For those of you that can’t afford or don’t want to pay Adobe…

Might I suggest the Affinity line of products?

Back a while ago, Adobe moved to a completely Cloud based paradigm. This offers a lot of very nice features not the least of which is that All Adobe products are available, and fully updated all the time. This is subscription dependent, nonetheless it’s very nice. 

It’s also very expensive for the small business who may or may not need to use the Creative Suite products only occasionally. Yes, you can turn the subscription on & off as needed and you still have access to view files created in Adobe products just not edit them if for instance you were to pay the monthly fee only as needed. This is a expensive option for individuals or small businesses, especially if you’re just an occasional user.

So being in the individual / Small business class of users I started looking for an alternative.

Typicality,  I use the big three. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. So I started looking for replacements. I found Affinity.  

I tried their Photo application. It was nice, a bit different from Photoshop and it’s in the differences that there was some of frustration. If you’re used to Photoshop, you tend to reach for tools that are present but not available in the habitual way that you’re going to grab them. 

The frustration is short-lived and as you adapt to the changes they’re not as jarring. So stay patient and don’t try to transition on a high pressure project. (You’ll make yourself crazy… I speak from experience!)

Then I tried Designer. This is Affinity’s response to Illustrator. Again, there was a level of frustration transitioning.  But it was short-lived, once again it was the differences between the applications that I stumbled over. 

Most recently, Affinity released Publisher, an answer to InDesign.

I’m still learning this one. Thus far I’ve been pleased. Again, there are differences but perhaps because of my previous experiences with Affinity’s other applications or just the layout of tools It’s not been a big frustration. Either way, using Affinity’s Publisher I’ve been able to turn out a couple of projects with a minimum of headaches.

The applications work well, They open Adobe native files and can save, import, and export, into a variety of formats as you’d expect, and they’re relatively inexpensive. Photo, and Designer work on Mac, and my iPad. Publisher, for the time being is running on the Mac but I’ve not seen it for the iPad yet.

Affinity produces Windows versions of their applications as well.

They’re generally smaller than the Adobe equivalents. An added perk for me is that they don’t spatter support and utility files all over your drive. So if space is at a premium on your drive, Affinity may provide you with some relief in that area too.

I can tell you, saving 50+ dollars a month adds up.

Based on the stability and functionality I’m seeing from Affinity I’m going to be retiring my old Creative Suite.