Affinity acquired by Canva, 'an online design and visual communication platform'

[Anbaric]

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Official announcement in excited corporate speak:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-statement/

'Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?

There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased – with plenty of free updates to V2 still to look forward to!'

I'd never heard of Canva until now. Looks like a web-based design/presentation package for those without much technical knowledge, targeted at the corporate market. Supposedly Affinity will continue to be developed as before, but I'm rather glad I have the v1 packages, which have perpetual licences that don't require the online activation they added in v2.

The reaction on the Affinity forum has not been universal joy:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201413-affinity-is-joining-the-canva-family/

One financial site thinks this is a probably a >$billion deal:

https://www.afr.com/technology/canva-s-billion-dollar-bet-on-a-37-year-old-nottingham-company-20240321-p5fea0

Looks like the bosses will be getting most of the cash, which probably explains the tone of that press release:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f6540177-9337-4782-91dd-4b0a84ffb83d?shareToken=7013a846cca64688ba3515ce5ef702ab

'The deal for Serif, which produces the Affinity suite of design tools and made pre-tax profits of £16 million in 2022, will mean a bumper payday for Gary Bates, 54, its chairman, and for Jim Maxwell Bryce, 59, its commercial director. Between them they owned about two thirds of the 37-year-old company, with other employees owning the rest. The move is a departure for Canva, which is led by Melanie Perkins, 36, its billionaire chief executive. It provides easy-to-use design templates and tools for untrained designers, with 175 million people using its software each month.'

Canva has previous form on buying out a company, integrating the technology, then killing off the original:

https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/kaleido-smartmockups/

https://help.smartmockups.com/article/99-closing-smartmockups

Edited March 26, 2024 by Anbaric

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[pcgarner]

I hope this goes well. I decoupled from PS entirely a number of years ago, solely due to the advent of Affinity. Canva and Affinity operate in very different worlds, and their users hardly overlap. Strange acquisition.

Affinity is a brilliant alternative to PS. As the saying goes, time will tell. I'm not hopeful.

[wattsy]

I'm struggling to think of any takeover of a much liked company that benefited the original customer base. I can't imagine this will end well for loyal Affinity users.

Edited March 26, 2024 by wattsy

[Tom R]

History would indicate that this is  bad news for Affinity users: Pump & dump is the mantra we’ve all heard too often.

Fortunately, I work mostly with film, but I have used Affinity (and Publisher) for some time now and have found it extremely useful—I especially liked the seamless integration with the DxO (originally) NIK Plug-Ins.

I will definitely brush-up on my GIMP skills and maybe work on writing scripts to automate, or at least facilitate, my interaction with NIK (which is confined to final JPEG export anyway).

[Doug A]

I have been worried about something like this since the early days with Affinity Photo when the hinted DAM did not materialize. 

Edited March 26, 2024 by Doug A

[Richardgb]

In my email today arrived this 🤔:

The Affinity and Canva Pledge By the Affinity and Canva Teams As we step into our shared future, we are committing to four pledges that we’re excited to share with the current and future Affinity community.

Earlier this week we shared the news that Affinity had been acquired by Canva. As the dust settles on the announcement, we wanted to say more about our future and our commitment to the Affinity community. Since our inception, both of our companies have shared the same mission and vision. We were both founded with the belief that design shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford complex software. Our goal has been to make the highest quality design tools available to the largest number of people with fair, transparent and affordable pricing at our core. By joining forces, we’re looking forward to accelerating this shared vision. Above all, together, we’re committed to continuing and amplifying Affinity’s position as the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market, while continuing to empower millions of designers to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals. 1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special. We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future. If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to. 2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite. We believe Affinity is the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market. It’s non-destructive, super fast, and easy to use. As such, we want to reassure you that it isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we’re committed to using our shared resources to continue expanding Affinity’s products through further investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite. We’re looking forward to accelerating the rollout of highly requested features such as variable font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export and much more. These additions will further cement Affinity as the best advanced design suite on the market and will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2. 3. We will provide Affinity free for schools & NFPs. Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its two-step plan, offers premium plans at no cost to schools and NFPs all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month. We’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximize their impact. We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and NFP customers that already use Affinity. 4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey. Affinity and Canva were both founded on the basis that their respective communities – of expert and non-expert designers – deserved better. The tools available were overly complex, overly priced, or both. We know designers deserve better. They deserve the highest quality tools to serve their needs and they deserve to be treated fairly. We also believe the design community also knows best what it needs. As such, we are committed to shaping our products based on your ideas, your feedback and your needs. To kick things off, we’d love to learn more about what you’d like to see as we embark on this next chapter of our journey. What would you like to see in Affinity? What features have you been dreaming of? What would you love to achieve? We’d love to hear from you here. Thank you to everyone who has been an integral part of the journey so far. We’re excited for the future and can’t wait to see what we can build together. With gratitude and excitement, The Affinity and Canva Teams

[jaapv]

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Beautiful words….🙄

[Anbaric]

35 minutes ago, jaapv said:

Beautiful words….🙄

Promises, promises...

https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/1570728566350020608

[thighslapper]

On 3/30/2024 at 10:10 AM, Anbaric said:

Promises, promises...

Another UK based institution cashing in and selling out to an overseas company (again, as it happens).

I'm still using Pageplus under Parallels on my Mac and have never needed to upgrade as it does everything I need. 

