The software market offers numerous alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, but few companies have taken on the challenge to go further and create a competitive suite of graphics tools – until now. Serif has completed the circle with the release of Affinity Publisher, a full-featured, desktop publishing application. This adds to the toolkit that already includes Affinity Photo (an image editor) and Affinity Designer (a vector-based illustration app). All three applications support Windows and macOS, but Photo and Designer are also available as full-fledged pro applications for the iPad. This graphic design toolkit collectively constitutes an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
Personas and StudioLink
The core user interface feature of the Affinity applications is that various modules are presented as Personas, which are accessed by the icons in the upper left corner of the interface. For example, in Affinity Photo basic image manipulation happens in the Photo Persona, but for mesh deformations, you need to shift to the Liquify Persona.
Affinity Publisher starts with the Publisher Persona. That’s where you set up page layouts, import and arrange images, create text blocks, and handle print specs and soft proofs. However, with Publisher, Affinity has taken Personas a step further through a technology they call StudioLink. If you also have the Photo and Designer applications installed on the same machine, then a subset of these applications is directly accessible within Publisher as the Photo and/or Designer Persona. If you have both Photo and Designer installed, then the controls for both Personas are functional in Publisher; but, if you only have one of the others installed, then just that Persona offers additional controls.
Users of Adobe InDesign know that to edit an image within a document you have to “open in Photoshop,” which launches the full Photoshop application where you would make the changes and then roundtrip back to InDesign. However, with Affinity Publisher the process is more straightforward, because the Photo Persona is right there. Just select the image within the document and click on the Photo Persona button in the upper left, which then shifts the UI to display the image processing tools. Likewise, clicking on the Designer Persona will display vector-based drawing tools. Effectivity Serif has done with Affinity Publisher what Blackmagic Design has done with the various pages in DaVinci Resolve. Click a button and shift to the function specifically designed for the task at hand without the need to change to a completely different application.
Document handling
All of the Affinity apps are layer-based, so while you are working in any of the three Personas within Publisher, you can see the layer order on the right to let you know where you are in the document. Affinity Photo offers superb compatibility with layered Photoshop PSD files, which means that your interchange with outside designers – who may use Adobe Photoshop – will be quite good.
Affinity Publisher documents are based on Master Pages and Pages. This is similar to the approach taken by many website design applications. When you create a document, you can set up a Master Page to define a uniform style template for that document. From there you would build individual Pages. Any changes made to a Master Page will then change and update the altered design elements for all of the Pages in the rest of that document. Since Affinity Publisher is designed for desktop publishing, single and multi-page document creation and export settings are both web and print-friendly. Publisher also offers a split-view display, which presents your document in a vector view on the left and as a rasterized pixel view on the right.
Getting started
Any complex application can be daunting at first, but I find the Affinity applications offer a very logical layout that makes it easy to get up to speed. In addition, when you start any of these applications you will first see a launch page that offers a direct link to various tutorials, sample documents and/or layered images. A beginner can quickly download these samples in order to dissect the layers and see exactly how they were created. Aside from these links to the tutorials, you can simply go to the website where you’ll find extensive, detailed video tutorials for each step of the process for any of these three applications.
If you are seeking to shake off subscriptions or simply not bound to using Adobe’s design tools for work, then these Affinity applications offer a great alternative. Affinity Publisher, Photo, and Designer are standalone applications, but the combination of the three forms a comprehensive image and design collection. Whether you are a professional designer or just someone who needs to generate the occasional print document, Affinity Publisher is a solid addition to your software tools.
©2019 Oliver Peters
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