Canva’s Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and Publisher into One Free App

Article Comments
62

After reading all the comments about the new Affinity (all-in-one-app) I can’t help but think that many of the comments are from folks who perhaps haven’t looked at the new app too deeply. Because if they did, their many complaints might disappear.

I just want to make two short points about all this.

(1) FREE
All the back and forth about the free deal, is it really free or whatever? Hey, it’s free. That’s it. Most people don’t need the AI add-on features (that costs $120 per year), so that shouldn’t be an issue for most folks. So just forget about that. Just be happy you can bypass Adobe’s servitude and use this great free app! And if at some point it isn’t free (I have to believe Canva that it won’t be), then just move on. Complaining about something that is given to you for free really mystifies me.

(2) DEFAULT SETTINGS
The second and last point (although I could make more). Quote: “It lacks a method to set a default DPI. It is set at 72 DPI and I couldn’t find a way to change it… There’s no way to set 16X9 as a default or to set a default long edge.” Etc. etc. That comment is because you haven’t gone in and looked at the app too closely. Setting up a “default” page is very easy, with any parameters you want. Here’s how:

SET UP A “PRESET”

Go to:
FILE
NEW
You’ll be presented with a window with dozens of pre-set pages.
On the right side of that window, you’ll see a panel called
DOCUMENT SETTINGS.
Directly under that name is the current preset name.
Change that name to whatever you want.
I have two presets set up, “Don72dpi “and “Don300dpi.”
After naming your preset, go to the parameters under that name,
and make any changes to the page parameters that you want:
dpi (72, 300, etc. or whatever you want),
size units (inches, pixels, etc.),
color format (RGB, CMYK, etc.)
and lots of other settings.

After you set up the page the way you want your “default” settings to be, click
CREATE PRESET
and you’ll see your preset appear at the top of all the other presets!!!

That’s it. You’re done.
Now try it out.
Close down Affinity and reopen it.
Hit File/New and in the presets window, you will now see your “default” preset!!!

Bottom line:
I encourage everyone to download Affinity and check it out. In just a few short hours, I’ve discovered lots of great features. Looking forward to discovering more. As a “for instance” I found a way to do one of the more difficult things to do in Photoshop, which is to silhouette a person. I’m not sure this is the best way to do this, but at this point, it works. I’ll be exploring this more later. Talking to a buddy of mine about this silhouette thing, he asked me to show him how I did it. So I created a short “how-to” video and put it on my website so he could view it.
Here’s the link for you to check out if you’re interested:

https://thedesignbeacon.com/Affinity-Silhouette.mp4

I suspect there are other ways (maybe/probably better) of doing this. So I’ll continue exploring Affinity a lot more. Well that’s it. I’ve read the TidBits emails for years, but this is my first posted comment. If it helps anyone out, then it was worth the time in writing it. Bye.

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63

The second segment in this YouTube video discusses at length the new Affinity-Canva relationship. Very informative.

64

Thanks for your points, Don. I am not mystified about the “free” aspect and the suspicions it arouses. It is the predictable outcome of at least two long-standing trends:

  1. Offering an app free of charge in an “app store,” but in reality providing crippleware* that will be of little use until the user makes one or several “in-app purchases.” Apple Inc is one of the notable enablers here. The Apple App Stores flag this under the “FREE” price, but state that the app offers in-app purchases rather than requires in-app purchases.
  2. The recognition that “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” There are various attributions for that line (as well as various wordings), but for the past 50 years businesses and governments have become increasingly transparent about monetizing individuals’ eyeballs, identities, and financial lives.

In my opinion Affinity falls somewhere in the “not-quite” zone on both those points.

  • There is a Canva paid tier that enables some AI tools in Affinity. So you could say it allows in-app(-like) purchases. But unlike crippleware in the App Store, the Affinity unified app is as fully capable and feature-rich as the v2 Affinity suite. It’s more like bolting on another application than it is enabling crippled features in the product you downloaded.
  • Potential users are right to be suspicious about something billed as “free,” but Affinity has gone to some lengths to assure users that they have no interest in, for example, appropriating rights to their work or using it to train an AI rendering model. I did not detect any mealy-mouth notes in the extended YouTube presentation on that score, and never did with the Serif corporate culture which I presume survives in some form.

The shame in all this is that justified concerns about other forms of software marketing have evolved into generalized suspicion about anything different than “Here’s the money, license please” transactions.

Personally, I’m happy to try the unified app and if I really hate having the capabilities of all three apps in one place I can fall back to the three separate Affinity apps I already own. And Adobe can still take a walk.

_____

*Sorry if I offended any developers here, but what else besides “crippleware” can I call an app that does little more than boot up and display a screen, then demand money every time I try to select a menu item? I’ll often convert genuine trial-period software to a license, but seldom do I reward crippled app developers with that because I still have no idea how the app will perform after I’ve opened it.

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