Posted about PL on Affinity Photo Reddit.

[Vivi_Ram]

https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/ ... ?context=3 - Posted on Affinity Reddit. Thought you might be interested.

Surprisingly, very few folks seem to know PL. What is that all about? I want to really change that, since I feel extremely strongly about scamscriptions. Soliciting thoughts!

[Herbert123]

Ah yes, PhotoLine's online (and offline) obscurity... I have done my share of sharing PhotoLine's benefits throughout the years on forums, demoing to students and other designers, rewriting the English PhotoLine Wiki (last June), and so on.

(At some point I confess of having become a bit of a photoLine zealot, and used every opportunity to share the wonders of PhotoLine online. I signed up for forums if people were looking for Photoshop alternatives just to raise awareness of the existence of PhotoLine. I even was banned from the Affinity forums because the Serif forum moderators were convinced I was a paid employee of PhotoLine

Well, I did take it a bit far. But Affinity till this day still misses a lot of functionality that PhotoLine does offer... They didn't like me pointing that out all the time ha ha!)

I'd like to think that you @Vivi_ram are here because of my 'PhotoLine preaching' in the early years of my conversion to PhotoLine I stopped doing this 6 years ago, or so. It just took too much of my time, and I work picked up for me. No more time for forum hopping.

It's funny, because you @Vivi_Ram decided to look for Affinity alternatives because of Canva's acquisition of Serif. You've seen the signs on the wall of things to come. And you are probably not wrong: if history of these type of buyouts have taught us anything, subs are probably the next step.

Myself, I started looking for Adobe alternatives when Adobe CS6 was released and renting became an 'option' alongside perpetual licensing. Notice when I joined this forum: Sat 12 May 2012. CS6 got released a few days earlier: May 7, 2012.

This is no coincidence. I, too, recognized the rather alarmingly bright signs on the wall: in my opinion and expectation CS7 would become a rent-only option. That turned out to be true, of course (but for the branding: CC replacing CS and a reset of version numbering). That day (still remember it like yesterday) I began searching online for a decent Photoshop alternative as a professional designer.

Being pretty cognizant of existing alternatives, I still forced myself to download and test every single possible option at that time. And over the course of a week between the 12th of May and May 7 I installed and tested them all. And they all fell short of my requirements. You have to understand that I loved working in Photoshop. Photoshop had been my mainstay image editor since Photoshop 3 at university (first version with layers, I believe).

So I went through that process, and then by pure chance happened upon www.pl32.com. Can't recall exactly how I wound up on the website. My first thought was: "Wow that's a bad site!". My second thought was: "that software can be any good.".

And I almost left it at that. A small voice told me to test PhotoLine, because I had tested everything else on the market, free, open source, and commercial, at that point and, you know, "What the heck, I'll give a whirl.".
I installed PhotoLine, and started it.

My first impression was that the interface looked rather garish and antiquated. Back in 2012 it wasn't even possible to customize grouping of panels, for example.

Then I started testing it. Added a few layers. "Good performance", was my second thought. And then. And then! I discovered that layer opacity could be set from a range of -200 up to + 200.
That was shocking to me! Absolutely shocking! I immediately realized the potential and possibilities. Why hadn't anyone else come up with this concept? WOW!!!

And I discovered other puzzling yet wondrously magnificent possibilities: image layers would retain their resolution, image mode, etc. WIthout having to resort to awkward smart objects (Photoshop could even emulate this with SOs at the time)! And the vector handling was superior to Photoshop. And 1bit image layers INSIDE an RGB document? Amazing! Mostly non-destructive workflow! And the curves handled BETTER than Photoshop! LAB, HSV without having to switch image mode!!! Wot!

Those things made me adopt PhotoLine, and I soon noticed how open the PhotoLine devs were to improvements.
Which were necessary, mind: at the time it was a bit of a quirky experience. But the potential!

So here we are, 12 years later, and many/most of PhotoLine's original quirks were resolved, thanks to an slow influx of other new users bringing fresh perspectives. It's my daily workhorse, and it also works so well together with Inkscape and Krita (external app feature in PL is brilliant).
I have Affinity and Photoshop (through work) installed as well, and actually dislike the workflow in Photoshop now. Or at least: PhotoLine works faster for me for most tasks that are important to me.

Now, back to why PhotoLine remains relatively obscure and unknown as an image editor. My thoughts:

[1] the Hubers just don't do any advertizing or social media. Or promotion. At all. This is word-by-mouth only, pretty much.

