Photoshop contender, Affinity Photo, made a big splash about two weeks ago when they announced that they are rolling out a windows Beta, effectively more than doubling their potential market.
We caught up with Affinity managing director Ashley Hewson at the UK Photography show (full TPS report here) to talk about Affinity’s future plans, their Windows Beta and how they will integrate with the iPad Pro. Hit the jump for a quick summary and some of my thoughts.
First thing that really stood up to me when talking to Ashley is how far Affinity Photo has come from when they started out about a year ago. We are now looking at a significantly more mature piece of software and while not being 100% full photoshop compatible, it offers some interesting features of its own and for many, many photographers and designers it will be enough.
Affinity Photo and windows
Talking about Affinity Photo and windows we learned that the GUI part of Affinity is about 20% of development, the remaining 80% are the features, things like the text engine, layers engine, filters and so on. I was kinda surprised at that. As a past developer of multi platform software, we always kept the GUI and MMI a very, VERY think layer. But I guess that it is different when developing graphics software where so much goes into display.
Ashley also told DIYP that Designer will roll out first and Photo will be the next in line. We saw a working demo, but it was only at the starting stages of windows implementation. Whatever was implemented, however, was almost pixel-exact to the Mac version.
Future plans
We chatted a bit about future plans, and did learn that Affinity are going to add a few platforms to their stack. Starting with Windows and going into iPads next (some more on that later). Linux, sadly, is not in the current roadmap.
The other interesting plans are to add a third product similar to In-Design to allow desktop publishing completing a full photo-editing/vector-editing/desktop-publishing trio. If looking are a more distance plans, an Aperture or a Lightroom software is being looked at and we would love to see what the team has in mind. One thing that is NOT in the plans yet is video, so no Premiere or After Effects. That does mean that if you are a user of the entire Adobe CC suite, Affinity will not have a full solution for you. On the other hand, if you are a photography-oriented user, Affinity plans to showcase a pretty complete bundle.
iPad Pro and Performance
The last thing I want to talk about from this interview (though there is more, including a demo) is Affinity Photo’s port into iPad (and iPad Pro in specific). Affinity has started porting to iOs (video below is about 1 year old) and they took me by surprise when talking about performance.
Since the iPad Pro was designed for content creators (rather than content consumers) it has some strong graphic hardware. Surprisingly, some of Affiniy’s software runs faster on the iPad Pro that it runs on a Macbook Pro. How awesome is that? When the time comes, I definitely want to see a surface going against an iPAd pro with affinity on it.
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