Transcription
Let's talk free software and some of the things that I know a lot of people are going to comment on this video, and I've already commented in lots of other people's videos, talk about the exact same topic. Affinity has now gone free.
If you didn't know, the quick TLDR is that Affinity was bought by Canva about 18 months ago, and ever since that point in time, people have been going on about how it's going to go to a subscription model, etc., etc., etc. Well, they've actually brought it out for completely free.
And you're probably going to say, "But Paul, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product." Let me just quickly say one thing here. That is probably true, but just because you didn't pay for it doesn't change that fact. You buy your Apple phone, your Android phone, you use things like Figma, all those different kinds of tools. Whether you pay or not, your data is being used in some way, shape, or form. This is probably going to be exactly the same thing. Do your own due diligence, and if you don't want to use it, don't use it.
But you can still carry on using the Affinity tools you already own. So, if you bought Affinity Photo, Designer, or Publisher, one or two, you can carry on using those. Or you can download the new Affinity app, which is just basically all three of those in one application for absolutely zero cost.
You're probably thinking, "What difference does it make, Paul? It's just a free piece of software. Why should I give a damn?" Well, if you are a designer of any way, shape, or form, whether that's web design, graphic design, print design, etc., this is a very good piece of software. Does it rival every feature you have inside Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign? No. But do most of us use every single feature inside those tools? I would argue in most use cases, no, we don't. But if it has features that you really, really, really need in those Adobe products, well, you're probably going to have to stick with those. For everybody else, we can use this.
Well, let's take a quick look at what's included and why you may want to look at this for your web design tool. So, to gain access to this, you are going to have to have a free Canva account. You can have a Pro account if you want. Makes no bloody difference whatsoever. All you need to do is sign in to get access, download this, and then the first time you spin it up, it's going to ask you to sign into your account. Again, for those people that are going to moan about this, this is no different to what you do with the Figma app on your desktop. You still have to log in to get access to that via your browser in your operating system. So, zero difference there whatsoever, and we probably all do that without worrying too much about it.
So, once you've done it, download it for Mac OS or Windows. No Linux support at this point in time. Then you're going to have access to all the options. The iPad versions are not there yet, but we can still use the previous versions if you've bought those. And I also believe version two of the iPad apps went free recently. Check that out just to make sure.
So, what's the big difference between the Affinity app and what we're used to with the three other apps previously? Well, now they're all combined into one single app. You can switch between the different personas, as it were. So, between vector, pixel, and layout simply by clicking and going into that, and you can round trip between any of the different sort of designs. You could be working inside the Publisher. You want to edit an image inside the photo editing. You can click the image, jump straight over, edit that photo. Then you want to do something with a logo. It's a vector piece of artwork. You can jump over to that. There's a lot of really cool features here.
If you want to take advantage of the AI features, which are part of Canva AI, this is where you're going to need to have a paid Canva account. My experience in looking at these is it's pretty rubbish at this point in time. So again, for most users, you're probably going to want to bypass the AI features anyway until they become a little bit better. But you can see we've got our vector options, our pixel options, our layout options, and you can customize the interface for how you want it to operate.
I'm a big fan of the Affinity suite of tools. I've been using these. I binned off Adobe probably three years ago and haven't really looked back. I bought Photoshop and Lightroom last year or year before. Installed it, tried it once, hated it, deleted it, and wasted 75 quid. You live and learn. I've already installed the app. So, let's jump in and take a quick look at it.
So, once you fire it up for the first time, you're going to be welcomed by your welcome screen. This is still pretty bare bones in comparison to the previous versions of the Affinity tools. So, this will probably expand as it starts to roll out and become a little bit more mature. At this point in time, it's only been out a couple of days. You've got your home. So, you got your various different sizes of documents here, your different landscape portraits. So, you can open these up. You've got some "Welcome to Affinity" options underneath, which are kind of tutorials on how to use various different features inside here. And you can click and download these from the cloud, and you can access them and use them to follow along with any guides and kind of get a feel for how it all works. So, for example, let's say we want to open this "Make a Splash" up. We'll choose that to download it. We now have a tutorial on how to use various different aspects of this. You can go through this if you want to. I'm going to just skip out of this and jump into the application itself.
So, we're currently taking a look at the layout option, which is basically Publisher, Affinity Publisher. As you can see on the left-hand side, we've got all of our different pages, our different layers on the right-hand side, and our different panels and so on. And you've also got your options down the left-hand side for the various different tools and the shortcuts and so on.
If we jump up, for example, and say we choose the image, jump over to the pixel, you can see now we've switched over to the pixel persona, and now we can start working with the image. So, if we come over to the right-hand side, you can see if we expand this out, we've got our kingfisher. So, let's just hide this. There's our kingfisher. We'll reenable that. So, we've got masks on there. You've got text and things on here. So, you can see everything is here. If you want to make changes to it, and if you want to jump into vector, for example. So, if we select the text, you come to vector, and then you can make changes inside the vector editor. So, it's a nice unified piece of software that allows you to easily jump around to what you want to do.
I don't have a Pro Canva account, but if you jump inside your, you can start taking advantage of those AI tools. And as you can see, there's various different tool options on the left-hand panel which you can start to use these for different generative, different generative kind of features and those kinds of things. Cool thing with this is though, it's fully customizable. So, you can customize all of this. You can choose the various different tools. You've got all the various different options you'd need for most sort of image editing, vector creation, publication, and layout designs and so on. So, there's a lot to like about this.
Like I say, if you are bothered about the whole sort of "it's now free so we become a product," skip it. Don't have to use it. There's no one sort of forcing your hand to say you must use this product or you don't have to. For me, I will be taking a big deep dive into this for myself to kind of get accustomed to how this works and how it may be different to what I'm used to with the other Affinity tools.
What's your thoughts on this? Are you already using the Affinity tools? Would you now jump over to using the Affinity app where all three tools are integrated into it? Do you have a Canva account? Are you going to use the AI integration into this? Or are you going to stick with the other tools? Or are you a die-hard Adobe fan and you will never ever look at these tools in favor of spending that huge amounts of money every single month? Let me have a comment down below and let me know your thoughts and feedback.
If you'd like me to create any kind of tutorials using the Affinity tools, let me know in the comment section down below. And if enough people are interested, I will absolutely take a look at creating some content on it for you. As always, all applicable links are in the description. My name is Paul C. This is WP Tuts. And until next time, take care.
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