Last one I ordered was left inside a wheelie bin. Which my neighbour helpfully put out the next morning.

I think they’re amazing. The chemistry of colored flame has fascinated me since I was young, and there’s nothing quite like being close to explosions. If I had more time and lived in the US I’d be a hobby pyrotechnician.

Volumetric video for sports is interesting because it offers VR users the option to ‘be there’, but the provider can also offer desktop/mobile users the option to control their own virtual camera. I can kinda see it taking off in a few years when more cheaper/lighter headsets with good passthrough arrive.

The main issue was plugins and external programs compatability. There are some really obscure plugins for advanced work in Indesign, like syncing with client spreadsheets for catalogue work, auto generating indexes/references, that kind of thing. Another problem with ID was working on a network with multiple users accessing the same file from different locations. With Photoshop it’s a similar story, we had a lot of actions and custom scripts that would’ve been a massive headache (or impossible) to port over manually. Personally I use a lot of scripts/actions using smart objects, auto selections etc for batch processing and the feature set in Affinity just isn’t (or at least wasn’t) up to it. These days I prefer Capture One over Lightroom for RAW processing but I still need to use LR when processing timelapse because the 3rd party plugins only exist for LR.

Yeah to be fair it’s been a few years since I looked and the list of issues that meant we couldn’t switch wasn’t too massive. Hopefully they get there!

Capture One has a free 30 day trial IIRC. It’s great for doing this kind of thing, if you put caps lock on you can hit keys 1-5 to rate and it will auto advance.

Affinity is the closest but still a ways off being a viable replacement for ID or PS. Source: worked in a design studio, every few years we would try Affinity in an attempt to de-Adobe our workflows but it’s just not comparable.