Test Affinity Designer

[ahwagner]

No description provided.

[wesleygoar]

Ill test this out too

[mcannon068nw]

seems pretty good. I can do most of the things I know how to do from AI/photoshop in designer/photo (with some exploring to get used to the UI/hotkey differences). Path drawing and shape addition seems pretty comparable to AI, and Photo has all the relevant level adjustments, selection, and blending tools from Photoshop.

Very simple shadows/saturation edits in Affinity Photo (left edited):

Cutouts in Affinity Photo:

Paths/Shape addition in Affinity Designer:

^Not immediately obvious, pen tool is just as good as illustrator for drawing a cat tail. Shape addition used to cut the holes out of the letters (previous had the holes drawn in as white circle overlays).

There were a few useful things missing: auto-trace (not sure how often we will use this), trim canvas (though you can just use the crop tool) but overall seems pretty comparable. Affinity Photo even had the clone stamp tool. There is probably some high level, professional artist thing that Affinity tooling can't do, but for a basic user with basic requirements they are definitely just as good as Adobe.

[wesleygoar]

@ahwagner Will Ray gave his stamp of approval for the Affinity Suite during lab meeting on Monday as well.