Affinity Publisher! It’s alive! ALIVE!

Latte Other Software & Development
21

Well, I answered my own question, above. I purchased all three of the Affinity products, and I am, to say the least, extremely happy.

As regards Publisher, I had some difficulty learning it, but with protracted viewing of online videos from a variety of Publisher experts, I persevered. I produced a Pubisher pdf followed by a cover produced in Affinity Photo. I hied both off to a printer in Toronto and was rewarded with proofs that perfectly match the work of Big-5 publishers in my genres. Except for the author and the output, the print book formatting is identical. My physical product stands up against high-priced output from all of the author-robbing bandits in the print book industry.

Affinity Photo wasn’t that difficult to learn to use, again with the help of several online gurus, most notably Olivio Sarikas and his output. That guy knows his stuff. He’s wordy, and friendly and knows the Affinity products.

I’ve used Affinity Designer to produce several vector-based covers too. Videos were a great help with this also.

In all, to date I’ve saved myself about 1,000 U$D in cover and print pdf productions. The Affinity software suite is worth the money if you are willing to invest the time in learning even more of your craft. If you’re an author, why wouldn’t you? Unless, of course, you’re locked into the Big-5 fantasy.

Whatever works. Keep on writing and learning.

22

I own (but have uninstalled) copies of Affinity Designer and Photo. Both are great app - easy to use and feature rich. My experience with them is such that I assume Publisher is also excellent.

I’ve uninstalled them, because without an alternative to Lightroom, I still need an Adobe subscription. I used to use Aperture for that, but Apple killed it and Apple Photos is a toy. I also need Adobe for Premiere but Final Cut would probably do if Affinity put a decent photo catalogue / development package together. Until then, if I’m paying for Adobe CC anyway, I might as well have Photoshop and Illustrator - not as easy to use, but still the industry standard for a reason.

23

Fortunately, I am one who has no need whatsoever for the Adobe tax. I find I can do what I need to to with the Affinity Suite of programs, which are now on a Black Friday sale (November 2020). I highly recommend all three, if only for the pricing. If you can only spring for two, I suggest Photo if you wish to learn to do your own covers. Publisher, if you do Amazon, Ingram Spark, or B&N POD print submissions.

I won’t go into why. Those of you who put in the time and do the work will understand.

There are plenty of videos available on using the software.

24

After years of sending manuscripts off to other people and letting them deal with the actual publishing part, I’m starting to dip my toes in the self-publishing waters. For the short term, I’m looking at non-fiction newsletter/zine type material: some illustrations, maybe a pull quote or two, probably 8-16 pages altogether. Text created in Scrivener, of course.

I have Word. I know how to use Word, though I haven’t done much with its more complicated layout features. (And also will need to pay for a more recent version if I start using it extensively.) Will trying to do a project like this in Word cause me to smash my computer into tiny bits? Would you more experienced folks recommend diving into “real” publishing software right away, or puttering along with Word until its limitations become obvious? (Causing me to want to smash my computer into tiny bits.)

And is Affinity Publisher an appropriate tool for a complete n00b?

Thanks!

Katherine

25

Affinity Publisher exports to pdf, which is what many print shops use. I can’t speak to zines or any other types of publications beyond completing several print books for export to pdf. Amazon KDP and other indie publishers will take the pdf and use it for POD printing. That’s fine for me.

Affinity has quite a number of videos that explain their processes. Here’s a link to Publisher’s videos: affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/

There are quite a few youtube videos on using Publisher. I recommend checking them out first. It took me a solid day of watching videos (which I hasten to add, I hate watching instructional videos). It had to be done. I came at it fresh the next day and completed my first pbook pdf. Success!

I recommend Photo as well, unless you have access to another photo editing program. Affinity’s black Friday sale runs until the 6th, I believe. Pick Photo up too if you have cash to spare.

affinityspotlight.com/article/h … Newsletter

affinity.serif.com/en-us/tutori … 337466797/

No matter what you want to do with Publisher, there are many videos available beyond those offered by Affinity. I had to search beyond Affinity for my pbook pdfs.

There is an Affinity forum as well: forum.affinity.serif.com/

I think Affinity offers a 14-day free trial for each of the Affinity products.

In case you can’t tell, I’m tickled pink that I picked up the three Affinity products on a sale. Sure there was a learning curve, but I conquered that and I’m far from a rocket scientist. They may work for you. They may not. As I mentioned, I build pbook pdfs with Publisher. I use Photo to make my pbook and ebook covers both now. The videos I watched out of interest on preparing magazine spreads and brochures and zines intrigued me, but I’m not into that, unfortunately.

