photoshop

I use procreate on ipad.

For windows I'm done with adobe. I'm not looking for an alternative to photoshop to stick with the company that made me leave photoshop.

I am looking to replace Adobe because 50 USD per month is quite a number. I prefer one time price like Affinity. Too bad they don't have replacement for Premiere Pro and After Effects. For now I'm stuck in Adobe's purgatory.

You probably already have, but DaVinci Resolve is worth a try

For Premiere Pro, did you take a look at Final Cut Pro X? Sure it's mac only, but it ticks all the other boxes

How does Affinity Photo compare with Pixelmator Pro? I'm trying to pick between the two.

I tried both. Pixelmator lacked (or I couldn’t find) vector tools I was looking for at the time, then the trial expired. That pushed me to Affinity and I had less trouble. Take this with a grain of salt, but vector work feels like a bit of an afterthought with Pixelmator.

I've never used Pixelmator, but Pixelmator is Mac Only where Affinity works on Windows too.

Yes! I also switch to all of the Affinity apps in addition to Capture One.

Affinity Photo literally freezes trying to open 5-10 raw files taken with a Nikon camera.

Pathetic. I tried to get a refund, oops buying through Apple's App Store makes that impossible.

What iPad are you using?

RAW files are more a lightroom thing from what I've heard

What a shitpost. Just bug report it, and surely they will be happy to fix it in the next release.

What level of bug would it take for you to believe that a company is inept and bug reporting to be a waste of time?

For example if I was selling lemonade, you bought some and when you tried to drink it, you discovered sand instead of lemonade, would you come back to my lemonade stand and report a bug in my lemonade making abilities?

By the way, no refunds, you keep the sand. Legit lemonade business right?