Affinity by Canva

A complete creative studio for zero cost

- Ian Evenden

> Free > FROM affinity.studio > NEEDS macOS 10.15 or later, 8GB RAM

First things first: yes, it's free. You'll need a premium Canva subscription if you want to use its artificial intelligence (Al) features, but then those have never been what Affinity is all about. The purchase of Britain's Serif by Australia’s Canva has led to this, the three pro-grade Affinity creativity apps - a vector illustration program, a photo editor, and a desktop publishing package originally designed for Mac (an iPad version is ‘coming soon’) brought together as one app.

You'll be looking for the catch, but as far as we can see there isn’t one. The new Affinity takes Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher, ups their version number to 3, and gives them away for nothing! It's not the Affinity name slapped on Canva, that app still exists on the web, but the old Affinity with a new look.

So you still get the distinctive colour picker, a triangle inside a wheel, at the top left. You can switch your documents between Vector, Pixel and Layout mode using buttons at the top right of the interface, in the same way the old StudioLink system used to work, and perhaps it makes more sense this way than having them as separate apps. You can open older Affinity files in the new app, but when you save them they'll be written to a new file format, which isn't backwards compatible.