Foxvideo Productions

When Serif released Affinity, it was a game changer, it had all the power (and more) of Adobe Photoshop, was non-subscription and at the time, an offer price of £39.99 so I bought into it.

It soon built up a strong following as an alternative to Photoshop for those not wishing to jump on the subscription model. It was followed by Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, both of which had no interest for me as I only needed a photo editing App.

Affinity v2 is now out, looking to upgrade I looked at the website only to find I needed to shell out £119.99 (upgrade price) for “Creative Collection’ - the full suite of Affinity Apps when I only need the photo App.

I suggest Serif are missing out here, having built up a strong following for Affinity Photo, to then only offer the full suite @ £119.99 (upgrade price), will certainly put people off who don’t require (or can’t afford like me) the “Creative Collection”.

Time to look around for an alternative within my budget now I’m retired!

Update - So Serif came back to me on this, they offer an individual App price of £67.99 for the new version 2, but no upgrade discount on an individual App (so much for trying to retain brand loyalty!)

Postscript.
Looking on Affinity forums, the opinion was that the v2 was probably not worth buying into at the moment. A Black Friday deal for Pixelmator Pro @ £24.99 looked tempting so I bought it. So far I'm very impressed with it and Affinity will be taking a back seat for my photo editing in the future.

One of the websites I built and maintain hosts a foreign language booklet in PDF format for children that can be read online or downloaded. The booklet usually runs to around 60 or so pages and around 8 - 10 megabytes in size, making it easy to download for anyone on a reasonable connection.

Back in June 2021, I was sent the latest copy, however it was over 100 megabytes! I tried several ways to compress it and reduce the size but. the best I could get it down to was 96 megabytes. Since then I’ve gone back to it several times and tried various methods to find out why it was so big and to reduce it to a manageable download for those on a slower internet connection but I failed miserably!

Just browsing Facebook groups today, I saw an item mentioning Affinity Photo from Serif could open PDF files, my old copy of Photoshop could open PDF files and I had tried it on this booklet previously, so I gave it a go in Affinity.

It opened (slowly due to the size!) and the open dialog gave me some options to change, I selected export file and there were some further options that looked as if it might help with the size, checking the file size after export gave me a 56 megabyte file!

So I opened that 56 meg file and applied the same settings again along with a few further options and exported the file - I got an 8 meg file that showed an acceptable quality loss from the original 100 meg file!

So after messing with this file for nearly a year, I found a program I’ve had on my Mac for several years could solve the problem for me........ Who knew?