[2] PhotoLine is powerful. I would argue it bests anything else on the market in certain areas of image editing. But with that power comes additional complexity. PhotoLine isn't an attractive proposition to beginners. And the workflow is different compared to Photoshop - and most other image editors try to emulate Photoshop, rather than do their own forward-thinking thing. S

[3] Hardly any tutorials online. Youtube tutorials are scarce. No influencers promoting PhotoLine. So without that community coverage it remains rather unknown. Most people respond to authority: there are (as far as I am aware) no well-known artists, photographers, designers of any kind using PhotoLine and promoting its use. Combined with [2], and we have a classic chicken-and-the-egg context.

[4] Affinity happened. If PhotoLine had promoted itself at the dawn of Adobe going rental, things could have been different. Instead, Serif jumped into that gap.

That's how I see it.

Sorry for the long post!

[lacogada]

Thanks for the write up Herbert ... interesting.

and it also works so well together with Inkscape and Krita (external app feature in PL is brilliant).

When you send to an external app ...

Is another file created ?

If yes, do you know where that file is located ?

[Vivi_Ram]

I agree with every you've said @Herbert123: I actually think Affinity has IMMENSE potential. But potential alone does not suffice. We need actualisation. The actuality is, Canva is going to enshittify Affinity rapidly.

You can skip the part below if you don't want to read a digression about Canva.

[StartRant]

I was listening to Melanie Perkins, the founder and CEO of Canva, wax eloquently about "democratizing design". Who was gatekeeping design? Design is an extremely niche skill that takes years to master. Like copywriting is. Then I realised that she means "creating design with very little effort or thought". Yeah, guess what? Creating design with little effort or thought always ends badly. Design, by definition, implies thought and effort. The second paradox that's baked into Canva is ML.

Let's say that you can create Mona Lisa with just a click of a button tomorrow. Perfect down to the last pixel. Identical to the original. That's still not going to cut it, is it? No one will ever value your AI crap like the original. Why? Because it has no humanity to it. It is just mechanical efficiency. And that's the conundrum of AI. Oversupply of content produced by AI will deflate value to the point where it will become perfectly meaningless. So what if I can produce thousands of templates if every other guy/gal with an email account can do the bloody same. If everyone is Da Vinci, then no one is.

Brute efficiency is simply self defeating in the end. [/EndRant]

Coming back to PL and making it more accessible:

I think in the interest of an even play ground, I am going to reproduce some of my own old works in PL and post them on YouTube in the upcoming year. I had a couple of ideas which I am going to work on potter around and put out there. I am going to map out the entire menu architecture of PL, button by button, menu by menu, dialogue box by dialogue box, and then trace them back to functions that people want to achieve from a photo editing tool. That exercise should also let me become utterly familiar with the software myself.

Let's see what happens.

Another digression: Have you all heard of Lunacy. It is a good, freeware alternative to Figma. Good, not great.

[shijan]

If exclude lack of advertisement, my guess that PhotoLine wasn't too popular from start due too many bugs. Pro people try to use it for work and after some time understand that bug here and bug there and something always don't works. It looked like a pro app, but it don't felt like pro tool for stable work. Same time people who expect to use it for home usage, find that it is too complex and too technical for them.
I started to use PhotoLine in the end of 2019. At that time it was already improved a lot by earlier generations of users. But even in 2019 my experience started mostly from problems. Only now, after thousands of bugfixes and UI improvements https://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6987 it feels like reliable tool that i can use. I was interested in PhotoLine mostly due unique 32 bit workflow, that no any other app currently can't provide, and due some very specific film scan processing workflows. But even now is still far from perfect and there are some really fundamental limitations that force me to use other apps in parallel (for example 8-bit brushes, not too accurate Remove Brush, or too small size of Layer Styles, too small Blur size and so on...)
I guess PhotoLine feels like very personal project for developers. From some point of view it is nice to participate in small community, be able quickly communicate directly to developers to ask for bugfixes and improvements. From other side, it all goes really slow. Maybe with larger team of developers and testers same bugfixes could be fixed 10 times faster, especially when it goes to some simple, but boring work (like manually change code settings in 10000 sliders one by one)
I guess at current state PhotoLine easily could be offered to larger CG companies like The Foundry or Blackmagic Design, to keep future development and promotion. Or could be joined to some opensource community (like Blender) with large team.

[Vivi_Ram]

I guess PhotoLine feels like very personal project for developers. From some point of view it is nice to participate in small community, be able quickly communicate directly to developers to ask for bugfixes and improvements. From other side, it all goes really slow. Maybe with larger team of developers and testers same bugfixes could be fixed 10 times faster, especially when it goes to some simple, but boring work (like manually change code settings in 10000 sliders one by one)
I guess at current state PhotoLine easily could be offered to larger CG companies like The Foundry or Blackmagic Design, to keep future development and promotion. Or could be joined to some opensource community (like Blender) with large team.

