From that perspective, there's some work to be done. One downside I discovered was when I converted one of these painted brushes into outlines-the translation near the corners produced a sawtooth series of dozens of extra points. Like I mentioned, the ability to paint with vector brushes in Designer makes it more of an artistic vector tool, yet you can use it for straight up pen tool activities. Yeah, again I think it's more about relearning the conventions you're used to. If you can swallow the $50 commitment, it's certainly approachable and worth trying. As a side note: Affinity Designer is actually an amazing artistic vector tool because of the brushes and the ability to intermingle vector and pixel graphics together. In fact, I like the brushes and some of the liquify effects better than Photoshop. Of course, when you do you'll find you can do the same things you used to in Photoshop. In Affinity Photo, it's called 'Affine.'That took a bit of Googling, but now I've got it locked in. One thing that baffled me was what was called 'offset' in Photoshop (where you can shift the image over and it wraps around to the other side of the canvas). You have to commit in your mind that you will switch and that it's okay to relearn a new set of controls. But isn't that true with any tool? It wouldn't be different if it were identical! It took some mind-wrapping to figure out (tutorials and YouTube videos) how to do the things that come second-nature in Photoshop.

So, I made the switch to Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer cold turkey. I also wanted masking and other advanced features that aren't always in iOS apps or other online services. Yet, for photo editing and manipulation I still wanted that ability without the monthly fee from Adobe.

I switched mostly because my UI work is done in Sketch or another vector program.

Affinity designer vs photoshop