The folks at Serif market, under the Affinity name, competitors to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (their corresponding names, respectively, are Photo, Designer, and Publisher). I have no experience with the latter two, but in February I sprang for $50 and bought a copy of Affinity Photo. It isimpressive, with several features that Photoshop lacks, like an LAB channel mixer. Since I’ve been using Photoshop for a bit longer, I’m not all that comfortable with Affinity Photo and am not qualified to do a serious comparison of the two programs. My impression, however, is that the two are quite close. If it weren’t for the PPW Panel, I’d be happy to make the switch, while reserving the right to switch back if it turned out to be less than expected.

I bring this up to point out that they’re running quite a sale now. Fairly early in the pandemic, they offered a special that they claimed was their way of supporting our profession in its hour of need. They would offer free trials for 90 days instead of the normal week or two or whatever, and also they would sell the software at half price. That sale ended when things seemed rather more hopeful than they do today. They just reinstated it, saying "Sadly, it’s clear that the pandemic continues to have a serious impact and so we’ve decided to bring back these offers once again."

Regardless of their motivation, we can for the moment buy one of these programs at roughly the same price as renting their Adobe equivalent for a month. That is not much of an investment. I don’t see that I am going to need a page-makeup program in the future but if I do I can’t imagine that I will want to rent InDesign. So I am likely to drop the $25 on Affinity Publisher. And, while I already have my copy, $25 doesn’t seem like a bad price for an emergency Photoshop backup.

https://affinity.serif.com

Dan