AFFINITY PHOTO 2
At the end of March I needed to process a bunch of photos I’d taken on a short trip to Kyoto, so I fired up my four year-old copy of Capture One Pro, my software of choice, and….crap, it didn’t work! Then I realised that the version I had wasn’t compatible with the new Mac I bought last November.
No problem, I thought, and hopped over to the Capture One website to see - what? $330 for a licence for the latest version?? (This is even worse than it seems, given the current weak exchange rate for the Japanese yen, the currency I use). Of course, they want to push you towards a subscription, which is maybe fine for a professional photographer, but for me, no thanks. The subscription was $120 a year. I don’t think so.
What to do? Then I remembered Affinity Photo 2, a PhotoShop alternative that I sometimes used for additional work on my pics. Why not update that to the newest version and just use that? For $45 it’s a bargain, with free updates and no fucking subscriptions!!
So I got it and dived in to the rather steep learning curve. The usual thing - lots of trial and error, use of great and not-so-great YouTube tutorials, some features better than Capture One Pro, some worse.
Actually, I’ve rather enjoyed learning the intricacies of Affinity Photo 2 - it’s like solving a difficult jigsaw puzzle, albeit one in which a couple of fairly important pieces are missing. It’s is not perfect, but the price certainly was.
And so I’ve just got used to it and can make reasonably good edits of my photos and then suddenly - would you believe it - Affinity has been bought up by some larger corporation whose software has - yep - a subscription model!! FFS.
The buyer quickly releases a statement to reassure existing Affinity users, mostly refugees from the pricey subscription-only Adobe Photoshop, to the effect that there will always be a non-subscription version available (translation - we’ll introduce a subscription model and make the individual licence fee so ludicrously expensive you will have to go the subscription route in the end - just like Capture One Pro, Adobe and all the greedy corporations out there).
Very annoying, but I should be safe for at least a couple of years before I’m forced into finding and learning yet another photo editing software that isn’t a complete rip-off.