You can do action/script that could make one click 'height blend' masks stack and keep normal,roughness, depth 'channels' inside switchable smart objects and layer compositions. Photoshop still could be used in modern texturing pipline as a texture mixer / compositor. If you photobash 150 layers, probably stick with PS. For smaller projects that are not too heavy, they are absolutely capable and suitable, been doing that for over a year now.

So yeah, if you plan on using Affinity Software, have a look at Designer and Photo, right now they should be up for sale for about 25 bucks each which is a no brainer. I really wished, the idiot that I am, that I had bought CS6 when I had the chance.Īnd I dislike Adobes strategy of subscriptions and the lack of good updates, if anything, they chance hotkeys and behavior and make Photoshop more unstable then before, at least for all of our agency where I work, with mixed Windows and Mac systems. On the other hand, Photoshop is nothing but a shadow to what is was once.

They still have a few little problems in the UI here and there and Photo is not yet as robust as Photoshop. I think the 2.0 release of Affinity will tell us more about the future, should come in a few months.

On a Mac I've heard good things about all Affinity apps. I throw around a lot of images and data in these programs, and Photo is not as robust as PS right now under Windows. I'm using Affinity Designer paired with Inkscape (for occasional tracing) instead of Illustrator and I have only touched Illustrator at work in the last months, but not at my personal projects. Affinity has great software and it is capable of most things. I am trying to stay away from Adobe for months now.

Affinity photo linux