Alternative to Photoshop

2h (edited) • 💬 Chat

I'd like to share part of my workflow with the community.

Instead of using Photoshop, and having to pay a monthly subscription, I use Affinity Studio. Studio essentially offers 90-95% of the functionality of Photoshop, but is FREE. It also has an InDesign and Illustrator competitor built in.

There are some really great YouTube videos showing how to use Affinity, but I'm using it to generate Mock collections very quickly using a feature called Symbols, which are like Frames in Photoshop. Masks, transforms etc are easy to apply.

I also use it, in conjunction with Kittl, to create designs, as the built in desktop publisher is more powerful at typography.

Affinity was created by a British company called Seriff, which was sold to Canva last year. You can get it for Mac, PC and iPad.

Here's a screenshot of one of my design templates. I import/drag the design into the template, make a couple of copies of it, place the design into the symbol artboards and all my mocks update. There are 8 symbol artboards in this template, 4 different sizes for the different Mocks, and 1 each for light and dark. I then export the lot to PNG. Takes about 5 minutes in total. Creating the template takes longer, but thats an upfront, one off time cost.

Anyway, I hope you find this useful. I'm not an affiliate or anything, but thought it might be helpful to share.

Oh, one last thing, you can import Photoshop plugins, but Alek's plug-in isn't recognised, never mind.

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Alternative to Photoshop