Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator
This is pretty huge news if you are someone that loves Canva (or hates it) but feels like sometimes it is a little too… limiting.
Recently Canva purchased the Affinity company. Affinity is company that produces the most comprehensive and direct competitor to the Adobe Creative Suite (PhotoShop, Illustrator, and InDesign). The Affinity versions, Photo, Designer, and Publisher respectively, are really great pieces of software, and, in a lot of ways, they are better than the Adobe versions. At full price, the Affinity suite (works on Mac, Windows, and iPad) will cost $164.99 one time. That’s SO much nicer than the subscript required for Adobe products.
Why am I telling you this? It’s because Canva has a policy that provides the best versions of their software to students and teachers for free, and when they purchased Affinity, they made the choice to include the new programs in that free offering! So now, you get everything Canva has to offer, but you also have access to these three professional-level design programs! I think that’s pretty awesome, personally!
We have put the suite in Chocolatey, so you and your students can now follow these instructions to install and activate on your school computers. Want to install it on your personal computers? Just follow the step 2 instructions in this link.
Installing Affinity On School Computers
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click the Windows button, and type in “GUI” or “chocolatey” to bring up “Chocolatey GUI.” Click on it to open.
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Click on “ChocolateyInternal” on the left side of the store.
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Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher are probably near the top of the list, but feel free to search for “Affinity” to narrow your choices. Once you see your Affinity options choose which of the three apps you want to install first, right-click it, and click on “Install.”
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Your install window will close, and you will then see a new desktop shortcut for your application of choice.
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If you want to install more of the apps, feel free to do that now or later. The next steps just have to happen with the first app you open.
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Pick one of your newly installed Affinity apps to open. You will see the screen below. Click on “Sign in with Canva.”
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Then click on the “Sing in with Canva” button
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This will open Chrome. On the page, select your team, then click on the “Allow” button.
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You will get an “Open Affinity [application] 2?” prompt. Select always allow, and then click the “Open…” button.
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You will get one final button to let you “Lanuch Affinity…” go ahead and click that to get started.
The Internet is full of tutorials on this software. Go forth, make beautiful and/or functional things.
Bonus tip…
The major thing Adobe offers that Affinity doesn’t address is video production. They may add this in the future, but that doesn’t help right now. To fix this, we have also added DaVinci Resolve to Chocolatey. I really like this software too. They use it on Hollywood blockbuster films, so I’m pretty sure it should work for our purposes!
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