I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want what they were selling. Might be worth another look with the Humble Bundle though.
There was one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has not been topped in terms of its retouch tool (actually got much, much worse). Since I restore a lot of old scanned-in family photos I keep this aging iMac just for photo editing.
When? Do you have any articles/videos showing the difference? I can’t find any.
The only major loss I’m aware of is when they left iPhotos and Aperture in the dust.
Unfortunately the retouch tool in Photos for cloning, fixing scratches, etc. took a huge step backward in performance. Like it became unusable.
So simply for dealing with old scanned family photos that have lots of scratches, tears, etc., I have stuck with Sierra Photos on my one machine.
This is adobe's whole schtick with the cancellation fees for example. You pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance as a termination fee. So if you subscribe 3 times a year for a month and then immediately cancel you are paying more than a yearly subscription.
Bill per hour would be OK.
Or buy once, give me 1 year of free updates but I can use it as-is forever (like intellij) is also fair.
Adobe does offer monthly subcriptions, but for individuals only.
But some of these subscriptions, including the one I think this thread is about, will obligate you for a period of time. This happened to me, signed up to a trial of Adobe to test a graphic designers pc, once it ticked over to paid, I was told that I had a 12 month sub, just billed monthly. (I screeched and pulled my hair out and went all karen and they ended it, but they wouldnt do it twice)
The "Apps on Tap" enthusiasts got absolutely mogged by Adobes commercial reality.
To cancel, you need to immediately pay out 50% of the rest of the year. And you’ll lose access to the products at the end of the month.
So unless you’re not even getting 50% of the subscription cost worth of value out of it, it pretty much makes more sense to continue it and cancel just before renewal.
As soon as you run over that 7 day trial, you’ve got a 30 day window a year from now where you can cancel without penalty. Miss it or forget? Set a better reminder for next year…
Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.
Not to mention, the push to run everything in the cloud, via the browser, means that for a lot of software, you literally have zero flexibility and control.
Not really a reasonable run time for a career, though. What do you do after that?
Yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Only then the security folks will start whining about factories and shipping terminals being controlled by ancient PCs with WinXP (not to mention power plants with hardware and software older than most of us on this site). In fact, the security folks and the business folks align enough on it that professional software is force-feeding you updates too, and you can't do anything about it unless you're a multinational megacorp and can afford to make bespoke deals with OS vendors.
> Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software.
5 is the minimum. Legal minimum for some documents, in some cases.
Still, the problem usually isn't upgrades per se, it's that universally these days, newer versions of products are almost always inferior in terms of functionality, performance and ergonomics. So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living, but then I discover they all went to shit and new versions are worse than the versions I have (and even worse, half of the software is now subscription-only).
That's just how all of tech works. Some pockets of software may be able to be fundamentally unchanged over decades, but the fact is that the software I used 5 years ago is not the same as the software I used now. Your choices are the same as ever:
- Don't upgrade for as long as possible
- Upgrade and eat the inefficiency cost for a while until replacements are found/made
- go the FOSS route and either do it yourself or rely on the goodwill of the community until its inevitable next schism.
There is no perfect solution unless you're willing to become a domain expert in that specific kind of tech and roll your own.
The only silver lining is that most of the fundamentals remain the same so you're not starting from square one. Whatever new web stack is being used today is still probably based upon React, which is based on JQuery, which is based Javascript. ES6 isn't a complete recvolution from ES3 (even if there are new major concepts to learn over those 15 years). So you have some knowledge transfer of seeing where and how things.
even at full price, $200 for 5 years of usage from a professional tool seems pretty good for me. That's $3.33/month if you want to convert to the subscription model way or thinking.
No way any potential subscription model would be cheaper here if you are in it for the long haul.
10 years down the line their DRM stops working because you're on locked down, ancient hardware and they don't want to support your OS anymore. Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Maybe you need to replace your motherboard and it counts as a "new" computer, and it no longer runs on. Maybe they take away your ability to reinstall it on another device because offline authorization no longer is enabled, and their online services don't support your old license. Both of these were done by reason studio. I hope you didn't buy a $400 perpetual license and expect it to work until the ice age.
Maybe they change the ToS like blizzard, and you now have to agree to the new ToS to continue using the software you bought and paid for?
Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to, like the whole unity fiasco?
I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user. Every single company screws us over and I hate to see people defend it because they think you can just opt out of it.
I'm happy to pay for quality software, both professional and consumer. With Affinity it took exactly one project to recoup much more than the cost ($50) of the software, and I expect that to be true for 99% of graphics professionals.
> Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to
Yeah, and then I'll laugh my ass off at them. It's like me writing that anybody who reads this comment owes me a hundred dollars. Now you read it, now you pay. Or not.
It's happened so many times before that we're wary when we see it happening again. Please read what I said before responding to me you absolute waste of time.
It's the easiest thing in the world to be distrustful. You're never going to be wrong, because you'll never take that risk and you'll effectively repel all people who don't like to be treated as if they were dishonest or be insulted at random. But what kind of people will you be left with?
also because users don't want that. I don't think any of us would necessarily be satisfied playing Doom 1993 on Windows 95 because 256KB of RAM is all we'll ever need.
I'm not even saying it's a bad way to live, to be honest; that's just not how user demand works. They'll inevitably want Doom 2/3/4/etc. until the franchise jumps the shark or stagnates into nothingness.
> People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
Well we're both probably cynically minded here on this topic. It's equally unlikely, but I've taken the path of walking away wherever I can for companies that keep pulling off these stunts. I've more or less de-googled myself over the last year outside of mail and Youtube, for instance. At some point, consumers need to put their foot down, but they won't. How many times does it need to happen before we evaluate who's really the fool?
>Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Yes, that's why I don't even trust the benevolent actors for stuff I really care about. If I can find it on GOG, it's likely DRM free and I have no worries about what Steam's runtime looks like 20 years from now. The internet may flame me for that mentality, but I remember when Google was in similar acclaim, down to their long buried "Do No Evil" motto.
Again, not perfect, but the worst thing to do is dump all your eggs in one basket. Always be on the lookout for your own interests and be ready to jump.
>I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user.
I agree with you the same way I agree that locks in an ideal world should not be required. They shouldn't be; I should have a reasonable sense of privacy, respect and security among my fellow man. an unexpected knock on the door shouldn't give me anxiety over it possibbly being an irrelevant sellsman, a crazy relative, or simply a package I forgot about.
But I'll keep my keys ready in the meantime until that ideal time comes. I can only look out for myself until then.
why not buy Affinity now and use it until you need to upgrade? unless there's some horrible TOS, I'm sure that tool as is will last you 5+ years before some new hit feature drops in.
However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.
I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)