Is the Free Affinity Worth Learning?

Happy New Year.

Last year, Affinity Photo became free to use and because I no longer had access to PS I decided to go for it. To be fair, it has been on my list of software to use if I lost access to PS. However I know from being on their mailing lists they had two main sales where prices where slashed to 50-70%. The summer and black Friday sales. When that didn't happen this summer, I held on tight because it a fair bit of cash. Then before black Friday there was this announcement. In the interim I was using Photopea which is pretty good. The caveat was I using it on my current Mac which has about 4GB. It works so why change it. Actually, I got a new one before I left my organisation because they gave 10% discounts. 

Note I say free to use because you still need a license to access this and I'm not really sure what Canva is doing when it checks. 

Affinity vs Photoshop vs Photopea the main difference to me.

For now the main difference is Photoshop (PS) is super efficient and resourceful and worked very well on my 4 GB memory Mac. Yes. It was okay. Not slow, not anything. It was good enough. Affinity and Photopea are resource or memory intensive. I had to shut stuff down, even then. But who wants to shut stuff time when half the time because I'm a very occasional user, I need to go down rabbit holes to get solutions.

Affinity learning curve

New Cover

This is to do with the learning curve. Affinity is simpler for those without the PS mindset. I found it frustrating to use, until I realised it was a totally different package and not a knock off. I nearly stopped using it and wanted to only use Photopea and sign up, but I decided to persevere. 

Photoshop also has a lot more tools and of course the generative AI features are included, simple things like removing objects. AI tools are in Affinity but you need to pay for them and from Youtube videos they still have a way to go to match PS.

The main reason I'm using it is because my cover on Amazon was terrible and I had to upgrade it. I could buy one but I like doing them myself.  This is the one I did with PS, the one above is my new cover.

First Cover

This is the cover but with time it ended up looking very tacky and too busy. 


There are lots of good tutorials and I the steps to doing things were so simple that I messed up at times not understanding the simplitist. The three-in-one package can also be confusing in terms of how the menus and resources are packed. 

Is it worth learning?

Yes, I think so because in the end these packages use the same concepts and mostly have  the same tools but in different places or there are workarounds. Therefore I'm likely to continue until I get a situation where I get access to PS again.

Concerns and Risks

There are concerns that if Affinity doesn't make the Canva grade they can shutter it, as in close it down and retire it. So that is the only risk with these take overs and acquisitions. It seems they are using it as a funnel for their main business. So we'll see.