Graphic and print designers do not just use Photoshop; it’s not the right tool for that job. The bulk of that work happens outside Photoshop in Illustrator or InDesign.
Affinity has matching applications (minus Lightroom and Bridge as I said).
It also handles vectors and text just fine in Photo and has integration functionality to edit between Designer (their Illustrator alternative) and Photo, and even more impressive integration once Publisher is added to the mix. But I've used Photo on its own for tasks like banner ads, header images, and a couple of full-colour flyers (it's not my main area of expertise so I generally do not)
Take a look at an Affinity video demonstrating Publisher (their InDesign competitor). Once you combine the three apps it is surprisingly powerful and a pretty credible alternative to InDesign.
Given that you can buy the entire suite outright for desktop and iPad for the price of about four months of full Creative Cloud, I think it’s at least worth considering, though the asset management side is still obviously lacking somewhat as I said.
ETA: photographer workflows can be considerably more complex than your characterisation! I have a darkroom-soft-focus simulation in live filters in one of my projects, cross-model curves (Lab curves on an RGB image without switching modes) in several, a black and white negative processing stack, HALD CLUT inference macros, and I know people doing colour neg corrections entirely in Affinity Photo (which is a task people often delegate to something like Silverfast)
>Graphic and print designers do not just use Photoshop; it’s not the right tool for that job. The bulk of that work happens outside Photoshop in Illustrator or InDesign.
Graphic and print designer do digital painting, collages, retouching, adding special effects to images (say fake halftone), fake natural media, and tons of other things with Photoshop. Illustrator is for vector graphics, which they also use, but it's a different thing. And InDesign is for DTP, not for graphics work (illustration, graphic design, retouching, image manipulation, etc) for web or print.
Clearly InDesign is used for print design. DTP is print design. Madness to imply it is not.
And both print and graphic designers use vector art pretty extensively. Large amounts of print/printed work is done with scalable designs for really obvious reasons.
Photoshop is not generally the final tool for a print designer; it is likely not often the final tool for a graphic designer. Things have moved on a lot.
I didn't refer to that kind of print design - the design of the layout and such, since it's irrelevant to Photoshop vs Affinity Photo comparison.
I refer to design for print. Graphical elements, manipulated images, etc meant to go to books, magazines, posters, and so on.
>Large amounts of print/printed work is done with scalable designs for really obvious reasons.
That's a different comparison, Illustrator vs Affinity Designer. And large amounts of print/printed work are done with Photoshop still: basically anything that's not vector. They're just done in high enough resolution to be able to be printed at all their target dpis.
I am not sure then why you draw a distinction between graphic and print design, when they are in your definitions essentially identical.
But stipulating this definition, and getting back to my original point, I don’t believe there are really significant things that would limit those users in Affinity Photo either, particularly when combined with the tools from Designer and Publisher which you can switch to seamlessly. I have worked alongside designers for thirty years and understand some of what they do; I do not see Affinity lacking in fundamentals or clever features.
Aside, again, from needing to add in an asset management app.
Which would be easily affordable given how comically affordable the entire suite is. But I hope Affinity fix this next.
Affinity has matching applications (minus Lightroom and Bridge as I said).
It also handles vectors and text just fine in Photo and has integration functionality to edit between Designer (their Illustrator alternative) and Photo, and even more impressive integration once Publisher is added to the mix. But I've used Photo on its own for tasks like banner ads, header images, and a couple of full-colour flyers (it's not my main area of expertise so I generally do not)
Take a look at an Affinity video demonstrating Publisher (their InDesign competitor). Once you combine the three apps it is surprisingly powerful and a pretty credible alternative to InDesign.
Given that you can buy the entire suite outright for desktop and iPad for the price of about four months of full Creative Cloud, I think it’s at least worth considering, though the asset management side is still obviously lacking somewhat as I said.
ETA: photographer workflows can be considerably more complex than your characterisation! I have a darkroom-soft-focus simulation in live filters in one of my projects, cross-model curves (Lab curves on an RGB image without switching modes) in several, a black and white negative processing stack, HALD CLUT inference macros, and I know people doing colour neg corrections entirely in Affinity Photo (which is a task people often delegate to something like Silverfast)