Serif’s Affinity suite – a powerful rival to Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign tools – has been made completely free to download.
Serif has long attempted to distance itself from Adobe’s subscription model by offering its Affinity suite of product – Photo, Designer and Publisher – for modest one-off fees.
However, the latest version of Affinity blends the three different products into one app and drops the price tag completely. It’s a free download for Windows or Mac, the only condition being that you need to sign up for a free Canva account to benefit.
Canva Ownership Of Affinity
There were fears that Affinity would end up following Adobe’s Creative Suite down the subscription route when Canva acquired Serif last year. And there is an element of subscription arm-twisting with the latest offering. If you want the advanced AI features that have now been built into the Affinity suite, such as the ability to generate images or vectors, you will need a premium Canva account, which starts at $119 (£100) per year.
However, the company is strenuously denying that this is the start of the slippery slope to full-blown subscriptions for the Affinity package and that the AI features are entirely optional.
“There’s no catch, no stripped-back version, and no gotchas,” the company said in a press statement. “The same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn’t come with a cost.”
All-In-One Affinity
The new Affinity combines all of the features previously available in the three separate apps into one product. The software is broken down into different studios, which are workspaces with different panels and features available, depending on what you’re working on at the time.
The Pixel studio is intended for photo editing, for example, while Vector populates the tools most often used for illustration work and Layout for page design.
Affinity has always offered tight integration between its different products, and this makes it even easier to access features from different modes. For example, if you want to tweak a photo while working on a poster layout, you can simply click on the image and flick into the Pixel studio to have access to all the photo-editing features. You no longer have to switch between different apps.
Users can also build their own studios, customizing toolbars and panels so that they always have their favorite features within easy reach.
There’s a smattering of new features that have been added to the suite too. Image trace now allows you to easily convert a raster image (ie. JPEG or PNG) into a vector, meaning you’re able to scale up text or a simple logo without losing quality.
There’s also a selection of new filter brushes to play with in Pixel mode, with a range of impressive glitch effects that can be applied to images non-destructively.
What About Affinity For iPad?
The company previously offered very impressive iPad versions of Photo, Designer and Publisher, but says it’s now working on a new all-in-one Affinity iPad app to match the desktop software. That won’t be released until early 2026, however.