Yup, I agree, even as a new user, it took me three full working days of pottering around to figure out the main functionalities and quirks of PL. I don't think others will be quite as motivated.

I honestly think your UI project is awesome and helps to make the program feel more familiar.

Further, I agree about joining up PL to Open Source. I'm a big fan of FOSS. But I wonder how the developers might feel about that. For one, I really, really want this program to be further developed well into the future as a viable alternative to Photoshop and Affinity. But I am also aware that moving code to FOSS is really not as simple as it sounds. It takes a lot of effort to transfer the coding philosophy to new developers. New developers without a thorough understanding of how the software was developed can utterly ruin it.

[Herbert123]

Thanks for the write up Herbert ... interesting.

and it also works so well together with Inkscape and Krita (external app feature in PL is brilliant).

When you send to an external app ...

Is another file created ?

If yes, do you know where that file is located ?

Correct, PhotoLine will create a temporary file that is saved in C:\Users\Red Dawn\AppData\Local\Temp.

As long as the receiving application can save the edited file in the same location and with the same file name the connection will function and it will remain 'live' between the two apps as long as the second app is open.

New changes and saving those changes will keep updating the layer(s) in PhotoLine.

It's pretty cool when it works. Unfortunately, not all design software has the capability to save over the original temp file. VectorStyler, for example, insists on saving a version with its own native file format, and obviously PhotoLine's external app connection cannot pick up on this.

But it works really well with InkScape and Krita, as well as other apps if they can save over the original temp file.

Also very handy to export to utilities that create some kind of final file for publishing.

[Herbert123]

From some point of view it is nice to participate in small community, be able quickly communicate directly to developers to ask for bugfixes and improvements. From other side, it all goes really slow. Maybe with larger team of developers and testers same bugfixes could be fixed 10 times faster, especially when it goes to some simple, but boring work (like manually change code settings in 10000 sliders one by one)

I would disagree with you here somewhat. Compared to my experiences with other design software team I found the PhotoLine developers WAAAY more responsive and quicker to resolve bugs and add new requested features than teams with huge resources and teams behind them.

Photoshop? Still littered with bugs from 20 years ago. Still a 15 bit mode in "16 bit" mode.
Affinity? Users have been requesting various expected features for years now, and still nothing.

Coming from Photoshop I found the PhotoLine developers to be incredibly responsive and fast-acting on bugs.

That said, in the past few years development seems to have slowed down a tad. I sometimes worry about the continued development of PhotoLine since no-one lives forever and the Hubers have been around for a long time. Longer than I, so I hope they have plans in place for continued development of PhotoLine when they start their (well-deserved) pension.

Ideally I would like to see PhotoLine open sourced and potentially led by the Hubers. Gimp is terrible. Blender and Krita are brilliant open source led projects, and in my opinion an open sourced PhotoLine would attract a LOT of attention from developers.

Take OpenToonz, for example. When that was open sourced it received a tremendous amount of attention. But the first release was riddled with bugs and the animations studio responsible for the open source version (Studio Ghibli) had deactivated larger parts of the functionality in order to focus on their very specific paper-based animation workflow.

Soon developers got interested though, because a great open source Linux option for 2d animation did not really exist. So one developer took it upon himself to start a build for Linux. And it went from there to the fantastic 2d animation app that it has turned into now.

Anyway, I am hoping this will also happen for PhotoLine. Currently a good professional-level open source image editor does not exist. I envision that PhotoLine might become that open source image editor.

[bruce1951]

OK a few comments from a happy user. But one huge caveat - I have no idea what the Hubers want or need. I don't know their goals. Maybe, just maybe, they are completely content with Photoline and all of our comments and wishes are moot. I do know they have been excellent when I have contacted them.

Way back in 2000 I bought my first digital camera. Kodak, and we all know where that went! Then to Fuji. Great camera but at that time totally lacking in any editing backup. Then to Nikon where I'm still at.
My first 'real' editor was Jasc's PaintShopPro. Great software that became a slow bloated program after Corel purchased it. And thanks to Herbert123 and one of his posts over at DPReview. I read his post on an astrology site! (Astrology?). I was sold. (Commision to Herbert123?). I'm guessing that was about 2016-7.

I'm heavily into photo-art. My aim is to make the viewer ponder if what they see is a photograph or a painting. Photoline allows me to achieve that goal. A key feature for me is the ability to use plugins or external programs. (Nik and FotoSketcher plugins. And Krita and Dynamic Auto Paint external programs. I do use some external programs such as Photomatix but not from within PL). Sending layers back and forth is key for me. Photoline meets my needs. Fancy UI doesn't worry me. (Hey I go way back to loading programs from a cassette. An amber screen was high tech).