Edited to add: I see you’re on a Mac. I recommend buying direct from Affinity rather than from the Apple store. You’ll get the updates a lot sooner when they come out.

26

Katherine,
For self-publishing, you might also want to take a look at the open source program Scribus https://www.scribus.net/.

I’ve used the beta versions of Scribus and Scrivener for publishing. Over the past few years my wife and I have published a dozen books – some ours, most by New England authors – using Scribus and Scrivener.

Steve
http://www.maatpublishing.net

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27

As of January 19, Affinity has a 50%-off sale. Still not convinced? In that case, try the more than generous 90-day free trial offer.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/90-day-affinity-trial/

I just finished another print book cover using Photo. Once again I’ll be using Publisher to do the formatting for PDF print to be submitted to Amazon and Ingram Spark.

Thanks to Publisher’s Master Page system, creating a print PDF is easy-peasy with templates I designed for 5.25x8 and 6x9 formats, depending on number of pages. I load a .docx, do a bit of formatting, and wham, bam, thank you Affinity, done and submitted.

28

I’ve asked this other times in other forums, but I still can’t get an answer focusing on the reasons why Aperture is superior to today’s Photos.

As for organizational features, it seems to me that Photos is more modern and powerful.

As for editing capabilities, I’ve seen that people seems to ignore that having Affinity Photo installed also adds many of its sophisticate photo retouching functions. If these are not lesser than the ones in Photoshop, I guess they can make Photos on a par with Lightroom.

Paolo

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29

The difference comes down to who the programmes were designed for, not in what they were designed to do. At face value, both programs (especially given the years of extra development that has gone into Photos since Aperture’s expiration) would seem to (and indeed for the most part do) fill similar roles… but one (Photos) is designed for general consumers as a cross-platform (dare I say, mobile-first) app, and one (Aperture) was designed for pros on their desktop/laptop machines.

That means a few things. For one, workflow is designed completely differently. Secondly, different feature-sets are prioritised / de-prioritised, especially in terms of their tweakability.

We have no way of knowing what Aperture would look like today if it had benefited from continued development, and I’ve not looked at Photos in such a long time that I’d have no idea whether it’s still a toy or now a perfectly valid choice (actually, I do know it’s still a toy from my experience of the iOS version and from the fact that pros don’t even talk about it), but we can use the two versions of Lightroom as a proxy…

“Lightroom Classic” is Adobe’s equivalent of Aperture: a fully featured power-house of an app designed for pros for use on desktop/laptops. “Lightroom” is Adobe’s equivalent of Photos: a mobile-first cross-platform app designed to appeal to people who’s primary device is an tablet/phone and/or people for whom a synced cross-device experience with cloud storage is critical.

A cursory look at these two programmes (I have both installed) prompts a few conclusions:

  • the basic photo editing tools for both are strongly overlapping and the simpler tools in ‘Lightroom’ will be more than sufficient and indeed easier to get good results with for the majority of consumers.
  • the organisation tools do a very similar job.

So why is ‘Lightroom’ (and by extrapolation, Photos) a toy and ‘Lightroom Classic’ a powerful tool for pros?

  • organisation has a different focus. The ‘toy’ puts things like facial recognition to find your friends, or grouping by vacation / time period up front. The ‘tool’ focuses on projects.
  • automation has a different focus. The ‘toy’ has all sorts of things like smart wizards, ai recognition, auto-collections, auto-corrections, filters and such the like. The ‘tool’ assumes the user is better than the computer so doesn’t push these things in your face (where they exist at all), and has much more reliance on user created tags, folders, adjustments, presets etc.

Plus, when all said and done, the pro tool ‘Lightroom Classic’ is simply more powerful and cutting edge. A Photos-plus-Affinity solution will give you a powerful approach, remembering that even Lightroom Classic has editing limitations and utilises a ‘edit-in-photoshop’ option for more powerful or more creative adjustments, although a critical difference here is that EVERY step in Lightroom / Lightroom Classic (and presumably Photos too) uses non-destructive editing designed to protect and preserve your digital negative — something that is lost every time you switch to an external app for additional editing.

So… should you care?
If you don’t care already, no you shouldn’t. Don’t let idiots like me who use deliberately inflammatory words like ‘toy’ and ‘tool’ skew your view of two perfectly excellent classes of programme. Use what works for you. If you’re happy with Photos, use Photos… in the same way that if you’re perfectly happy with the camera on your phone you shouldn’t worry about spending $3000 on a DSLR and lenses, and if you are happy using MS Word, you shouldn’t worry about using a pro writing app like Scrivener… unless and until your use case changes.

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