Viewranger (by far the best mapping software) sold out to Outdooractive and despite promising to honour perpetual licences for previous maps dumped the software and their own replacement made things unusable. It was obvious Viewranger knew this as signing up to transfer everything you had to Outdooractive included a clause waiving any legal claim against Viewranger. Cynically Viewranger also updated their app the year before and after the change it became inactive, whether ypu agreed to the transfer or not. Luckily I had the old version on another iPad and everything still works fine and I still have access to the £200+ worth of maps I downloaded. 

I'm also not optimistic .... once someone else has full control they can cite all manner of 'market or financial pressures ' that allow them to renege on 'promises'. 

[Anbaric]

Today Affinity spammed me (as a v1 owner who had never upgraded) with a £29 offer for the entire v2 suite, which is cheap enough to take a punt on even if the future is uncertain ('So I, for one, welcome our new evil corporate overlords'). It was a personalised single use link, so I can't post it here, but you might want to check your spam if you are in the same position. One worthwhile upgrade is 'non-destructive' editing at the raw conversion stage in Affinity Photo (in v1, raw conversions are baked in, though you can do reversible image edits after raw processing). Keep hold of your v1 installers and keys, though - unlike v2, they don't require online activation, so they can always be used whatever happens to Affinity.

[Richardgb]

3 hours ago, Anbaric said:

Today Affinity spammed me (as a v1 owner who had never upgraded) with a £29 offer for the entire v2 suite, which is cheap enough to take a punt on even if the future is uncertain ('So I, for one, welcome our new evil corporate overlords'). It was a personalised single use link, so I can't post it here, but you might want to check your spam if you are in the same position. One worthwhile upgrade is 'non-destructive' editing at the raw conversion stage in Affinity Photo (in v1, raw conversions are baked in, though you can do reversible image edits after raw processing). Keep hold of your v1 installers and keys, though - unlike v2, they don't require online activation, so they can always be used whatever happens to Affinity.

Around the time of the Canva takeover I also 'upgraded' from v1 to v2 of Affinity Photo for much the same reason as you - it was cheap enough to try it out, and it was a 'perpetual' licence. Like v1, I haven't found any glitches (unlike some of Serif's previous photo editing products), but there again I haven't had to make any major changes in my workflow either. (I mostly use Affinity Photo as the second stage for TIFF files exported from C1 as I prefer to make certain adjustments there). Overall, a very satisfied user here.

At the time of the upgrade I got the whole Affinity suite for only a nominal sum extra but haven't delved into these yet.

[David Cantor]

1 hour ago, Richardgb said:

Around the time of the Canva takeover I also 'upgraded' from v1 to v2 of Affinity Photo for much the same reason as you - it was cheap enough to try it out, and it was a 'perpetual' licence. Like v1, I haven't found any glitches (unlike some of Serif's previous photo editing products), but there again I haven't had to make any major changes in my workflow either. (I mostly use Affinity Photo as the second stage for TIFF files exported from C1 as I prefer to make certain adjustments there). Overall, a very satisfied user here.

At the time of the upgrade I got the whole Affinity suite for only a nominal sum extra but haven't delved into these yet.

I’m very happy with Affinity having used it for about six years. It does everything I need and want to do and I’m sure that there’s a lot more under the bonnet. I self-published a book three years ago using Affinity Publisher and that worked very well. There’s a lot of consistency across the three Affinity products so if one is only used to Photo, the learning curve for the other two is quite easy. The tutorials are excellent and Affinity Revolution on YouTube is another valuable resource.

David

[Anbaric]

On 11/24/2024 at 1:00 AM, mark_s90 said:

The funny thing is, I had the email about updating to Version 2. And it did not cost me ANYTHING..  and I only bought the software last november as Version 1. 

I believe they stopped selling v1 when v2 came out (2 years ago). Perhaps you just had an earlier v2 release? Upgrades are only free when the major version number is the same. The significant changes between dot releases are listed here:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/whats-new/

[Anbaric]

1 hour ago, mark_s90 said:

Sounds more like it.. But the thing is, does it still give teh ability to load a file, rename it, and then let me do what I want to do with the image, and then actually save it to the image as a stand alone item?

I used to use nikon software but stopped because it only saved the editing done as a 6 kb file, and just updated the original file when i opened it. Pretty embarressing when you send the right file name but its only 6kb and cant do anything.

I think the way the Nikon software used to work was that 'non-destructive' edits were saved back (as metadata) to the original raw (NEF) file, keeping everything in one place. Then they switched to saving the edits separately as metadata in small 'sidecar' files for several versions of the package - the NEF files were untouched, and you had to keep the sidecars and the NEFs together if you wanted to revisit your edits. You probably last saw one of these versions, and I'd assumed they were sticking with this approach. But looking at the docs, it seems they now offer both methods in the current version of NX Studio, so you can choose which you prefer:

https://nikonimglib.com/nxstdo/onlinehelp/en/save_85.html

https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products/564/NX_Studio.html

Either way, you will see the effects of your edits when you export a tiff or a jpeg, though in these files the edits will of course be baked in.

Affinity never writes to the raw files, but in v2 you can choose whether to embed the raw data in the .afphoto file, keeping everything in one place, or you can link the .afphoto file to the raw file, which takes up less storage space but means you have to preserve the link between the files and not move them around independently:

https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Raw/raw.html&title=Developing a raw image

Edited November 28, 2024 by Anbaric

[Anbaric]

8 hours ago, mark_s90 said:

Im a person who likes to take a 11x14" crop out of a 16x20" photo and expect it to be nothing more then the crop when i hit save. I prefer the OLD style of "desctructive editing to be honest.

With any editor you can save a copy as a tiff or jpeg and you are done. That will contain your crop and nothing else, in a universal format all image software can read.