One of the things I really like about Affinity Photo is that it’s a photo editor, and the developers know it. The software makes it easy to make object selections, adjust colors and pretty much anything else a user would want to do with a photo. It’s not yet available for purchase, but the beta is a free download, and it’s pretty solid in my experience.

Illustrator and Photoshop weren’t anywhere near this great when they launched.Īt $50 on the Mac App Store, it’s definitely worth the price of admission for those who need to do graphics work, but want to avoid the Creative Cloud.Īffinity Photo, if the name doesn’t give it away, is a stand-in for Photoshop. They may be right, but I’m willing to show my support to a piece of software that makes itself more affordable, and is still growing. Someone out there, somewhere, may argue that this does not offer the options and tools that they need to replace Illustrator. While Designer’s toolset is its own, it does enough to keep itself familiar to those who only have experience with Illustrator or Freehand (and I’m sorry for anyone who ever had to use Freehand). After playing around with a free trial (available here), I found that it’s similar enough to Illustrator to give most of us a more affordable alternative. It enables users to create vector graphics much like they do in Adobe’s software. This is Serif’s answer to Adobe Illustrator. It’s just something I enjoy, or use for graphics as needed. Every so often, I will put together a simple design, or play with some photos. Still, I occasionally miss graphic design. It’s okay, because I found something I really like doing. That would have been fine, but I didn’t exactly have the money or the experience to get a job to make a living. I enjoyed it, but it was pretty hard to find a job without moving far from my little hometown.

Long ago, long before I was a blogger or an IT guy, I was a graphic designer.

Serif labs affinity photo