Free software! Affinity Photos, Designer & Publisher are now free

I have been using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for many years. As someone that builds websites they have proven invaluable to convert, resize and optimise images for the web. I recommend Affinity Photo to all my clients that need image editing. I appreciate there are free online tools but very few of them offer the ability to truly optimise files for size (data size) for websites, in particular .JPG files saved at 80% quality. And who wants their valuable images stored with a 3rd party, much better to have them on your own device.

Affinity Photo also opens Photoshop PSD files and Designer opens Illustrator .ai files and editable PDF files. I’ve not used Publisher but if it’s as good as the other two it will be excellent.

Affinity have always been amazing value and use the rather old fashioned, but very welcome, one time charge system, rather than a subscription model which I think we are all getting tired of. They were taken over by CANVA a little while ago and users were concerned that the Affinity Suite would go down the subscription route.

In fact the opposite has happened, CANVA have made the suite FREE! Ash Hewson, the CEO at Affinity, has assured all users this is not a ploy to suck us in and then start charging. In an interview with PCPro Magazine he was very firm about the businesses commitment to keep these products free for the foreseeable future, great news!

You will need a free CANVA account to download them, and there are version for MacOS, Windows (Intel/AMD & ARM), with an iPad version coming soon.

To get your free software go to https://www.affinity.studio/ and sign in with your CANVA account login.

If you don’t have a CANVA account go here and click SIGN UP in the top right for your free account https://www.canva.com/en_gb/ You will need these details to log into https://www.affinity.studio/

There are many excellent free Affinity tutorials online so getting up to speed is fairly easy.

Enjoy!