Mac owners have had the opportunity to make use of applications Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for almost a year now, but that the software has only been available for the Mac has been a frustration for Windows based photographers stuck in the Adobe world with no real viable alternative.
Now, that’s all about to change, with Serif’s announcement today that Affinity Photo and Designer applications are coming to Windows.
In a press release, Ashley Hewson, Serif’s Managing Director stated…
Pretty much any article, blog or social post about our Affinity apps now seems to attract a rush of comments from users asking why we don’t make them available on Windows. Well, I’m really excited to finally reveal we are working on it and the development team are making incredibly rapid progress.
We already have an early build of Affinity Designer running on our PCs in the office here, and we will be making it available as a free public beta early in the summer.
That Affinity is coming to Windows will be great news to a great many photographers and other creatives out there who have been hesitant to buy into Adobe’s subscription model, or have been seeking a serious competitive alternative.
The Affinity apps for Windows will have exactly the same feature set as their Mac counterparts, as well as share the same single file format that has become a core feature of the Affinity suite.
Coming to Windows makes the Affinity range ideal for inter-agency collaborations, cross-platform creative workflows, and for a huge number of design studios, photographers and freelancers who have a PC based set-up.
Serif have also promised to match the price of the Windows release to fall in line with that of their Mac software at $49.99 / €49.99 / £39.99, with no subscription costs.
Affinity for Windows is due for release in “a matter of weeks”, and you can sign up for the free beta at affinity.serif.com/windows/
This is good news. Competition is good for us, costumers!
If Affinity Photo had a image manager built in, like LR I would be throwing money at them.. Sadly, they don’t, it’s only a image manipulator.. I tried this program on my apple stuff and it’s good SW, but without this key piece of functionality it’s crippled for me and so I bit the bullet and when to the dark side (Adobe). Still keeping my finders crossed that Affinity will add a photo manager to it.. If they do, and it’s effective, I’m in.
They have stated on several occasions that they are working on a Lightroom-type photo asset management program for the Affinity line.
Personally, though, I prefer Capture One over their built-in raw converter (and Adobe’s). With Affinity’s upcoming support for embedding their layered native files into TIFFs, the collaboration between C1 and Affinity Photo should become even more seamless.
Really looking forward to this, just switched back to Windows from Mac and I’ve missed Affinity Designer. Can’t quite justify the cost of Illustrator for my shoddy scribbles.
Is there a ruler tool in inches?