Serif is offering another free trial to help out creators during the current global pandemic.
What you need to know
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Optimised for the latest tech on Windows and Mac – and chosen by Apple as its Mac App of the Year – Affinity Publisher is the next generation of professional publishing software. You can place an embedded or linked file inside the frame. The file can be an Affinity-compatible image file, a PDF, an InDesign IDML document or an Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher document. The frame's contents can be scaled according to one of three automatic behaviours, or panned, scaled and rotated manually.
- Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher each have another 90-day free trial.
- You can use the free trial even if you took advantage of the Affinity suite's free trial last year.
- All three apps are 50 percent off on Windows 10, macOS, and iPadOS.
You can get a 90-day free trial of Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher from Serif right now. Serif, the makers of the popular creative apps, is offering the trial to help people during the current global pandemic. The company had an identical free trial offer last year as well. Even if you took advantage of last year's free trial, you can still use this new one.
If you prefer to own the apps for good, you can purchase all of the Affinity apps for 50 percent off, including versions on Windows, macOS, and iPadOS.
'For almost a year now, the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to severely impact people all over the world, not least in the creative community,' says Serif's website. 'Last year, to support that community, we made all our apps free for anyone to use for 90 days. We were humbled and overwhelmed by the response.'
The company goes on to say, 'Sadly, it's clear that the pandemic continues to have a serious impact and so once again we are offering a 90-day free trial.'
in our Affinity Publisher review and Affinity Photo review we break down how the apps are powerful creative tools that don't require a subscription.
Affinity Publisher Tutorial
Affinity Photo
© Provided by Windows CentralThis photo editor delivers a professional level of tools and options without needing a subscription.
Affinity Designer
© Provided by Windows CentralThis graphic design program allows you to edit vector and raster designs and doesn't require a subscription.
Affinity Publisher
© Provided by Windows CentralThis publication app can link with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, so you don't have to jump between apps.
About Studio panels
Studio panels are areas of the user interface, like dialogs, that contain settings that help you design objects and layer content. Some are also related to the document itself, and others simply offer design aids.
What is common to all Affinity desktop apps is that Studio panels can be arranged in many alternative combinations and groupings instead of their default docked locations. Their ability to be undocked, repositioned, sized and snapped together means you can customise them to help your current workflow.
Undocking—Any panel can be detached from its anchored default position by dragging. The panel floats in readiness for repositioning or resizing and will always be on display.
Repositioning—An undocked panel can be dragged to a more appropriate position in your Document View, perhaps to avoid obscuring an area of design or to be nearer the design areas you’re currently working on.
Resizing—Panels can be resized both vertically or horizontally, typically to reveal additional information that would otherwise be hidden.
Snapping—Like the snapping of objects together, panels that naturally work together can be snapped to each other, both vertically or horizontally. This can greatly improve your design workflow. Once snapped, the panels can be repositioned as if one panel.
Examples
Here are some panel arrangements that you might like to adopt for all Affinity apps.
Undocking and adjusting panel height
Undocking a panel can bring more settings into view; increasing panel height can further reveal extra information. Some panels may be more complex by design with expandable drop-down categories or hidden layers/group content so you’ll benefit from the extra height.
Also useful for:
- Character panels
- Paragraph panels
Undocking and adjusting panel width
An undocked panel can also be increased in width to view information that is otherwise truncated.
Snapping panels together
Once undocked, multiple panels can be snapped to each other just like when object snapping. The great advantage is that panels that are closely related will always remain connected, which means less cursor movement between them and a quicker workflow; both panels are always in view too.
Other Designer panel pairings:
- Assets—Constraints panels: for device mockups, if you’re adding iOS assets to the page you can set constraints for intelligent scaling/anchoring.
- Layers—Effects panels: with different layer effects applied to each object, clicking between each affected object in the Layers panel displays that object’s layer effect settings in the Effects panel in turn.
Photo Book Affinity Publisher
Other Photo panel pairings:
- Brushes—Colour panels: with your Brushes panel height increased, more brushes are at hand. This lets you quickly pick up colours from the Colour panel for a greater choice of brushes.
- Brushes—Swatches panels: like the Brushes/Colour panel combination but you can pick up stored colours from any colour palette.
Other Publisher panel pairings:
- Hyperlinks—Anchors: the two features work in combination, so pairing these panels makes sense.
Saving your workspace
Once Studio panels are arranged as you want them (they’ll be preserved in future sessions), you may want to save these Studio arrangements to a preset for later use. Saving means you can create multiple presets of panel arrangements to suit different workflows. Presets are saved per Persona, so you can have different presets per design discipline, e.g., presets for vector drawing and separate presets for raster painting.
To save, use View > Studio Presets > Add Presets.
Affinity Photo Publisher Pro
As an added bonus, any customisation you’ve made to your toolbar setups will be saved with the preset too.