Recently we took a look at some very capable but more affordable alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. It’s always a benefit to customers when developers provide legitimate competition and choice. However, if you find yourself sticking with one...
As with photo editing applications, there are several vector illustration apps on the market that offer an alternative to Adobe Illustrator, such as Corel Draw. For many creative professionals, switching away from a workhorse like Illustrator will require the new software to check several important boxes. This article can provide some insight into why Affinity Designer might be worth a look for many Illustrator users. Like Affinity Photo, Designer offers a professional feature set, is available for Mac, iPad, and PC, and offers a very affordable perpetual license.
The latest addition to Serif's Affinity suite, Publisher, is designed to provide a professional layout environment similar to InDesign or Quark Xpress. Released in June 2019, in some respects, Publisher doesn't yet have the feature depth of its competitors. However, in others, it surpasses them. And in general, it is both capable and very easy to learn. While it won't fit every workflow, especially publishing teams that rely heavily on complementary apps like Adobe InCopy, Affinity Publisher is an appealing option for freelance designers, students, and recent graduates, and others not dependent upon an Adobe ecosystem.
Photoshop is no longer the only heavy hitter on the block. We chose to look at Affinity Photo because it is available on Mac and PC (as well as a capable iPad edition), includes a professional feature set, and offers an affordable perpetual license that is currently just $24.99. Also important is that most of your Photoshop skills will translate directly to Affinity Photo; there are only a few areas where you might have to “relearn” certain tasks. Let's take a look.
Occasionally customers who purchased the Accelsior 4M2 ask if it’s possible to “set aside” one of the four installed M.2 SSDs as a macOS boot volume, while the remaining three are used as a RAID 0. This setup will reduce the maximum performance levels as compared to the factory RAID 0 config, but it is possible. The steps in this Rocket Yard Guide provide an overview of the process.
Earlier this week, Adobe launched the latest version of the Creative Cloud suite, CC 2020. While we plan to offer a more detailed look at a later time, including the possibility of a couple competitive reviews (think Affinity apps), this article provides a quick overview. Overall this release is more about the improvement of existing functions and added stability and less about headline features. While that’s not as exciting to the average user, this approach is not a bad thing. For years, many long-time users complained that Adobe fell victim to the “feature bloat” trap. They perennially released new features that were designed to wow people (i.e., were easier to market) but which were either not often requested or not fully “baked.” In the meantime, many existing, commonly used features were not evolving.
