Affinity V2: What’s New in Photo, Designer, and Publisher

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A major new version of any design software is always worth a look, but Affinity V2 offers a truly remarkable upgrade with some compelling new features.

The entire Affinity suite comprising Photo, Designer, and Publisher – the equivalents of Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign – is now available for a one-time purchase of $169.99, reduced to just $99.99 until December 14, 2022. No monthly subscription, no ongoing charges.

That’s enough in itself to tempt many designers, but there’s an additional bonus in that all these apps are licensed for Mac, Windows, and iPad. You read that right: all three apps, including, for the first time, Publisher, run on iPad just like their desktop counterparts. These are not cut-down versions of the desktop apps, but fully featured apps intelligently remastered to a mouseless, mobile environment.

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Steve Caplin is a freelance photomontage artist based in London, whose satirical illustrations have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. He is the author of the best-selling How to Cheat in Photoshop, as well as 100% Photoshop, Art & Design in Photoshop and 3D Photoshop. He writes regularly for CreativePro and is an instructor at LinkedIn Learning. His YouTube channel 2 Minute Photoshop is a library of over 100 Photoshop tutorials, each just two minutes long, hosted at photoshop.london. When he’s not at his computer Steve builds improbable furniture, which can be seen at curieaux.com.
  • Inkling says:

    I layout long scientific texts, so I’m delighted by the new features for that, particularly endnotes.

    But the regular expression (Regex) portion still comes up short. I use GREP in InDesign to clean up imported Word documents and need the same in Publisher. But not only is Regex undocumented, I was surprised to discover there’s no way to save an expression once it’s tested. They’re too complex to safely enter each time, particularly when that means for each of a couple of dozen chapters. Users have been complained about that since the early betas of 1.0, but it’s still not in 2.0.

    Affinity needs to add that and do it better than InDesign. Users should be able to run a set of replace all Regex replacements with a single command and even specify in a Place of text what set should be automatically run on that imported text.

    In my case that—and of course ePub export—are the two remaining barriers to leaving InDesign behind.

  • Nadia van 't Oosten says:

    Very interesting development. If Adobe is not learning from this quickly, sooner or later (probably sooner) Affinity will become the favorite suite for designers. I will definitely keep an eye on it!

    • Steve Caplin says:

      The problem for Adobe is that Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all came with baggage, from different developers – and even now they’re developed by completely separate teams. The sort of integration we see in Affinity just isn’t possible with the Adobe apps. And Affinity has (as I last counted) a developer team of just 13 people!

  • Sue Campbell says:

    This has definitely peaked my interest. As an Adobe user from the mid 80s I feel like I’ve paid, and paid, and paid …. I do want GREP and need EPUB export, but there are other tools I might use for EPUB if I absolutely had to. I have no doubt those will be coming to Affinity eventually. The added footnotes and book features are an added bonus. Since I am retiring, but will still do the occasional project, paying once and OWNING it is what I NEED. (I am so tired of the subscription model of nearly everything in life.) At $99 for three integrated products! I think I’m gonna try it. I do wonder about stability, auto-saves, and file corruption … but we’ll see!

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