A new Publisher in town

 

Affinity Publisher has now hit the streets and joins Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer to provide a complete creative solution for artists, designers and publishers. With the arrival of Publisher, the Affinity suite now provides a solution that rivals (and in some areas, surpasses) the Adobe Creative Cloud at a fraction of Adobe's cost.

Having worked in software development for a large part of my career, I'm more often than not disappointed by the quality of new software. In the rush to completion, things like usability, reliability and functionality often suffer, sometimes irredeemably. It is, therefore, a cause for some celebration when a new piece of software is delivered that lives up to its pre-release hype and, in most respects, approaches some sort of perfection. Such a piece of software is Affinity Publisher.

In my day-to-day working life, I use Adobe's InDesign for publication. It's become an old 'friend' (in the sort of way that a prison cell-mate might be considered a 'friend'*). I use InDesign to produce large documents that average around 100 pages, sometimes 200+ pages, have multiple sections, a variety of created and imported content types, and are revised frequently prior to publication as print and interactive PDFs. This is not lightweight use.

Though I had been involved in the Affinity Publisher beta programme for about six months, the beta had lacked some of the features I frequently use in InDesign and so I had never pushed it in the same way that I push InDesign. That changed when the final completed version was released and I recreated one of my larger documents in Affinity Publisher. This is not a review as such. but this is what I discovered:

1. There was nothing that I do in InDesign that I couldn't also do in Affinity Publisher. I might have to do it differently, but it could all be done.
2. Affinity Publisher needs learning. Many of InDesign's features work differently in Affinity. I don't think any were worse (just different). 
3. Affinity's free video tutorials are pretty comprehensive and made learning easy.
4. Overall, I felt I was more productive at some of the tasks I need to do in Publisher (e.g. managing imported PDF files and managing a document with multiple sections).
5. Affinity Publisher provided rock-solid reliability on my Windows 10 desktop (Mac and iPad versions are also available).
6. The integration between Publisher, Photo and Designer was first-class and exceed anything Adobe offers (Photo and Designer features are available from within Publisher without leaving the Publisher application).
7. A perpetual license for all three Affinity products (Publisher, Photo and Designer) costs less than four months subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud.
8. Affinity Publisher is the sort of friend that might neet you at the gate when you finally get out.*

Affinity has the capability to go head-to-head with Adobe, especially if you don't need access to other tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud, like Premiere or After Effects. But, if you or your team are focussed on the main tools for raster graphics, vector design and publishing, then you may find the Affinity suite a much better fit. Find out more at: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

* No direct personal experience - just second-hand reports :-)

Goodbye Adobe

Back in 2013, when Adobe introduced their “Photography Program” - Lightroom and Photoshop for AU$9.99 a month - it seemed like a reasonable deal, especially compared to the highly inflated prices that Adobe had previously charged for Photoshop in NZ. At the time, one wondered how long those prices would last. The answer, it seems, was three years; in 2016 the price went up to AU$13.79 and now, in 2017, it has risen again to AU$14.94. And so,  once again, it was time to look for an alternative to Lightroom and Photoshop that would address all my photographic processing needs.

A Google search suggested ACDSee Ultimate 10. What? Surely not. Not that picture indexing, format converting, lightweight editing tool that I remembered from the early 2000s? How on earth could that replace Lightroom and Photoshop? But I had to look and, amazingly, found something beyond my wildest dreams. ACDSee U10, manages photos much like Lightroom, it developes RAW files much like lightroom and it edits photos much like Photoshop - and it does it all in one application.

I had some specific requirements that ACDSee had to meet. It has to support the RAW formats from all my cameras (past and present) - Nikon, Sony, Canon - which it did. It had to support my workflows for photography and especially infrared photography - which it did. And it had to support the Topaz, Photoshop filter plugins, which are an integral part of my workflow - it did that too.

There were two areas where I was worried at first - ACDSee’s lack of support for merging either panoramic photos or HDR photos. Both of these functions are standard in Lightroom and Photoshop and, although I rarely use HDR these days (modern camera sensors are just too good) the missing components were close to being a deal breaker. However, I have copies of both Microsoft’s ICE (free) for panoramas and Photomatix (paid) for HDR - both of these programs can be installed in ACDSee as ‘external editors’ and the handoff of files between ACDSee and these programs is seamless - making the process just as simple as in Lightroom or Photoshop. Issue avoided.

