#Affinity designer online pro#

#Affinity designer online pro#

But in the meantime, for projects that matter, I’ll use a free app like MediBang Paint Pro (or even Krita or Fire Alcapa), even with its relative paucity of features and slightly clunky interface (the wretched type dialog!). I’ve got the thing now, so I suppose I’ll keep playing with it from time to time-and with the free upgrades, I can hope these problems will be fixed in future releases. But I think the application just isn’t ready for digital painting, even with the low price tag. Photo does have some really cool features, especially the live preview of both gradients and layer blending modes (hallelujah!), and I’m sure Affinity Photo is a decent tool for photo editing. But Medibang Paint Pro is using almost that much with the same file open, and I haven’t had similar problems with its brushes. I initially thought this stuff might be a problem with my limited CPU or RAM-Photo is currently hogging about 1.8 gigs of memory on an open file with many layers. This wasn’t because of any brush or layer setting that I could find it started doing that and then stopped again, all on its own. On one notable occasion (actually, the very first day I tried out the application), the paintbrush antialiased to white instead of transparency, leaving jagged halos that showed up when I tried to paint a background on the layer underneath. This odd behavior is fixed when I zoom in or out. If I start the stroke over transparency and then move the cursor over the layer pixels, nothing happens. Sometimes the eraser tool will work only if I begin the stroke over existing layer pixels. There are other, weirder things going on with the brush engine. Sometimes you can restart the engine just by zooming in or out or rotating the canvas, but other times you actually have to close and then reopen the document to get it to work again. That is, I make a brush stroke (with either the drawing tablet or the mouse) and nothing happens.

To begin with, it periodically just… stops working. Especially when you compare its free-upgrades-for-life deal to Adobe’s pay-us-every-month-of-your-life racket.īut when I tried Photo out, I immediately found some serious issues with their brush engine. The features looked great, and with the special they were running it was less than 40 bucks-certainly a reasonable price for a full-fledged photo editing and digital painting application. So I picked up Affinity Photo, as it looked like it might finally be the Photoshop alternative some of us have been waiting for. But right now I’m working to create good comps for my book cover illustrations, and I’m keeping digital finishes in mind in case I’m unable to get my gouache technique under control in time (which seems all too likely). I only do digital painting once in a while, and it’s usually just to enhance a photographed image. I’m a traditionalist painter (some might say reactionary). I hope some of you have had a different experience: