I have been using Adobe products, particularly InDesign and Photoshop, for book design (cover and interior layout) for my publishing house. Because I’m stepping back from publishing to focus on my own fiction novels, this is a good time for me to try an alternative, the Affinity suite. Unfortunately, I can’t purchase it just now as Canva has acquired Affinity and is about to relaunch a new version of the software and/or a subscription model (which it has publicly denied); it’s stopped selling the current version of its software.
I know this is a strange time to get some feedback because we don’t know what’s changing when the new software version rolls out at the end of the month. Even so, I’d love to hear from anyone who’s switched from Adobe InDesign and/or Photoshop to Affinity Photo 2 and Affinity Publisher 2, particularly if you have used these tools for book design. What, if any, have been the pain points?
Hi, Adobe priced me out of their market about 20 years ago. I had been using Lightroom, Photoshop and Pagemaker/In Design.
I’ve had all 3 of the Affinity suite since they were first launched. I can’t say I use them a lot; I’ve probably used Designer most, followed by Publisher.
Photo, I look at from time to time, but always return to the (Mac only) Graphic Converter, which I’ve been using since 1990/91. I’ve tried Luminar, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo and a couple of others, but they haven’t chimed with me. Affinity Photo is probably the one I’d go for if Graphic Converter fell by the wayside.
Pinch points, none really. I just take new apps on their own terms without expecting them to be like other apps I’ve used.
I use InDesign, but know one thing about Publisher that would be a pain for my workflow. When you drop a docx into inDesign, the app imposes its styling on any style-assigned spans the project already has a style def for. In Publisher, this does not happen. Publisher acquiesces to the style specification of the incoming no matter what it is named. The reason that is bad for me is because my wordflow depends on using the names of defined styles in Scriv to indicate what inDesign should do with special spans of text. The style name passes from Scriv to docx and from docx to InDesign. The style as defined in Scriv can look like anything convenient to me, but inDesign is responsible for imposing its final look — which is just what I want.
p.s. Another thing I know, but is unlikely to be a thing for you: inDesign has a built in facility for specifying signature size when doing imposition. With Publisher you would need a third party resource to do this. But unless you are making hand bound books, this probably doesn’t mean anything to you.
Hi
I have been using Affinity Publisher and Photo in combination with Lightroom Classic for years in my work, and it works perfectly. Adobe Photoshop and InDesign only make sense if you have to do the most complicated masks and all sorts of other things every day. But for professional work as a photographer or for good layouts of all kinds, Affinity and LR Classic are perfectly adequate.
I’ve been using Affinity Photo for e-book and print book covers for years. I also use Publisher for my print book interiors. I found Publisher a bit of a bear to learn, but once I picked it up, there was nothing holding me back from producing 20 or 25 print books for upload to Amazon and Ingram Spark.
After I wasn’t required to use Adobe for professional purposes I switched to Affinity. I’ve found Publisher to be excellent, quite matching InDesign unless you have specific production plug-ins that aren’t compatible.
Affinity Photo is a bit more problematic. The underlying usage-model is just different enough from Photoshop that my 30-year habits keep barking their shins. I can get it to work with excellent results but it’s gritty sometimes.
Affinity Designer seems fine but to be honest it’s been so long since I’ve had to do serious Illustrator work I don’t know that I have a valid opinion.
One sterling thing about Affinity is that the three applications are deeply integrated—you don’t need to switch to another one to fix placed art the full app’s functions are available within another app. Pretty fancy.
We’ll see what the momentous announcement will bring. . . .
I have not yet done books with Publisher. But for newsletters, flyers, magazines etc I switched from InDesign a couple of years back. Some things work better, some different.
The two main remaining issues for me are:
lack of column span (doable, but needs workaround with additions frames)
justification in InDesign looks better; their multiline justification does a pretty good job. Publisher looks okay and most people will not even notice the difference. But this is one reason why I started learning LateX for typesetting books.
@PommeDeTerre, may I ask a follow-up question? I’ve used Photoshop for years, but never needed to try Lightroom. I gather that Affinity Photo falls short in some way that you make up for with Lightroom Classic. Is this unique to the needs of a professional photographer, such as cataloging, or is there some other aspect that would be useful to know for someone with more general book publishing needs? By that, I mean resizing images, adjusting ppi, adjusting contrast, and, less commonly, manipulating the image in some other minor way.
I don’t quite understand your question, but with Affinity Photo you can do almost everything you can do with Photoshop when it comes to general requirements. Lightroom has the advantage of archiving and direct editing without having to go to another programme. Only when complex masks need to be created, etc., do you have to go to an external editor. In short: Lightroom for general requirements and Photoshop/Affinity for exceptionally complicated tasks.
Everyone, thank you for sharing your experiences with me. I’ve decided to make the switch, provided there are no nasty surprises when the Affinity site unveils what’s next on Thursday.
This page is frightening, TBH. At least Serif used to be pretty generous in the past when it came to fully functional trial versions. Maybe Canva honors this tradition. In that case you won’t have to spend any money to find out and finding out isn’t a lengthy process with Affinity (coming from Adobe).
Yup. I’m a Serif customer since 2017 or 18 (only Photo and Designer 1.x and 2.x, though). If needed, I’d buy Publisher without thinking twice or even testing it beforehand. (Not saying you should.)
Nothing bad came out of the Canva merger. Yet. The way they handle this current transition to whatever and the wording is kinda worrying. If “true” creative freedom is coming, what did they sell until now?
But let’s wait and see what happens. Maybe this is all just a weird marketing strategy for version(s) 3.x, without forced “AI” inclusion, subscription models and other abominations. Fingers crossed.
