Over a year ago, Affinity sold to Canva, which is maybe Adobe’s closest competitor, giving it a suite of professional design materials. Over the last year, development with Affinity has been slow, or so we thought. In reality the company was fixing bugs in the 2.5 versions while preparing this new 3.o version. Of course, the forums and social media were filled with dread and negative speculation. When Affinity went from version 1 to 2, the same thing happened. Much of the panic and doom was from obvious trolls, probably Adobe fans or even employees not happy that another company was making headway in the graphic design software world. The posts were absolutely certain it was going to be a subscription service or become a browser-based app or triple in price.
This time the marketing strategy was even worse, or was it? They took the current products off sale and closed the forums. Not nice but maybe it was for the best. They started a Discord that not too many people joined over the month wait and was filled immediately with the same paranoia and trolling. Not as many current users were exposed to it though and after a couple weeks it calmed down and people were fighting age-old "Mac/Windows" crap. In a way this, I think, lessened the exposure current users had to the panic and trolls and while no one was happy to wait a month with no forum to rely on for help, I don’t think 4 weeks waiting was a deal breaker for many of them.
The release.
Affinity Studio is free, for all time, it seems and Canva is using it to bring people from Adobe to their subscription service by keeping the suite self contained and fulled featured except for AI functions. AI is something the majority of Affinity Photo users want no part of so they don’t have to now. If they do, they can join the Canva subscription service that already existed to get them. The download you need a Canva account, the same as Serif used for Affinity to verify the software is legit when you sign in. You cannot be connected to the internet for as along as years and when you are connected again, it just checks. The software will work in the intervening time. This has not been the case with Adobe. This all seems expected and it’s fair enough.
The new software.
It’s sort of a stretch to say it’s new as it is mostly the same as 2.6 in features, with a couple new ones added. The interface had change and that will take getting used to. I don’t like the grayscale icons after being spoiled with easy to find coloured ones for years. The three Affinity programs are merged into one. Some people have commented that this is a problem and not professional despite the fact it has been an option since Affinity Publisher was released. When Affinity started, you could always open and edit any Affinity file in any of the other apps. It’s had to imagine something more useful and professional than that! Things are categorized differently or just in different places but most are still there.
The only missing feature I have noticed so far is the Book feature is gone or so hidden I can’t find it. It’s something I desperately wanted Serif to add for years and they finally did. It allows you to make a file that can include multiple external files. Chapters or magazine sections, for example, then rearrange them and have the numbering update automatically and also make a table of contents that updates automatically if you change something. I have used it for books and thought it would be great for setting up a magazine. Magazines are usually set up in sections with different people working on articles, pages of ads, etc. and this gives a lot of flexibility and also lets you export it all as one file for the printer. It never worked 100% or even 80% for some reason and was frustrating but it just needed to be improved. Maybe it will come back and work well in a future update.
New features.
While they mention EPUB, something affinity never touched, in the update documents is a future addition. EDIT: I just discovered that you can export to EPUB from the export window. There are acouple options and I will try that in the near future.
Canva has added bitmap vectorization, something users have been champing at the bit for since version 1. I find lit lacking, as I do most factorization software. Adobe Illustrator had a really great vectorization feature until the I think the cloud thing started. It had lots of adjustments and you could fine-tune it before committing. It then got rid of the fine-tuning and this version in Affinity is sadly closer to that than the older Illustrator model. If the image is very simple and has only or mostly solid colours, it will work great. If there is too much variation or detail, it fails. I will be keeping with Super Vectorizer Pro for the foreseeable future.
Here is a best-case scenario test with an old logo design of mine and it looks good.
Top is the oringinal.
A new addition I was not expecting, it might be in Illustrator already is gradient fill using a mesh. This is going to be very useful! Instead of using masks and multiple layers of gradients and still not being able to follow the contours of your object, this lets you shape the fill as you please and add colours to any mesh point. It should make realistic or complicated vector drawings much easier to work on.
Conclusion.
I don’t see a reason to complain about all the awful things predicted that never happened and say well, they might happen at some point. Free is not something to sneeze at when the software does what it always did and more with more to come. I don’t like the interface; I will get used to it and have already finished a project for a client and am working on another. The studio is noticeably faster on my Intel Mac and only crashed when I tried to use the AI driven help chat. Not a surprise and I am not a fan of AI chat anyway.
Sorry to those expecting the worst but it’s a good start and a possible way to break the monopoly Adobe has had (and abused) on the graphics industry. I’d say buy it - but IT’S FREE!
