Affinity Designer - Vector Image Creaton

tfindlay

Administrator
Staff member
For some time now I have wanted to learn how vector drawing differed from the regular bitmapped drawing used in popular graphics and painting programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. These programs draw shapes by filling in individual pixels on the screen. Vector graphics draw shapes in a very different way. They are computer graphics images that are defined in terms of points on a the screen, which are connected by lines and curves to form polygons and other shapes. Which of the two ways of drawing on the screen you use depends on what you want to create.

4.JPG

Bitmap images often begin as photos to which objects such as text, shapes and effects can be added. To create a vector image you pretty much start with a blank canvas to which you add various shapes to build up an image. Since I had no idea how to do this I was looking for an affordable, user friendly application with lots of support videos. With these criteria in mind I eventually choose Affinity Designer.

Since I was starting with no knowledge of vector graphics the learning curve was pretty steep but, with the help of a plethora of YouTube tutorials I was able to produce a decent vector image in a couple of days.

Parrots 2.jpg

Affinity Designer is an incredible program. Several months later I am still learning what it is capable of. Although it is feature rich and the learning can go on and on, it is possible to produce simple images using only a few of the available tools.

If you decide to give it a try don't forget to take full advantage of the many excellent YouTube tutorials available. There are free tutorials and others you have to pay for. It's worth spending a bit of time to find the ones that you find easy to follow.
 

chas_m

Well-Known Member
That's remarkably good for just a couple of days learning! IIRC Affinity also has some tutorials and other learning resources on their website as well.
 

dfaulks

Well-Known Member
I was just looking at the site to learn about straightening a photo and it looks super easy.

The best part is the in-fill feature; when a photo is rotated slightly, one ends up with a blank space at each corner. This is easily fixed up in Affinity. Look at the Macro tutorial to see an example.
 

Bruce Whittington

Well-Known Member
That's impressive! I have not used Affinity Designer, but will put in a good word for Affinity Photo. It's very reasonable, and very powerful. I have avoided Adobe for a number of reasons, and Affinity is a really good alternative (except the whole world revolves around Adobe . . .). One drawback is that it does not have a usable browser function - I use ACDSee for that. I have had difficulty grasping some of the editing functions in Adobe, and Affinity has a similar learning curve for me, but I am getting there. I did sign on for third party tutorials from Affinity Revolution (also reasonable) and they have been much easier to learn by, but I am only part way through it.
 
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