Nuts and Bolts: Affinity Graphics Software.

Good day, Fellow artists,

I hope everyone is well and looking forward to a wonderful summer. I am popping in to share my experience with a new software program that I hadn’t heard of until about two months ago. It is called Affinity Photo and was said to be an inexpensive alternative to Photoshop. I was intrigued so I did some research and was more intrigued. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do love Photoshop, but sometimes it really annoys me when it behaves badly! I won’t go into details about that, but anyone that uses it probably has had some issues.

So, I decided to dip my toe into the Affinity waters and take advantage of the 10 day free trial. As with any new program there is a learning curve, but I found Affinity to be very similar to Photoshop and easy to pick up. Of course I had to turn to online tutorials for some things (and still do 2 months later), but then after 5 years I still need to watch PS tutorials. At the 8 day trial mark I decided I really liked Affinity and jumped in with both feet! I paid the $49.95 and don’t regret one penny of that!

Some of the things I really like about the program are:

1- The move tool is very smooth.
2- The brushes that come with the program.
3- The ease of exporting to different file types. All options are on one screen to choose from instead of scrolling like in PS.
4- Affinity reads PS files and can export to a PS file. PS can’t read Affinity files.
5- I love that I paid just the one price and still get free updates without having to purchase the new updated version.
6- There are many tutorials to answer your questions.
7- It loads super fast!
8- I think the text tool behaves a little better than PS, has a smoother method for kerning and leading the text. (Although, it does have 2 types of text tool and I am still a bit perplexed by this!) Also, it does lack the ability to warp the text right in the tool, you would have to use text on a path, from what I have found out so far, and I have never been good at that!
9- As with PS you can make your own keyboard shortcuts.
10- It also uses what PS calls styles and actions, in Affinity they are called styles and macros. (It doesn’t use PS styles or actions)

Some of the things I don’t like so much about the program are:

1- the drop shadow effect tool just doesn’t wow me, but it is ok. It is called outer shadow.
2- the color tool is very strange. It seems to change the foreground and background colors at weird times. I really don’t know how to explain this, I suppose it is something you just have to experience. I just keep at it until it does what I want! Apparantly this is one tutorial I haven’t watched!
3- the guides took me a bit to figure out and I really don’t care for how it behaves when the Snapping is turned on. There is just way too much going on in terms of it giving info on dimensions right on the screen. Again, I am sure I am not explaining this very well.
4- And one thing that really threw me for a loop was after using Affinity way more than PS for a month, ALL of my PS file icons changed to Affinity icons! WHAT IS THIS MADNESS YOU ASK! Well, after about half an hour of being ready to call Affinity and find out what in blazes just happened, I found the reason why and it wasn’t earth shattering after all! Apparantly after using a particular program so much for a period of time, Windows thinks you want this to be your default program and changes the icons for you! It doesn’t mean a PS file is no longer a PS file, it just means they think you want to open it in Affinity. It was a super easy fix to get my beloved PS file icons back. If this ever happens to you, this is what you do.

in Windows:

Right click on the PS file, click “properties”, on the general tab and the “opens with” line click “change” and choose PS and apply.
This works for any file I assume where you want to change the program that opens it.

That’s all for now! I would love to hear from any of you that may be proficient with Affinity or if you decide to try it, how you find working with it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention there is an Affinity Designer program as well that handles vector and raster graphics.

Have a great day!
Betsy