Foxvideo Productions

In the words of Nigel Farage recently……”I’m allowed to change my mind”.

Back in June 2023, I wrote a piece about upgrading Affinity Photo 1 to v2, I liked the App and was using it, Serif had bought out an upgraded Version 2 and I asked for an upgrade price which they refused, instead only offering me the full price version for £67.99.

So, I bought into Pixelmator Pro on offer for £24.99 which I love using, it really is a good photo / design App and highly recommended with AI integration, very regular updates and new features.

Come forward exactly 12 months and an email popped into my inbox from Serif offering me a 50% discount on anything in-store. I sat on the email for a few days. Almost out of the blue a friend asked if I could photograph a bas relief in a local church for her, to be used in an upcoming exhibition.

The lighting was terrible and I bracketed the exposure over 3 f stops, back home I used HDR Merge in Affinity Photo 1 to produce an acceptable print for her. I remembered the offer email from Serif a day later and went to look at the cost, Affinity Photo 2 with a 50% discount was now £33.99, a price I thought acceptable, so I bought it.

Why didn’t Serif consider offering me that as an upgrade price 12 months earlier? Maybe they are now losing too many users to Pixelmator Pro.....You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.

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.