So as for my opinion? I would be very wary of off loading Photoline. In any form. With a small crew at the helm sanity will prevail. Go open source or sell out would mean an uncertain future. IMHO.

I have been lucky with my work. I have sold-licensed-printed many images. To multi nationals and magazines. To museums and individuals. I think my work as gone to approx 47 different counties. (Yes I'm boasting). Made good money. I doubt I could have done it without a flexible program like Photoline.

Be careful what you wish for!

Bruce

[shijan]

From some point of view it is nice to participate in small community, be able quickly communicate directly to developers to ask for bugfixes and improvements. From other side, it all goes really slow. Maybe with larger team of developers and testers same bugfixes could be fixed 10 times faster, especially when it goes to some simple, but boring work (like manually change code settings in 10000 sliders one by one)

I would disagree with you here somewhat. Compared to my experiences with other design software team I found the PhotoLine developers WAAAY more responsive and quicker to resolve bugs and add new requested features than teams with huge resources and teams behind them.

I didn't say that PhotoLine developers are not responsive. Compare to bureaucratic systems in large companies everything goes very fast in PhotoLine.
I don't know is it right to compare apps with different complexity level like this, but have other real life example:
Few years ago, In parallel with PhotoLine, i helped with bugfixes and ideas for free app Hybrid (UI for VapourSynth video filters system) https://forum.selur.net/thread-1279.html That Hybrid was in in near same situation as PhotoLine. One man project with long history and very powerful and unique options, but with billion of bugs, especially macOS version. So i started to communicate with developer and step by step he fixed literally thousands of problems. Due bugs found in Hybrid UI, people at Doom9's Forum bugfix and release new versions of VapourSynth plugins and VapourSynth itself also was improved a lot. Sometimes Hybrid bugfixed beta releases where done in few days and sometimes in few hours, so it felt really fast compare to PhotoLine beta releases once per 3-4 weeks.

[lacogada]

Thanks Herbert for the answers to my questions

[der_fotograf]

I envision that PhotoLine might become that open source image editor.

For god's sake NO. Only a commercial product will guarantee a stable, smooth operation (use) and continuous development. I hope I will never see hundreds of »branches« of PL in the scattered Linux world, where teams work against each other and use »Scrum« instead of precise code, where HELP files are almost nonexistent, questions will be answered in a rude tone from arrogant maintainers and new versions have to be compiled by the users.

[PPaul]

For god's sake NO. Only a commercial product will guarantee a stable, smooth operation (use) and continuous development. I hope I will never see hundreds of »branches« of PL in the scattered Linux world, where teams work against each other and use »Scrum« instead of precise code, where HELP files are almost nonexistent, questions will be answered in a rude tone from arrogant maintainers and new versions have to be compiled by the users.

I fully agree!

[Herbert123]

I envision that PhotoLine might become that open source image editor.

For god's sake NO. Only a commercial product will guarantee a stable, smooth operation (use) and continuous development. I hope I will never see hundreds of »branches« of PL in the scattered Linux world, where teams work against each other and use »Scrum« instead of precise code, where HELP files are almost nonexistent, questions will be answered in a rude tone from arrogant maintainers and new versions have to be compiled by the users.

What about Blender, Krita, OpenToonz, InkScape, Godot ... ? Those are managed/headed by more centralized teams, and it worked in their favour. Each one has great support, communities, and all of them are very popular.

Blender has even sort-of taken over the generalist 3D market. Godot is one of the top 3 most popular game engines. And I have had FAR more negative experiences with commercial products being acquired by larger companies and then phased out. A commercial product is no longer a guarantee for continuous development (quite the opposite, nowadays).

A small list of commercial victims: Freehand, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flash / Animate, LightWave, Modo, Softimage, TrueSpace, Microsoft Expression range, Movie Maker, HyperCard, Shake, QuickTime, ... Many of these were at one time hugely popular, yet were discontinued.

Whether a software product is commercial, freeware, or open source is no indication for its potential success or support by the developers.

[der_fotograf]

And who exactly will pay the developers of PL? Who exactly will pay their retirement?

You forgot to mention Cinema 4D. It is the world's leading 3D development program.
The same is true for Rhino 3D, which is the leading software for 3D CAD.

Blender etc. is for people who don't want to pay anything or just have everything for free.
Remember, there is no free lunch.

Those are managed/headed by more centralized teams, and it worked in their favour.

Please be so kind and publish valid data on how much income the developers of freeware generate with their effort.