The tools available in ACDSee Ultimate 10 are not direct one-to-one replacements for those in Lightroom and Photoshop; U10 is clearly not a clone of the Adobe products. Having said that, I found that my knowledge of Lightroom and Photoshop allowed me to navigate ACDSee U10 fairly easily and come up to speed within a day or two, helped by ACDSee’s excellent introductory and tutorial videos. But, the key to ACDSee’s utility does not lie in any functional equivalence to Lightroom and Photoshop - the key question for me is, ‘can I produce equivalent results’ and the answer here is decidedly, ‘yes’. In fact, in some areas, like infrared, I found myself producing better quality results more easily than with the Adobe products.

I am, quite frankly amazed by ACDSee U10. Previously, when I have looked for alternatives to Adobe’s expensive products, I have only been able to find alternatives which had severe limitations either in functionality, usability or reliability. So far I have found nothing in ACDSee which has posed any significant issue. I am producing the work I have always produced just as easily, possibly easier, and at a much lower cost. Seven months of Adobe subscriptions will see ACDSee fully paid for (perpetual license) or ACDSee also offer a subscription plan for those that are interested at about 60% the cost of the Adobe subscription.

Christchurch Botanic Gardens 720nm infrared processed in ACDSee Ultimate 10 and Topaz.


Of course, you shouldn’t just believe me, so have a look at this review from fstoppers: https://fstoppers.com/originals/all-one-imaging-software-and-digital-asset-manager-fstoppers-reviews-acdsee-175036

Becoming a software pirate

I have always been a staunch opponent of software piracy, but sometimes you hear stories that make you question your own ethics. Such was a coffee shop encounter with a casual acquaintance I will call ‘Jim’. The coffee was a sort of confessional as Jim had just become a software pirate, quite late in life. Jim’s story went something like this:

He needed a copy of Photoshop made by Adobe. He went to their website and found that it would cost him US$699 (NZ$875). A little steep, he thought but, if that was the price, he was willing to pay. But before doing so he thought he would check pricing elsewhere and found that Amazon had it for sale at US$585 (NZ$785). Sweet, he thought, and pressed Amazon’s ‘One click’ to purchase. Unfortunately, Amazon said they could only download the software to customers in the US. Dam. Why?

Back to the Adobe Store he went, with credit card in hand to pay the full whack of US$699 but his transaction was refused – because he lived in New Zealand. Uh?  Adobe directed Jim to their New Zealand store – where he was told that a copy of CS6 would cost him AU$1,062. Now 1,062 Australian dollars was going to set Jim back about NZ$1,400 a far cry from the NZ$785 that the Amazon shop would have charged or even the NZ$875 that Adobe would have charged in the US store. WTF?

It seems that Jim had stumbled across the price gouging practices that Adobe employ outside the US. Adobe claim that it’s justified because of the cost of doing business in those countries. But Jim just wanted a download and there’s no way that would cost Adobe more in New Zealand than it does in the US.

Jim was incensed. Incensed enough to spend a few hours trawling the web, reading about Adobe’s pricing practices and coming to the conclusion that they are nothing short of unethical.  Jim was also incensed enough to find out what a ‘torrent’ was and how he could download an unlicensed copy of Photoshop. And this was someone who regularly paid voluntary donations to developers of ‘free’ software that he liked.

As I look back on that conversation, it amazes me what happened that day; Firstly, Abobe and its agents (Amazon in this case) turned away a buyer who was willing to pay US$699 dollars - the same price any American would be charged.  They did this because Jim was a New Zealander (or at least not an American). Americans are charged NZ$875, New Zealanders NZ$1,400 for exactly the same product – that’s rampant and unjustifiable discrimination. 

The second thing that happened was that an otherwise honest man became a software pirate because, in his mind, if it was good enough for Adobe to rip him off then Adobe just made themselves fair game in the rip off stakes.

It’s a sad tale on many levels, but it made me wonder how many pirates there are that would pay the price - if the price was fair? I own two fully licensed Adobe products but I’ll certainly be looking much more carefully at the pricing next time around. Perhaps you should too.